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Are you interested in indicators for liveable cities?

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Our summary today works with the book chapter titled Defining indicator systems for liveable cities from 2023 by Rudolf Giffinger and Hans Kamar, 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.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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Urbanization has reshaped cities into complex entities grappling with economic shifts, immigration, and environmental pressures, including climate change. This transformation demands innovative urban policies that integrate technological advancements and smart city concepts for sustainable development. Simultaneously, addressing climate change is imperative, requiring cities to become more adaptable and resilient to ensure a high quality of life. The evolution of cities thus hinges on the dual pillars of innovation and resilience, guided by comprehensive indicator systems to monitor urban sustainability and liveability.

The “liveable cities” concept merges sustainability, smart city innovations, and urban resilience to tackle challenges like resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and social disparities. A liveable city aims for sustainability, innovation, and resilience, integrating community involvement and technology to address urban issues. It strives for efficiency, adaptability to environmental shifts, and resident well-being, blending smart city and resilience efforts to achieve a holistic urban development that encompasses technological, ecological, and social aspects.

Liveability in cities encompasses a dynamic interplay of socio-economic, environmental, and technological changes, characterized by the concept of “territorial capital” which includes local resources and factors as assets for urban transformation. Urban development, influenced by technological progress and environmental shifts, follows a transformative process involving preparation for change, navigating transitions, and building resilience. This process emphasizes the need for policies that are robust, adaptable, and transformative, affecting local resources and the city’s capacity to respond to external threats.

The concept extends into the development of liveability indicators, merging the “Smart City” approach with urban resilience to create a comprehensive framework for sustainable urban policies. Smart city components focus on mitigating emissions, improving socio-economic conditions, modernizing infrastructure through technology, and enhancing governance. Similarly, resilience emphasizes the transformation of urban systems for greater flexibility, robustness, and adaptability to environmental changes and external shocks. These components suggest a multidimensional approach to urban development, where liveability is achieved through a balance of smart innovations and resilience strategies, reflecting the city’s capability to adapt and transform in response to challenges.

Turning liveability components into indicators requires using data to capture urban life’s complex aspects, including cultural, social, economic, and technological factors. Indicators should reflect local urban realities and measure both the results of policies and the processes driving these outcomes. This approach uses outcome indicators for assessing urban development’s effectiveness and process indicators for evaluating policy implementation over time, aiming for a detailed understanding of urban liveability amidst ongoing urban transformation.

Selecting and defining indicators is crucial for evaluating urban liveability, particularly through the lens of smart and resilient development. This requires identifying indicators that reflect urban liveability’s core aspects and gathering the necessary data. Smart development indicators focus on urban infrastructure, governance, and public engagement, while resilience indicators measure a city’s robustness, adaptability, and capacity for change, especially against climate-related shocks. The approach advocates for a mix of outcome/result and process indicators, providing a comprehensive view of a city’s static and dynamic qualities in smartness and resilience.

Urban liveability faces challenges from rapid urbanization, socio-economic changes, technological progress, and climate change, highlighting the need for integrated urban planning approaches. Current indicators often focus solely on sustainability or smartness, lacking a unified framework for smart and resilient development. A comprehensive set of indicators for urban liveability should clearly define its key aspects to align all stakeholders and combine quantitative measures of urban features with qualitative assessments of social processes and public satisfaction with urban services and governance.

This method emphasizes understanding urban development from both local and procedural perspectives, combining static benchmarking and dynamic monitoring to cater to various research needs. Developing a comprehensive indicator set requires collaboration from an interdisciplinary team and local stakeholders to ensure its applicability and relevance to decision-making. While benchmarking provides a broad overview of a city’s performance, it might not capture individual city nuances. On the other hand, path-oriented approaches give detailed insights into specific urban challenges but could affect the comparability of results, underlining the importance of creating customized indicators for each city’s unique situation.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, 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.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. In what ways can community involvement be enhanced to contribute more effectively to the development of sustainable and liveable cities?
2. How can we leverage smart city technologies to make urban areas more resilient to environmental changes like climate change?
3. How liveable is your city currently? What needs to change for it to become more liveable?
4. What are you doing to make your city more liveable?

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