Assessing Urban Livability through Residential Preference—An International Survey

Abstract

Livability is a popular term for describing the satisfaction of residents with living in a city. The assessment of livability can be of high relevance for urban planning; however, existing assessment methods have various limitations, especially in terms of transferability. In our main research article, we developed a conceptual framework and an assessment workflow to provide a transferable way of assessing livability, also considering intra-urban differences of the identified livability assessment factors to use for further geospatial analysis. As a key part of this assessment, we developed a survey to investigate residential preference and satisfaction concerning different urban factors. The current Data Descriptor introduces the questionnaire we used, the distribution of the responses, and the most important findings for the socioeconomic and demographic parameters influencing urban livability. We found that the development of an area, the number of persons in the household, and the income level are significant circumstances in assessing how satisfied a person would be with living in a given city.