CNNGo, a shopping, travel and lifestyle guide for Asia conducted an informal online survey asking the public which city is the greatest in the world.I guess the poll closed yesterday and so far Hong Kong was the choice for 19% of voters while 13% voted for Singapore. Bangkok had 9% and New York had 8%. In this kind of online survey nobody's declared a winner. If I live in Oslo or Pretoria and loved the city very much, such city is the greatest for me no matter which one is proclaimed greatest city on any survey.
There may be a lot of reasons behind why Hong Kong is on top of this fun survey. Among them:
1) More people based in Hong Kong were aware of the poll. It gives personal pride to live in the so-called Greatest City, so a vote cast for the host city is almost automatic.
2) CNNGo is more Asia-exposed and that respondents from Americas or Europe may not be the targeted ones in the survey. Hence the apparent lack of vote from those regions.
3) The lead image of the survey portrays Hong Kong's skyline at night time. Not a mosaic of top landmarks of contending cities. A good hint to choose Hong Kong as the greatest?
Does Greatest City mean happiest residents? Past surveys doesn't show Hong Kong has among the happiest people in the world. Maybe freest, but that title has also been questioned.
While nobody should take the survey seriously (no medals are at stake or no monetary awards given), it's given me inspiration to write more about this unofficial greatest city in the world.
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