If you’ve ever dreamed of a perfect life in Paris, London or Rome, or secretly pined for wonderful Copenhagen or beautiful Prague, the EU has news for you: the ideal European city is none of those places.

The ideal European city is a combination of eight cities, from Cork in Ireland to Leuven in Belgium (sorry Eastern Europe!), according to the EU’s in-house science service.

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A new index by the EU Joint Research Centre published Thursday measures 168 cities in 30 European countries and ranks how they perform in 29 areas of culture and creativity.

The ideal city would have the cultural venues of Cork, the cultural attractiveness and knowledge-based jobs of Paris, the innovation of Eindhoven, the new creative jobs of Umeå, the education system of Leuven, the openness, tolerance and trust of Glasgow, the connectedness of Utrecht and the good governance of Copenhagen.

When cities are grouped by size, Paris (population of more than 1 million), Copenhagen (500,000 to 1 million), Edinburgh (250,000 to 500,000) and Eindhoven (under 250,000) came out on top in their respective categories.

Size isn’t everything

EU researchers found that while capital cities fly high, smaller cities often do better. The capitals of Austria, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, Netherlands and the U.K. all finished in second place or worse within their country.

Amsterdam and Łódź are at opposite ends of the index’s “cultural vibrancy” ratings despite having a similar population. Meanwhile, tiny Weimar in Germany achieved the same score as London and Berlin.

The index represents a major effort to inject “soft” issues such as culture into political debates about the future of Europe. It builds on emerging academic and economic consensus that the “creative economy” is an important foundation for thriving economies.

The evidence base for the index may raise eyebrows: it ranges from official statistics by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, to TripAdvisor reviews.

Factors that fed into the research model include the number of cinema seats in a city, the size of a city’s foreign-born population, and the number of transport connections it has.

The index “puts sound evidence at the disposal of policymakers to help them identify where they fare well and where further improvement is desirable,” Tibor Navracsics, the European commissioner for education, culture, youth and sport, said.

Full report about the index