For the seventh year running, Zürich has been judged to have the best quality of life in the world. But how good is life there? asks Derek Scally
ANYONE WHO HAS visited Zürich knows why James Joyce never left. The Irish writer first visited the city in 1904 and visited on and off before spending his last years there, until his death in 1941.
After dirty old Dublin, Joyce was shocked on his first visit at the sight of the Bahnhofstrasse. It was so clean, he said, that you could pour minestrone soup onto the street and eat it up with a spoon.
The all-round cleanliness of Zürich is still a shock: first-time visitors walking along the River Limmat in summer have been known to panic when they see bodies in the water. They're not looking at corpses, locals point out, but swimmers. The water is so clean that water sports are encouraged: in the rivers or the city's 22 river pools.
With surprises like that, it's no wonder that Zürich, for the seventh year running, was this week crowned the city with the highest standard of living in the world.
The 215-city ranking by Mercer Consulting is based on assessments of 39 quality-of-living categories. Dublin was 25th on the list.
Zürich came out top for its political and social stability, positive sociocultural climate, efficient public services and endless recreation possibilities in a well-preserved natural environment.
Zürich city officials reacted modestly to the news.
"We have been given many advantages by nature," said Franziska Dörig of the Zürich City Development Authority. But, any visitor can see, Zürich excels at making the best of its natural advantages. In the summer, the entire city opens out onto the crystal clear waters of the Limmat and Sihl rivers and Lake Zürich, stretching out to the mountains on the horizon.
Another advantage for Zürich is its size: with about 300,000 residents, it straddles the ground between small and big city.
The city manages an enviable balancing act: combining a cosmopolitian flair that Dublin will never have with a manageable, familiar feeling that Dublin has lost. It occupies a compact footprint, surrounded by woodlands, while its river-side bars, rich cultural scene and lively nightlife in the cobbled streets of the old town will come as a surprise to anyone with notions of a staid town of banks and jewellery shops.
ZÜRICH ALSO BENEFITS from not being the focal point of Swiss life: the federal system has spread out the population across several cities such as Geneva, Basle and the capital, Bern.
Most locals in Zürich need little encouragement when asked what makes the place special.
"The city is small and yet offers so much," says Zürich-born Tanja Hanhart. "Without being boring, it's clean and everything works. Particularly important is the transport: when a bus goes by, you don't feel like you're going to choke, like I remember from Dublin."
Zürich has come a long way since the 1990s, when a whole area of the city was in the hands of drug dealers and addicts, driving families to the suburbs. The problem was brought under control by dispersing the scene and setting up city-run drug-taking centres.
Huge sums were then invested in urban renewal, renovating the main train station and creating spaces in the city where people would like to spend time.
Families are returning, giving a shot in the arm to fading inner-city neighbourhoods.
"Very important for all of this is the federal system giving Zürich direct access to tax revenue to plan and decide big projects for itself," says Franziska Dörig of the planning office. "That keeps politicians close to people and convinces everyone of the need to do things with a co-operative approach." Many Swiss are convinced that Zürich's quality of life and prosperity - unemployment is under 3 per cent - begins in the mentality of the residents.
FRITZ SENN, DIRECTOR of the city's James Joyce Foundation, cites the lasting influence of Huldrych Zwingli, a severe 16th-century pastor in the city who became the head of the Reformation in Switzerland.
"You don't let rubbish fall because it costs money to pick it up again and when things are clean they stay that way," says Senn. "We don't let buildings fall into disrepair because then it's more expensive to renovate. It's not efficiency, though," he laughs, "it's meanness."
Regardless of its roots, it's a quality foreigners have grown to love.
"They demand quality in everything - buildings, infrastructure, food, even the clothes they wear," says Maik Westhaus, a German architect who studied and worked in Zürich.
"Rather than do it cheap and have to replace it in a few years, they spend the money the first time around. That's a very satisfying feeling - for an architect in particular."
But there are sides to Zürich that annoy even the locals, such as the obsession with social harmony.
Last year, Zürich police ran a public-order campaign under the well-intentioned but slightly sinister slogan: Erlaubt ist was nicht stört(What doesn't bother anyone is permitted).
"They should just hang up signs saying, 'Anything that might bother someone is forbidden'," complained one artist at the time. "Without provocation, a society is dead. It's the Orwellian state."
Zürich hasn't quite reached 1984 yet, but, like most big cities, the rest of the country likes to take it down a peg or two.
"Zürich is extremely pretty in terms of location, nightlife and international flair, but the mentality of the people is very stressful," says Ramona, a regular visitor from the Swiss town of Baden. "They're so reserved and restrained and only interested in two things: who is the best dressed and who earns the most money."
The city has no shortage of excluded groups, too, from low-earners struggling to cope with the high cost of living or immigrants who complain about social exclusion. The growing German population, in particular, feel resented by, and resentful of, the locals. But that tension hasn't stopped Zürich becoming a magnet in the region for young professionals and artists.
So, what gives the city the best quality of life? Perhaps the fact that the city isn't just pretty, but that it also works.
The secret? Co-operative planning between citizens and a local government with real spending power to fund essential projects, such as a public transport system efficient enough to push down the number of cars on the city's streets.
Everything in Zürich is just a short tram ride away: even James Joyce's final resting place, in a graveyard overlooking the city, within a lion's roar of the zoo.