The City Index

Most guides to a city are written at lunchtime. This one starts at eleven at night and works forwards, because what a place is like at eleven has very little to do with what it told you at one. Milan is a fashion capital until midnight and a members’ club afterwards. Berlin does the same trick in reverse.

Every profile in the City Index scores its city out of 100 on six things: nightlife, luxury, privacy, dating scene, late night and alternative scene. Then it spends a thousand words on everything six numbers cannot hold.

The six scores, and what each one is asking

• Nightlife — how much there is, how late it runs, how many separate scenes manage to ignore each other.
• Luxury — the depth of the high end: hotels, private clubs, concierge culture, doors with lists on them.
• Privacy — how easily you go out without being photographed, logged or discussed afterwards.
• Dating scene — how people actually meet, and how formal anyone is prepared to be about it.
• Late night — what is still open at four in the morning, and who is entitled to be in it.
• Alternative scene — everything living outside the luxury track, usually south and east of it.

These are editorial judgements made against a written rubric. They are not survey data, and we say so on every page that uses them. The six combine into a single World Class Score, and the weighting behind it is published in our editorial standards, because a ranking with a private formula is a claim rather than a measurement.

Two cities, and the argument the section is making

Two profiles are open so far, and between them they make the case better than this page can.

London after dark is a city that records everything and repeats none of it. Cameras on the junctions, a tidy contactless log of where you got on and where you got off, and a room full of people who will not ask who you came with or mention afterwards that you did. London sells privacy. It charges an annual subscription for it, and the doors are where the fee is collected.

New York after dark sells the opposite commodity and has never once pretended otherwise. Proximity. Everything is twenty minutes away, the man on the door knows your business before you have finished giving your name, and the city discusses you cheerfully the following morning. One of these cities is discreet. The other is simply too fast to care, which turns out to feel like the same thing until about three in the morning.

Read them in either order. Whichever one you finish second will explain the first.

Comparisons, the law, and the ranked version

The comparisons are the pages most people arrive on: two cities, the same six dimensions, side by side, and an answer to the question nobody can settle over dinner. Not “is Paris good”, which has no answer. “Is Paris or London the better long weekend if privacy matters to you more than volume”, which has one.

Each profile also carries the parts a score refuses to hold: which districts do what, what changes between a Tuesday and a Saturday, and where the local law draws its line. That last one varies far more than visitors expect, which is why the country-by-country position lives in Guides rather than halfway down a city page where nobody reads it.

City scores also feed Rankings, where they are ordered instead of described. The vocabulary used across both is defined in the Encyclopedia.