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Former foreign correspondent William Dowell has been based in places like New York, Hong Kong, Paris and Cairo. He now considers the Lake Geneva region one of the most interesting and liveable places in the world.

I moved to Geneva because my employer, one of the world's leading humanitarian development and relief organizations, decided to rebase its operations here.  It is not hard to understand why. Geneva is quietly moving into an increasingly commanding position as an essential nerve center for international humanitarian operations as well as the outer reaches of advanced research in sub-atomic physics, and the globalization of the world's economy—all of this in a delightfully manageable and humanly accessible environment.

In short, Geneva has all the advantages of a highly sophisticated world-class city, without the pollution, traffic and social friction that you find in New York, London or Paris.

The Romans recognized the Lake Geneva region's strategic position as a gateway to Western Europe. Voltaire saw the location as the best choice for an enlightened free thinker, and he delighted in the city's receptiveness to new ideas and different cultures.

Today, the Geneva region, which reaches as far as Lyons and the nearby Aosta Valley in northern Italy, is taking full advantage of European unification and the integration of an increasingly efficient continent-wide transportation system. Easy Jet and a variety of other options make it possible to commute to a meeting in London or Berlin and be back in Geneva by nightfall, and Geneva's ranks as one of the most convenient and friendly in Europe.

But this is also an area where important things are happening.  Geneva is currently the place chosen for many of the debates that are shaping the UN's ongoing reform process.  If you are not present in Geneva, you are not part of that dialogue which is reshaping the future of humanitarian operations, not just for the UN, but for non-government organizations as well.

CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, has the world's most advanced nuclear accelerators and detection equipment that are now searching for the particle that holds matter together. As one physicist put it, "If you want to be at the frontier of physics, there is no where else that has the infrastructure to enable your research."

Every year, the World Economic Forum at Cologny, organizes one of the world's most dazzling brainstorming sessions at Davos, attracting the most brilliant minds and innovative business personalities shaping contemporary global society.  This is reinforced by a series of regional forums that now take place throughout the year.

But what makes Geneva especially workable is the fact that it is gifted with a small but highly international and connected population that is spread across the Lake Geneva region.

When I moved to Geneva, I originally thought that the only option was to live in the center of the city.  Then I began exploring the villages just across the border in France, and I began to realize that to look at Geneva as a conventional city is to miss much of what it has to offer.  It is more effective to look at the entire Lake Geneva region as a kind of dazzling buffet, in which each village offers its own specific taste of life. The city of Geneva has yet to appreciate this critical aspect, but much of the international community as well as Swiss, many who have moved across the border into France, do.

I had grown up in New York, but this time I opted to live in a centuries' old farmhouse in a French village, whose largest population at times appears to be 40 cows in a farm at the crossroads that mark the town center. These days, I commute to work along a beautiful back farm road. The drive takes fifteen minutes and there are no passport checks. My week is timed to the Saturday morning markets in Fernay and Gex, or missing that, the Sunday morning market in Divonne, or Sunday brunch in St. Cergue, or the antique market in Nyons. The trick, in fact, is mastering the enormous variety of choices that are available.

Recent surveys have rated the quality of life in the Lake Geneva Region as among the highest in Europe.  But it is the experience and the interconnectedness of its international professionals that makes living in Geneva so extremely rich.

At casual dinner parties, I am likely to be seated next to someone discussing the World Health organization's latest strategy in Niger, or an innovative plan for agricultural reform in Malawi, or a casual visitor from Google or Microsoft, trying to figure out how to link the worldwide satellite system to CERN's massively paralleled supercomputer.  That kind of thing happens in Paris or London, but not in an environment that is this relaxed and spectacular.

William Dowell, a former correspondent for TIME and ABC News, now works for the humanitarian and development NGO, CARE International, based in Geneva. He lives across the border from Switzerland in France's Pay de Gex (Ain).