Grab a PBR, a ukelele, an ironic t-shirt, some beard balm, and eyeglasses with thick vintage frames, because you’re going to hipster town. The Creative Urban Institute named the “coolest” small towns in the world and the results may surprise you.
The Portland, Oregon-based Institute ranked 10 cities across 20 countries to determine which places were more hipster than others. The methodology did not include counting the annual total of kazoo orchestra concerts, how many pickled beets stores per square mile, most bow ties sold, most mumblecore films rented or most spirulina cold-pressed juice smoothies consumed.
What they did do was examine towns with a population under 130,000. During their analysis to find the world’s coolest small towns they counted 2,834 tech startups, 7,772 coffee shops, 4,588 microbreweries, and 493,203 Instagram posts. Based on the “coolness index”, The Creative Urban Institute determined that Charleston, South Carolina. is the coolest in the world for 2020. Charleston scored a hipster score of 8.737, while Boulder, Colorado, only scored 7.531.
Here are the world’s top 10 coolest small towns.
- Charleston, South Carolina – 8.737
- Mullumbimby, Australia – 8.437
- Oss, Netherlands – 8.285
- Santa Rita do Sapucai, Brazil – 7.824
- Chiang Mai, Thailand – 7.797
- Boulder, Colorado – 7.531
- Leuven, Belgium – 7.489
- Tiradentes, Brazil – 7.391
- Truckee, California – 7.383
- San Miguel de Allende, Mexico – 7.212