Over 83% of the residents living in the city, the capital of the southwestern state of Baden-Wurttemberg, said they could "live very well" there, according to a survey of 600,000 people by Perspektive Deutschland, a polling initiative spearheaded by the consultants McKinsey.

Following Stuttgart on the contentedness meter were the Bavarian capital Munich (82%), the western city of Duesseldorf and the northern city of Hamburg — both earning an approval rating of 78%.

The eastern city of Dresden, capital of the state of Saxony, ranked the highest among states of the formerly communist east, at number nine (70%).

Despite the continued disparities in overall well-being between states in the east and west, Germans living in the east are increasingly satisfied with their cities and towns.

Just four years ago, easterners were only about a third as content as their western counterparts, but today they lag just ten percentage points behind.

"Cities like Dessau and Magdeburg and areas like Vorpommern made great advances with respect to previous years," said former German President Richard von Weizsaecker, the polling project’s honorary chair.

Perspektive Deutschland bills its 2005 poll as the largest online sociopolitical survey worldwide to date.