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Are you interested in indicators for liveable cities?

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Summary of the book chapter titled Defining indicator systems for liveable cities from 2023 by Rudolf Giffinger and Hans Kramar, part of The Future of Liveable Cities book, published by Springer Nature.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Professor Rudolf Giffinger in episode 208 talking about smart and liveable cities.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see what indicator systems we can use for liveable cities. This book chapter investigates what is involved in liveability and proposes a framework with a dual approach to capture the static and dynamic aspects of urban liveability.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Urbanization challenges cities to become innovative and resilient, integrating smart city technologies and sustainable development practices to address economic, environmental, and social pressures.
2. The “liveable cities” concept emphasizes sustainability, smart innovation, and resilience, focusing on efficiency, adaptability, and enhancing the quality of life through community and technological integration.
3. Developing liveability indicators requires a multidimensional approach that captures both static and dynamic aspects of urban development, necessitating a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures to assess and guide urban policies effectively.

You can find the chapter through this link.

Abstract: Processes of urbanization and trends of densification and enlargement of cities are very often accompanied by economic re-structuring, social polarization and increasing environmental problems. As a consequence, cities have to cope with growing challenges of sustainable development, and climate change causes new forms of menaces through extreme weather events. Both intraurban trends and climate change impacts increasingly threaten the liveability of cities and metropolises. There are two opposite approaches which both aim at influencing and steering urban development in a strategic way: First, Smart City policy is targeted at implementing new technologies for a more efficient management of sustainable urban development. Secondly, the Resilient City policy aims at mitigating the negative effects of external crises by reducing urban vulnerabilities and strengthening adaptability and transformability in potentially affected urban areas. Evidently, these two policy concepts support urban transformation processes from different perspectives, but they both pursue a place-based approach for steering urban development processes in a sustainable way. Both policies try to influence the liveability of cities in various fields of action by implementing projects and interventions. Hence, liveability can be regarded as the outcome of two different place-based policies, which consider urban performances in a multidimensional way. In this context, this chapter  briefly discusses the socio-economic, environmental, technological and governing components based on Smart City and Resilience literature and suggests groups of potential factors, which are supposed to be more or less important for urban liveability. These factors are characterized by relevant dimensions reflecting a city’s recent performance and activities in its path of transformation and representing existing conditions and resources for strategic projects. In order to give an idea of relevant indicators and to make the concept more precise, adequate types of indicators are introduced. Considering selected indicator systems, two methodologies are introduced for the implementation of the indicator concept: the first approach is based on the concept of benchmarking cities by a comparative analysis of values. The second way follows the idea of monitoring a city’s development over time from a path perspective, which allows to show specific changes and trends. Both approaches, however, clearly follow place-based concepts, which are able to provide empirical evidence on the liveability of cities on the base of local and regional data. In that way, they are both suited to provide an evidence-based contribution to acedemic discussion and to be practically applied in strategic urban development planning. A final discussion of both methodologies suggests recommendations not only for practical implementation but also for future research.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.001R – Smart Cities – Ranking of European medium-sized cities;
• No.131R – Inventing Future Cities (book summary);
• No.139R_The landscape and evolution of urban planning science;

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