A recent United Nations Report on World Urbanization found that Tokyo remains the world's largest city. That will come as no surprise to anyone, but London-based magazine Monocle's ranking Tokyo as the third most livable city in the world just might astonish many.

Tokyo's 36 million people are double the size of the runners-up — New York, Mexico City, Bombay and Sao Paulo, each with around 19 million. None of those giant cities, though, were even close to making the livable list.

Copenhagen and Munich were ranked first and second in quality of life. Making the roughly 1.2 million citizens in those two cities happy, though, is a much smaller undertaking than in Tokyo. In terms of population, Tokyo would rank 35th in the list of the world's largest countries, with more people than in all of Canada or all of Iraq. Things may not be perfect in Japan's megacity, but the city has managed to solve its problems with 30 times the people of those European cities.