How Uproot works

• Cost & housing — rent, 1-bed in the centre, price level.
• Lifestyle — sunshine, air pollution (pm2.5), happy with green spaces, happy with public transport, feel safe walking at night.
• Opportunity — unemployment, household income, job growth, english proficiency, internet speed.
• Taxes — income tax + social security, vat (standard rate).

Each metric is put on a 0–100 scale by comparing all 12 cities — the best city on that metric gets 100, the worst gets 0. Those are averaged within each dimension.

Your sliders then weight the four dimensions. Weights are applied steeply (raised to the power of 2), so a slider at 5 counts far more than one at 3 — caring a lot really steers the result. The dimension scores are combined with a geometric mean, which means a city that is weak in something you weighted heavily is pulled down hard rather than rescued by its other scores.

The result is a single number per city. It is a way to rank options against your priorities — not a verdict.

• •Numbeo
• •Eurostat
• •National meteorological services
• •Open-Meteo Air Quality API
• •EU Quality of life in European cities survey 2023 (Eurostat urb_percep)
• •EF English Proficiency Index 2023
• •Speedtest Global Index
• •OECD Taxing Wages 2023
• •European Commission

Most metrics refresh from an API; a few slow-moving ones (rents, tax rates, sunshine normals) are updated by hand each quarter or year. The exact source and year sits next to every figure on a city’s profile.

• Unemployment is the survey (ILO) measure. It is comparable across countries but reads lower than the registered-unemployment figure some national agencies publish — for Berlin, about four points lower.
• Some metrics are country- or region-level. Tax, VAT, price level, English proficiency and internet speed are national; unemployment, job growth and household income are for the surrounding region. These are tagged on the city pages.
• “Happy with…” metrics are resident opinion. Public transport, green spaces and feeling safe at night come from the EU’s Quality of Life in European Cities survey — what residents report, not a physical measurement. Porto is not in that survey, so those three use rough estimates there.
• It is 12 cities for now. A deliberately small set while the method settles. More to come.
• Not advice. Uproot is a starting point for a big decision, not a substitute for visiting, doing your own sums, or talking to someone who lives there.