Best Cities for Arts & Culture

Museums, galleries, theaters, libraries and attractions per resident.

22 cities ranked in the United States.

Rank	City	Population	Score
1	Seattle, WA King County	780,995	98.6
2	Nashville-Davidson, TN Davidson County	704,963	88.4
3	Austin, TX Travis County	993,588	87.1
4	Columbus, OH Franklin County	933,263	84.4
5	Indianapolis, IN Marion County	891,484	78.2
6	Oklahoma City, OK Oklahoma County	712,919	72.8
7	Charlotte, NC Mecklenburg County	943,476	70.1
8	Dallas, TX Dallas County	1,326,087	60.9
9	Fort Worth, TX Tarrant County	1,008,106	57.1
10	Jacksonville, FL Duval County	1,009,833	48.3
11	Philadelphia, PA Philadelphia County	1,573,916	47.6
12	San Antonio, TX Bexar County	1,526,656	44.2
13	Denver, CO Denver County	729,019	41.5
14	San Jose, CA Santa Clara County	997,368	40.8
15	New York, NY Kings County	8,478,072	39.5
16	Chicago, IL Cook County	2,721,308	34.0
17	Houston, TX Harris County	2,390,125	33.0
18	Los Angeles, CA Los Angeles County	3,878,704	27.9
19	El Paso, TX El Paso County	681,723	21.1
20	Las Vegas, NV Clark County	678,922	12.9
21	San Francisco, CA San Francisco County	827,526	6.1
22	San Diego, CA San Diego County	1,404,452	5.4

How this ranking works

Each metric is scored 0-100 by percentile against the other ranked cities, then blended using these weights:

Museums per 10,000 residents ×2
Theaters per 10,000 residents ×2
Galleries per 10,000 residents ×1
Libraries per 10,000 residents ×1
Attractions per 10,000 residents ×1

Place counts cover a 5 km radius around each city's center, so cities are compared like for like. Scores are relative to the cities in our dataset. About the data.