65.7 % of Hungarian people live in cities and environmental quality - along with housing, energy and water use, public transportation and other factors - is important to the quality of life. One might be interested in whether which cities have cleaner air, or more urban parkland, or more pleasant climates. Which cities have better air quality or which ones are wasteful in their use of water and energy. To answer these questions, a Green Cities Index was constructed (by S.L. Cutter, Rutgers University, USA), which is used to rank major urban aeras in Hungary by many different environmental criteria.

Ranking cities according to their environmental quality and level of environemntal awareness is an important task. Over the years many quality-of-life rankings have been produced comparing countries and cities, although few of them focused specifically on environmental criteria.

A larger set of environmental indicators and a smaller set of cities was used in this paper in order to control for the effect of city size. We examined all Hungarian cities and classified them into groups according to their size. A rigorous, quantitative measure of environmental quality was developed and it was studied how these cities compare with one another. We applied several measures for each of the 237 cities. There were considered but omitted other environmental indicators, in most cases because data were not available for every city. We ranked cities by population and population density, but these measures did not include in determining the rankings in the Green Cities Index.

It should be mentioned that environmental conditions for the cities are always changing. Indicators considered for the cities improve in many cases. Hence, our Green Cities rankings should be wieved as a snapshot of the level of environmental quality and concern at a given moment in time.