Livable Cities from a Global Perspective

Roger Caves, Fritz Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315523392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Livable Cities from a Global Perspective offers case studies from around the world on how cities approach livability. They address the fundamental question, what is considered "livable?" The journey each city has taken or is currently taking is unique and context specific. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to livability. Some cities have had a long history of developing livability policies and programs that focus on equity, economic, and environmental concerns, while other cities are relatively new to the game. In some areas, government has taken the lead while in other areas, grassroots activism has been the impetus for livability policies and programs. The challenge facing our cities is not simply developing a livability program. We must continually monitor and readjust policies and programs to meet the livability needs of all people.

The case studies investigate livability issues in such cities as Austin, Texas; Helsinki, Finland; London, United Kingdom; Warsaw, Poland; Tehran, Iran; Salt Lake City, United States; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Sydney, Australia; and Cape Town, South Africa. The chapters are organized into such themes as livability in capital city regions, livability and growth and development, livability and equity concerns, livability and metrics, and creating livability. Each chapter provides unique insights into how a specific area has responded to calls for livable cities. In doing so, the book adds to the existing literature in the field of livable cities and provides policy makers and other organizations with information and alternative strategies that have been developed and implemented in an effort to become a livable city.

1
Livable Cities

From Concept to Global Experience

Hilda Blanco

Introduction

The professions involved in urban planning and development, management, and the provision of urban services have long concerned themselves with what makes for a good city from their specific standpoints. Is a city safe? Does its built environment reflect a rich history? Is it economically vibrant, providing employment opportunities for its residents? Does it house its population adequately? Are there great economic inequalities in its population? Does it have adequate parks, medical care, roads, transit, and so forth? Because cities have become the dominant human habitat, and according to the United Nations’ latest population projections, by 2050, 66% of the world’s population will live in urban areas (UNDESA, 2014), cities and their qualities have transcended professional domains and have become the subject of public attention. Popular global indexes focus on the quality of cities. A city’s livability, its sustainability, its resilience are concerns that transcend specific professional interests and engage larger publics. These concepts are multidimensional and intersecting. The essays in this volume provide profiles of cities around the world through the lens of livability. They make clear the multidimensional aspects of the concept of livable cities as well as its limitations. In particular, many of the essays raise the issues of whether livable cities are sustainable cities and whether livable cities are just cities.

This introduction will first discuss the concept of livable cities, as it became popular in the 1980s and1990s in the urban planning and design professions and related movements, including the new urbanism, smart growth, healthy cities, biophilic cities, and resilient cities movements. It will then review major ranking systems and reflect on their relation to the livable communities/cities movement in urban development. The final section will discuss the relation of the concept of livable cities to sustainability and to resilience, addressing issues of future generations, human rights, ecological sustainability, and resilience to disasters.

Emergence of the Concept of Livable Communities/Cities

A livable place is a place suitable for human living, worth living in, according to dictionary definitions. As such, a livable city or community is commonly recognized as a place with qualities that are suitable or good for human life. Although urban livability concerns such as overcrowding, the quality of housing, air quality, green spaces, safe and adequate supplies of water, and sanitation are issues that have been at the core of urban planning, public health, and other urban professions that emerged in the early 20th century, the concern with community or urban livability is more recent (Whelan, 2012). In the US, the quality of places has been an object of study since the 1980s. In the same decade, a major rating of urban places, Rand McNally’s Places Rated Almanac (Boyer & Savageau, 1981) began to be published. In the 1970s and 1980s, a growing interest in what makes for livable communities and cities led to the development of a new field in psychology, environment-behavior studies, pioneered by Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960, which emphasized the quality of places and the effect of places and their quality on people’s behavior.¹ Appleyard’s Livable Streets (1981) focused on the characteristics of streets and how their quality affects the quality of neighborhood life, a continuing major focus of livable cities’ efforts. Partners for Livable Places (now Partners for Livable Communities) organized as a national nonprofit in the US in 1977 to foster livability in the built environment. In 1981, Pressman edited a volume, International Experiences in Creating Livable Cities, a collection of essays focused on the experiences with policies to improve the livability of cities around the world, primarily in Europe and Canada, but also including lessons from Australia, Brazil, South Africa, and Japan. Many of the essays were focused not only on cities’ efforts to tame motor vehicles and to improve pedestrian safety, but also on urban regeneration and planning, although the topics varied among countries. For example, the concern with livable cities or communities was evident and a focus of political agendas in the Netherlands since the 1960s, with a specific emphasis on a need to improve citizen participation in livability policy (Kaal, 2011). International conferences for urban design and planning professionals with the explicit focus on making cities livable began to be held in 1986 (International Making Cities Livable, 2017).

Lynch’s Theory of Good City Form

Kevin Lynch’s A Theory of Good City Form (1984) identified several dimensions of urban form that are important to the concept of livable cities. Lynch’s dimension of vitality is particularly relevant. By vitality, Lynch meant the extent to which a city or places in a city support “the vital functions, the biological requirements and capabilities of human beings”. Lynch identifies three aspects to vitality: sustenance, safety, and consonance. Sustenance refers to the ability of a city to provide an adequate supply of food, energy, water, and air and proper disposal of waste, all the physical and natural goods that humans need to survive in an urban place. Safety, according to Lynch, refers to the absence or control of hazards, poisons, disease in a settlement. Consonance refers to the match of a settlement form with the biological structure of humans, for example, whether a settlement can maintain the internal temperature of people or provide optimum sensory input. Thus, Lynch’s dimension of vitality is very close to what the ordinary meaning of a livable place is in terms of enabling human life. Other dimensions of place in Lynch’s theory are often incorporated in concepts of livable communities: access and fit. By access, Lynch meant the degree to which people have access to public places, to other people, places of employment, schools, information sources, and so forth. This dimension concerns the range and quality of things or people or activities to which people desire access. In a more abstract way, Lynch was referring to the means of transportation and communication that provide us access to all types of economic and social goods. By fit, Lynch referred to the degree of match between the place and the customary behavior of people in a place. For example, how well does the suburban home fit an elderly resident, or how well does a narrow sidewalk fit the needs for daily walking of residents? Lynch’s normative theory of urban form identified major dimensions of how urban form can sustain basic human needs. His theory was a normative one, describing multidimensional values, which he did not operationalize. To apply these criteria, a designer or an evaluator would need to interpret the dimensions in measurable ways.

The New Urbanism and Smart Growth Movements

The livable cities movement has been strongly identified with the new urbanism movement and the smart growth movement in the US (Godschalk, 2004). The early focus of New Urbanism, an urban design movement that emerged in the US in the mid-1980s, was mainly on reforming suburban development into more compact and livable places. It sought to replace suburban subdivisions with more traditional town plans incorporating interconnected street grids, better defined lot/block and block/street patterns, and higher densities than existing suburbs (Duany & Plater-Zyberk, 2006). Moving beyond suburban development, the emphasis of the new urbanism movement has been on the quality of urban places and the public experiences and behavior that well-designed places can facilitate. It has also emphasized diversity of housing types to promote affordable housing options and more inclusive urban places. Peter Calthorpe, an urban designer who brought a strong environmental ethos to the new urbanism movement (van Der Ryn & Calthorpe, 1986), initiated the concept of transit-oriented development in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Calthorpe, 1993; Carlton, 2007). This concept, geared to reduce automobility, enhance mobility, and develop more compact development, has been incorporated into the new urbanism agenda.

In the 1990s, reacting to lack of progress in containing sprawl, the smart growth movement, a movement in urban planning that evolved from the earlier urban growth management movement (DeGrove & Miness, 1992) advocated several similar measures as the new urbanism: limiting expansion of new development through urban growth boundaries or utility districts, increasing residential densities in existing and new growth areas, promoting more mixed-use and pedestrian amenities to minimize car use, emphasizing public transit to reduce the use of private vehicles, and revitalizing older existing neighborhoods. (American Planning Association, 1998; Burchell et al., 2000; Downs, 2001). The association of new urbanism and smart growth with livable places and communities in the US was made explicit through the Ahwanee Principles² (Calthorpe et al., 1991) advocated by major new urbanists and smart growth advocates, including Calthorpe and Duany and Plater-Zyberk in 1991.

The Healthy Cities Movement

In the late 1970s, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) concept of health began to shift from absence of disease to well-being, and its goals began to go beyond medical intervention to include disease prevention and health promotion (World Health Organization, 2005). The notion that people’s health in cities is as much dependent on their social and physical environment as on their access to medicine began to emerge in the 1980s, with the support of WHO. A growing movement among public health professionals began to coalesce around the healthy cities concept, which is defined as a process rather than a particular health status, and by a commitment to improve social and physical conditions to support the quality of life of residents (Duhl & Sanchez, 1999). Regional associations of Healthy Cities and Healthy Communities under WHO number hundreds, if not thousands, of members. In Europe alone, 90 cities in 31 countries belong to the regional association, and 28 countries have national networks involving 1,400 towns and cities (Hancock, 2014). The physical aspects of the Healthy Cities agenda overlap significantly with the livable communities’ agenda, with a greater emphasis on promoting active living, that is, opportunities for walking and biking. In the US, the active living agenda, prompted by the increasing incidence of obesity, has brought together urban design and public health academics to conduct joint research on the urban form aspects of the agenda (Moudon, 2005; Berke et al., 2007; Frank et al., 2007; Giles-Corti et al., 2016; Goenka & Andersen, 2016). But the Healthy Cities program also highlights, especially in the context of low-income countries, the importance of environmental infrastructure for health, such as water, sanitation, and waste disposal.

Biophilic Cities

The more recent movement promoting biophilic citi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Livable Cities: From Concept to Global Experience
• PART I Livability in Capital City Regions
• PART II Livability and Growth and Development
• PART III Livability and Equity Concerns
• PART IV Livability and Metrics
• PART V Creating Livability
• Final Remarks
• Additional Information on Livability for Cities Covered in the Book
• Index