On the first sunny morning of the week, entire families spill onto the pavement terrace of Juno, a bakery in central Copenhagen, and tuck into slices of lemon cake, homemade butter biscuits and loaves of many kinds. A few streets away, at the newly opened Kong Hans Bakery, a pâté en croûte filled with confit rabbit, veal tongue, pork cheeks, black trumpet mushrooms and Sicilian pistachios sits in the counter as if it were the most natural thing in the world. In this city of 600,000 people, bread is not a humble side dish; it arrives at the table like a main course, announced by the chef with the same ceremony as the fish. At Lille Mølle, a restored mill whose young chef Christoffer Sørensen already holds a Michelin star, the meal pauses for a moment of ritual: “And now, the bread,” the kitchen says, presenting a freshly baked bun with handmade butter.

That reverence for the elemental is not confined to bakeries. For the second consecutive year, Copenhagen has topped the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index, scoring a perfect 100 in stability, education and infrastructure. Vienna follows in second place, also with maximum marks in health, education and infrastructure, while Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide fill out the top ranks with their own perfect scores in health and education. The Global Destination Sustainability Index, which measures more than 70 criteria across environmental infrastructure, social performance and tourism supply chains, tells a parallel story: Helsinki leads with 93.52 points out of 100, Gothenburg takes second and Copenhagen third. In all these league tables, the Nordic and Alpine cities are praised for low crime, public transport, cycling mobility and a social cohesion that reduces the threat of unrest.

This quality of life comes with a price tag that is visible in household bills. According to an analysis by Visual Capitalist based on GlobalPetrolPrices.com data, Sweden records the highest annual energy expenditure per person in 2025, at $1,926, followed by Finland ($1,786), Austria ($1,709), Denmark ($1,583) and Germany ($1,450). The study attributes the elevated costs to energy policy, taxation, infrastructure and dependence on imported fuels. In South Australia, a new government scheme designed to shore up electricity supply is adding an estimated $23 per household per year to network charges, a cost the energy minister defends as necessary to prevent even higher wholesale price spikes. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, state utility PLN is offering a 50 percent discount on power-upgrade fees until July 2026, a measure aimed at households with modest initial connections who want to increase capacity to 7,700 VA.

Homeownership patterns across the OECD add another layer to the picture. The average rate among member and partner countries sits at 70.1 percent, but the geography is asymmetric. Slovakia (93.5 percent), Romania (92.8 percent) and Croatia (90.4 percent) lead the world, a legacy of mass privatisation programmes that transferred state housing to occupants at steep discounts after the transition from planned economies. At the other end, Switzerland registers just 38.2 percent, Germany 41 percent and France 58.5 percent, figures that analysts in European capitals link to regulated rental markets, strong legal protections for tenants and cost structures that reduce the structural need to buy. In Colombia, more than half of low-income renting households spend over 40 percent of their net income on rent, and a similar share of low-income mortgage holders cross the same threshold.

Back in Copenhagen, the cult of gluten is not a contradiction but a complement. The same society that pays some of the world’s highest energy bills and taxes has built an urban fabric where a former ugly mechanical workshop becomes Demokrati Garage, a coworking space where the day begins with a sandwich of cheese and rye bread. At Riviera, an Italian émigré named Chiara Barla turns unsold pastries into original granolas. The lasting image is not of a city performing for an index, but of a baker reusing yesterday’s brioche, and a chef in a converted explosives warehouse from 1745 serving Japanese milk bread with artisanal butter as if it were the most precious course of the evening.