Skylines/About-Rules

About

A few attempts have been made in the past decades to rank the most impressive cities skylines in the world, but this is probably the best one. None has ever been so comprehensive, shown an historical perspective, compared different rules and different administrative hierarchy levels.

This idea dates back to 2003, when I started my ranking lists for personal use, thanks to my curiosity, love in Geography and tall self-standing structures and mankind's engineering marvels ! But since then, information and time availability, internet speed, and maybe my own knowledge in PC sheets have made it impossible to publish these refined and complete results, until now.

Rules

Data Sources

Slightly different rules were applied for different lists:

Points > 90m - Points are awarded when a structure is higher than 90 meters

Points > 100m - Points are awarded when a structure is higher than 100 meters

Points > 120m - Points are awarded when a structure is higher than 120 meters

Examples will be described specifically for the 90m list :

Skyscrapers, Buildings with towers, Pyramids and Religious strucutures (Churches, Cathedrals, Mosques, Minarets, Religious Structures, Temples and Pagodas) count 1 point for each meter built above the 90m height limit (ex: if a building is 100m high it will be awarded 10 points).

Towers, Road Bridges, Flag Poles, Amusement Rides, Monuments and Statues (non-religious) count 0,5 point for each meter built above the 90m height limit (ex: if a tower is 100m high it will be awarded 5 points).

Industrial structures, communication masts and frame assembly towers don't count.

Destroyed structures scored since the year they were built until the year they were destroyed.

Skyscrapers structural height was considered, and not their antenna's height.

When a buildings height is not known, just the numbers of floors, I used slightly modified CTBUH formulas to estimate it:

Residential and Hotel Buildings = 3,1 x (n°Floors) + 7,75

Office and Governamental Buildings = 3,8 x (n°Floors) + 11,7

When a structure's built year is not known I proportionally distributed its points for its city since 1960.

Many Administrative Hierarchy levels were considered for total points calculation:

Country

State or Province (largest countries)

City Metro

City Proper.

Original site database is from February 2019 but I 've included a new interactive database sheet, updated in February 2021, with slightly different rules, as shown below. In the spreadsheet a filter can be added to the line number 7 for custom data sorting. The new, projected 2025 score, was created including under construction structures, but excluding those that were "on hold" at the time of research.