athens.taipei The Atlas of City Experiences
The Anti-Awards

24 rankings. Every one is the true extreme of a real measurement — there is no worst city, only cities magnificently bad at one specific thing.

All 24 rankings →
The weather6
The Sauna You Can’t LeaveThe Bedroom That Never CoolsThe Umbrella EconomyRain, By The MetreSixteen Thousand DaysThe Year Without a Window
The hours it keeps6
The Cinderella ClauseThe Early Bedtime AwardThe Sunday Ghost TownThe Breakfast DesertThe Great Lunch VanishingThe Part-Time City
Getting out5
The Great Escape IndexHardest City to Leave (In a Hurry)The Domestic BubbleThe Hibernating AirportThe Perth Meridian
The ground and the sky4
The Wobbliest GroundThe Volcano PartyThe Volcano Next DoorThe 3 p.m. Sunset Club
Everything else3
The Monoculture MenuThe Calendar of ExcusesA Gigabyte of Cats
Tools

Three ways to interrogate the atlas rather than read it.

Open the comparer →
Compare two cities Head-to-head on absurd terms only. No GDP, no cappuccino index. The year, month by month Where to be in each month, who has the most days off, and when the airports peak. Start from a goal Eat well at 2 a.m. · Work all day from a café — ranked by what the city keeps open.
How this is made

Every figure on this site states where it came from and what it cannot tell you.

Read the method →
Method & principles What we measure, what we refuse to guess, and why rhythm is never a claim about people. Sources Every corpus behind the atlas, with its licence. Books coming soon The long-form city profiles and the method book. Contact · request a city Tell us what the atlas is missing.
The index

126 cities across the atlas, by region — or browse the full A–Z.

Every city, A–Z →
Southern Europe21
RomeMilanBarcelonaMadridAthensLisbon
Western Europe20
LondonParisLuxembourgViennaAmsterdamDublin
North America & Caribbean18
New YorkMiamiAustinSan FranciscoLos AngelesSeattle
CEE & Balkans16
PragueBudapestWarsawBelgradeBucharestKraków
East Asia12
TokyoOsakaFukuokaSeoulBusanTaipei
South & Southeast Asia11
SingaporeBangkokKuala LumpurChiang MaiDa NangGeorge Town
Provenance

Sources

Four sources carry this atlas. Each one is named, each one has an edge, and the edges are printed rather than smoothed over.

What we use

measured · ODbL

OpenStreetMap

Opening-hours tags across each metro catchment, aggregated into the city rhythm — median open and close, and the share of places running past midnight, open on Sundays, or taking a midday break.

  • 113 of 126 cities have enough mapped venues to report
  • Contributor data: complete in some cities, thin in others
measured · reanalysis

Open-Meteo

Daily temperature and precipitation from 1981 to the present, reduced to monthly normals. These drive the weather chart, the thermal seasons, and the best-time-to-visit window.

  • 124 of 126 cities carry a full year of normals
editorial · CC BY-SA

Wikipedia & Wikivoyage

The written layer — what a city is known for, the seasons it recognises, and the moments that transform its year. Every claim on a city page quotes its section, and nothing is paraphrased into a stronger statement than the source made.

reference

Country & place reference

ISO country codes and metro population figures, used for naming, grouping and scale — never for ranking.

Where it stops

Rhythm describes what a city keeps open. It is not a claim about how anyone lives inside those hours. A city with no measured rhythm shows its editorial layer alone rather than a guess, and a city with no comfortable weather window is told so plainly.

Every figure is current to its edition, not to today. Where something has gone stale, the fix is a new edition — not a quiet edit.

Credit

Map backdrops and city rhythm derive from OpenStreetMap — © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Weather normals from Open-Meteo. Editorial text from Wikipedia and Wikivoyage under CC BY-SA.