Neighbourhood Liveability Research Articles

Evaluating The Livability Of Plotted-Gated Neighborhoods And Mid-RiseResidential Environments: A Case Of Lucknow

Evaluating The Livability Of Plotted-Gated Neighborhoods And Mid-RiseResidential Environments: A Case Of Lucknow

Housing Financialization and Community Wellbeing: Tenant Resistance in the Liveable City

Tenant movements are increasingly impacting urban governance and the development of housing in Canadian cities. Tenants resisting violent and ‘gentler’ forms of gentrification—through outright expulsion or being priced out of their communities—have demonstrated their unwillingness to allow financialized real estate to determine their housing futures. At the same time, tenants also have to contend with discourses of urban improvement that increasingly dominate the terrain of financialized rental housing (re)development. Community benefits agreements and other similar arrangements emphasizing neighbourhood liveability and wellbeing are increasingly deployed as devices to justify housing (re)development, but also work to facilitate gentrification. Through an examination of a struggle between tenants and a financialized real estate investment firm in Canada’s capital city Ottawa—which aspires to be North America’s most liveable mid-sized city—this article explores the implications of a Community Wellbeing Framework for a neighbourhood redevelopment project forged through tenant resistance efforts.

Monon Neighborhood Livability Study

Monon Neighborhood Livability Study

Urban Acupuncture as Recovery Approach to Improving the Liveability of Neighbourhoods Affected by Beirut Port Explosion

Abstract Following the port explosion in 2020, Beirut witnessed an unprecedented crisis, revealing the incompetence of its development plans and promoting the emergence of new approaches to improve liveability in damaged areas. Currently, urban planning has shifted from the traditional focus on large-scale interventions to the focus on flexible and adaptive small-scale interventions, especially in financially weak areas. Inspired by traditional Chinese medicine, urban acupuncture (UA) exemplifies this shift through localized interventions aimed at revitalizing cities by simulating their energy. This paper aims to investigate the potential of implementing UA as a recovery approach in Rmeil neighbourhood, heavily impacted by the explosion, to improve its liveability. By analysing and comparing two international examples, the paper highlights the interventions used to activate the urban context. It finally proposes six strategic interventions and ten key actions tailored to achieve social, economic, and environmental results in Rmeil with less effort. This paper represents the foundation for implementing urban acupuncture on a broader level in Beirut and other spots in Lebanon.

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE ON NEIGHBORHOOD LIVABILITY IN CYBERJAYA, MALAYSIA: A GLOBAL TECHNOLOGICAL HUB

The phenomenon of rapid urbanisation that has occurred since the 1950s has presented opportunities for growth and innovation in cities, primarily through the utilisation of urban agglomerations and economies of scale. Urban areas encounter diverse obstacles that restrict their ability to provide services to inhabitants and hinder the achievement of a sustainable urban future for the residents. This research examines the issue of urban functional weakness, with a specific emphasis on the emergence of a global technology hub such as Cyberjaya, Malaysia. This study analyses the relocation behaviours of residents, with a focus on the international community, and it identifies inadequate public infrastructure as the primary factor contributing to liveability issues within the urban area. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, utilising both quantitative data collection and in-depth interviews, to support its findings. This study examines the impact of social variables and public infrastructure on neighbourhood liveability and design quality. The findings suggest that social variables play a significant role in neighbourhood liveability, while public infrastructure has a positive effect on both liveability and design quality.

Link among Governance, Investment, and Design in Creating Sustainable and Livable Residential Architecture in Germany, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Contemporary neighborhood livability differs across countries due to implementation of sustainable policies within the building sector. This paper aims to showcase these differences among Germany, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina through a comparative case study analysis of two contemporary housing developments from each country. Representative neighborhoods from the aforementioned countries that were selected for analysis were located in Munich, Rijeka, and Sarajevo. The residential environment livability analysis method was used in order to pinpoint and compare results of each of these cases, and to assess their livability. The highest number of livability criteria among analyzed cases were found in Munich, while the lowest were found in Sarajevo. The conclusion is that this is happening due to German authorities actually implementing sustainable building standards in housing development prescribed by sustainability policies, while the authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina completely, and Croatian authorities partially, go around these policies and bend to the will of investors, regulating residential urban development to the detriment of end users.

OUTDOOR ARTIFICIAL LIGHTING EFFECTS ON LIVABILITY OF PEDESTRIAN PATHS IN URBAN HERITAGE CONTEXT

Lighting is an important ecological factor that influences individuals’ outdoor activities as well as the development of livable communities in cities. Artificial outdoor lighting is vital in improving the quality of urban open places throughout the nighttime and has a significant impact on the pedestrians' night-time perception and mental safety. This study aims to uncover whether outdoor lighting has indeed an effect on the livability of the pedestrian paths of a community and if so, what is the optimal design that fits an urban heritage setting. The research employs a mixed methods approach, where both qualitative and quantitative methods are used. The first part of the study, being qualitative, used a survey conducted in the historic region of the city of Batroun in Lebanon to collect data concerning what the paths’ users regard as important when it comes to artificial outdoor light design with concerns to perceived urban design qualities related to neighborhood livability. The second part of the study is based on simulations of proposals of outdoor artificial light using Dialux in order to find the design the most appropriate to the context of Batroun.

Policy relevant health related liveability indicator datasets for addresses in Australia’s 21 largest cities

Measuring and monitoring the spatial distribution of liveability is crucial to ensure that implemented urban and transport planning decisions support health and wellbeing. Spatial liveability indicators can be used to ensure these decisions are effective, equitable and tracked across time. The 2018 Australian National Liveability Study datasets comprise a suite of policy-relevant health-related spatial indicators of local neighbourhood liveability and amenity access estimated for residential address points and administrative areas across Australia’s 21 most populous cities. The indicators and measures encompass access to community and health services, social infrastructure, employment, food, housing, public open space, transportation, walkability and overall liveability. This national ’baseline’ liveability indicators dataset for residential address points and areas can be further linked with surveys containing geocoded participant locations, as well as Census data for areas from the Australian Statistical Geography Standard. The datasets will be of interest to planners, policy makers and researchers interested in modelling and mapping the spatial distribution of urban environmental exposures and their relationship with health and other outcomes.

Predicting the liveability of Dutch cities with aerial images and semantic intermediate concepts

In order to provide urban residents with suitable living conditions, it is essential to keep track of the liveability of neighbourhoods. This is traditionally done through surveys and by predictive modelling. However, surveying on a large scale is expensive and hard to repeat. Recent research has shown that deep learning models trained on remote sensing images may be used to predict liveability. In this paper we study how well a model can predict liveability from aerial images by first predicting a set of intermediate domain scores. Our results suggest that our semantic bottleneck model performs equally well to a model that is trained only to predict liveability. Secondly, our model extrapolates well to unseen regions (R2 between 0.45 and 0.75, Kendall’s τ between 0.39 and 0.57), even to regions with an urban developmental context that is different from areas seen during training. Our results also suggest that domains which are directly visible within the aerial image patches (physical environment, buildings) are easier to generalize than domains which can only be predicted through proxies (population, safety, amenities). We also test our model’s perception of different neighbourhood typologies, from which we conclude that our model is able to predict the liveability of neighbourhood typologies though with a varying accuracy. Overall, our results suggest that remote sensing can be used to extrapolate liveability surveys and their related domains to new and unseen regions within the same cultural and policy context.

Transport Poverty: A Comparative Study between South Africa and Nigeria

Background: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and neighbourhood liveability is dependent on an improved transportation sector. Urban transport is conceptualized as either mobility or accessibility; thus, it remains an integral part in enhancing urban livelihood and serves as a hub connecting all sectors of a city's economy. Lack of access to opportunities and/or services, inadequate transport services, and physical or financial inaccessibility to transport options are prevailing in African cities and have been used to conceptualize transport poverty. Objectives: This study seeks the relationship between some dimensions of transport poverty and life satisfaction. The argument put forward in this study is that transport poverty predicts life satisfaction that is a vital aspect of subjective wellbeing. Methods: The study utilise an exploratory, comparative design that will enable the comparison of dimensions of Transport Poverty in Ibadan, Nigeria, and Durban, South Africa. For this study, communities in both Ibadan and Durban were randomly selected; while data were collected through an online survey method. The hypothesis that spatial exclusion mediates the relationship between service availability and satisfaction with life, transport disadvantaged and satisfaction with life, and transport reliability and satisfaction with life were tested through mediation analysis. Results: For the first hypothesis, partial mediation existed; for the second hypothesis, no mediation existed; for the third hypothesis, total mediation existed. Lastly, spatial exclusion varied between the two countries. Conclusion: The study concludes that a transport network that is not reliable leads to spatial exclusion, which in turns affects satisfaction with life. Likewise, all dimensions of transport poverty are similar except for spatial exclusion which differs between the countries, with South Africans experiencing more cases of spatial exclusion as compared to Nigerians.

Intended and Unintended Consequences of Two Paradigms of Urban Planning, and Their Social Justice and Human Health Impacts, in Portland, Oregon

This article describes two contesting paradigms of urban planning employed successively in Portland, Oregon; (1) urban planning typical of the US in the first half of the 20th Century that was focused on traffic and infrastructure, and (2) progressive urban planning focused on neighborhood livability and connections. It gives a history of their implementation in Portland, focusing on issues of racial and socioeconomic justice in the Albina neighborhood. Recent knowledge about air pollution’s impacts on human health, and infant and childhood development, are integrated into the discussion of urban planning. It describes racially and socioeconomically disproportionate access to urban green spaces, with the corresponding health implications. It also describes attempts to mitigate such health implications, sometimes resulting in “green gentrification” and displacement. The article asks if the results of the two paradigms of urban planning were objectively different from one another in terms of impacts on minority and disadvantaged communities. Future urban planning, and the need for human health concerns becoming central, are discussed.

Trajectories of neighborhood environmental factors and their associations with asthma symptom trajectories among children in Australia: evidence from a national birth cohort study

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the prospective associations of neighborhood environmental exposure trajectories with asthma symptom trajectories during childhood developmental stages.MethodsWe considered asthma symptom, neighborhood environmental factors, and socio-demographic data from the “Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC)”. Group-based trajectory modeling was applied to identify the trajectories of asthma symptom, neighborhood traffic conditions, and neighborhood livability scales (considered for safety and facilities). We used multivariable logistic regression models to assess associations between various neighborhood environmental factors and asthma symptom trajectories.ResultsWe included 4,174 children from the LSAC cohort in our study. Three distinct trajectories for asthma symptom were the outcome variables of this study. Among the neighborhood environmental factors, we identified two distinct trajectories for the prevalence of heavy traffic on street, and two trajectories of neighborhood liveability scale. Compared to the ‘Low/no’ asthma symptoms trajectory group, children exposed to a ‘persistently high’ prevalence of heavy traffic on street was also significantly associated with both ‘transient high’ [relative risk ratio (RRR):1.40, 95% CI:1.25,1.58) and ‘persistent high’ (RRR: 1.33, 95% CI:1.17,1.50)] asthma symptom trajectory groups. Trajectory of moderate and static neighborhood liveability score was at increased risk of being classified as ‘transient high’ (RRR:1.16, 95% CI:1.07,1.25) and ‘persistent high’ (RRR:1.38, 95% CI:1.27,1.50) trajectories of asthma symptom.ConclusionExposure to heavy traffic and poor neighborhood liveability increased the risk of having an unfavourable asthma symptom trajectory in childhood. Reducing neighborhood traffic load and improving neighborhood safety and amenities may facilitate a favorable asthma symptom trajectory among these children.

Will neighbourhood liveability be promoted by new housing related planning policy in Adelaide, South Australia?

Will neighbourhood liveability be promoted by new housing related planning policy in Adelaide, South Australia?

Do Citizens Understand the Benefits of Transit-Oriented Development? Exploring and Modeling Community Perceptions of a Metro Line under Construction in Thessaloniki, Greece

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is an integrated urban and transport planning approach that aims to mitigate urban sprawl and car use, enhance neighborhood livability, increase public transport use, and promote sustainable mobility. Although TOD is widely accepted by academics, planners, and policymakers, the question of how citizens acknowledge its expected benefits remains open. This paper explores citizen satisfaction and perceptions of their neighborhood and investigates their awareness of TOD’s potential for sustainable revitalization and regeneration of metro areas in Thessaloniki, a compact Mediterranean city that is introducing a new urban rail system. Our research is based on a questionnaire survey, conducted within the catchment areas of two future metro stations, which present different spatial and socio-economic characteristics. For the data analysis, we use inferential statistics analysis and ordinal logistics regression to investigate the variations in citizens’ perceptions. Findings reveal that even if there is a statistical difference between people’s perceptions regarding the main spatial features of their neighborhoods, respondents in both areas express similar major concerns about public space, walkability issues, transit quality, and the positive effects that the metro could offer regarding urban revitalization and development. Furthermore, age, income, and personal travel behaviors appear to be significantly related to the level of satisfaction with public transport and the willingness to increase transit use because of the metro. We argue that citizens’ pre-construction surveys can support local policy makers in tailing and optimizing a TOD project implementation based on the community’s needs and priorities. Such surveys operate as knowledge production platforms to strengthen policy efficiency and reinforce the feelings of trust between citizens and local policy makers.

City love and place quality assessment of liveable and loveable neighbourhoods in Rotterdam

After the worldwide interest in global sustainability and climate change challenges, an increasing concern is voiced on local quality of life and neighbourhood liveability. In recent urban studies, human well-being, satisfaction and happiness studies are gaining much popularity in a local context (the ‘microcosmic city’). The present study seeks to identify the determinants of the residents’ appreciation for their daily environment, called here ‘city love’. The latter concept captures both tangible or material aspects of city life (‘body’) and immaterial and emotional dimensions of local quality of life (‘soul’). The present paper seeks to develop and test a new quantitative ‘city love’ concept, inspired by the soul and body conceptualisation of urban attractiveness for residents and visitors – based on a novel ‘feelgood’ index (FGI) and a ‘human habitat’ index (HHI) –, with a view to map out the citizens’ contentment or appreciation (called neighbourhood love index – NLI) at a district or neighbourhood scale in the city of Rotterdam. Our study utilises data from a quantitative survey among thousands of residents located in 63 neighbourhoods in this city. In addition, the Rotterdam dataset contains not only survey data, but also register data on these neighbourhoods, e.g., real-estate values, crime statistics, and socio-demographics, while geographical information from OpenStreetMap (OSM) is added as a complement. In addition to a multivariate analysis of the rich data set, the paper employs also a quantile regression analysis extended with fixed effects. The results show that the coefficients of the feelgood index (FGI) and the human habitat index (HHI) decrease slightly as we move up the distribution of the neighbourhood love index (NLI). This means that physical and functional aspects of neighbourhoods, e.g., access to such amenities as public transportation, sport facilities, and also streets with diverse attractions or bikeable and walkable road networks, become more important for the lower end of the distribution of the neighbourhood love index (NLI). Our neighbourhood-specific analyses show that the Rotterdam districts and neighbourhoods differ substantially in many physical and social-emotional respects, which calls for place-based policies and sub-local well-being initiatives.

City love and neighbourhood resilience in the urban fabric: A microcosmic urbanometric analysis of Rotterdam

Ups and downs in city life are dependent on the citizens' appreciation for their urban ‘home’, in particular the neighbourhood liveability. Taking modern research on urban wellbeing and happiness as a point of departure, this study presents and tests a new methodology for assessing the residents' affection for their local neighbourhood. This approach is inspired by the ‘city love’ concept and seeks to examine and decompose city love through an analytical distinction into the ‘body and soul’ of the city. Using a rich multi-period and geographically detailed database on neighbourhoods in the city of Rotterdam, including distinct social capital indicators for analysing social resilience in urban areas, a microcosmic decomposition of objective and subjective socio-economic information is carried out. On the basis of geo-science visualisation methods and advanced spatial-econometric techniques for handling neighbourhood autocorrelation effects (‘urbanometrics’), a series of explanatory regression analyses is executed in order to identify and explain the determinants of city love at neighbourhood level in Rotterdam. We find that bonding and bridging social capital are prominent in shaping neighbourhood love and social resilience.

Evaluating the potential of online review data for augmenting traditional transportation planning performance management

Synchrony of transportation planning with revealed public preferences and expectations has traditionally been difficult to achieve. In other domains, such as manufacturing and design, frameworks have been developed using data-driven analytic processes to extract customer preferences and expectations to inform product development. This study builds from approaches to understanding customer satisfaction in other domains to investigate the potential of social media review mining for bridging the gap between understanding of neighborhood livability and conventional transportation planning decision-making practices. The novelty of the approach is in interpreting an automated user-defined translation of qualitative measures of livability by evaluating users' satisfaction of the neighborhoods through social media and enhancing the traditional approaches to defining livability planning measures (through a sentiment analysis and visualization package). The provided data-driven neighborhood satisfaction package draws the marketing structure of transportation network elements (analogous to the ‘products’ in other domains) with residential nodes as the center of the structure. In this study, the FastText algorithm is tested to employ a social review analysis, common neighborhood aspects are annotated, and neighborhood satisfaction is visualized and compared to the associated demographic side information. Through extracting the important aspects of the public concerns, advanced visualization helps transportation planners better understand the implications for community livability and provides insight into an approach for conducting more equitable public outreach. This approach has the potential to capitalize on residents' interests in social media outlets and to increase public engagement in the planning process by encouraging users to participate in online neighborhood satisfaction reporting. This study demonstrates a proof of concept for a social review analysis and specifies the methodology for agencies to augment planning performance management. (word count: 273).

How accessibility and transportation options affect neighborhood livability: evidence from the 2017 oregon livability survey

ABSTRACT Promoting accessibility and expanding transportation options are at the center of many livability programs. Using the 2017 Oregon Livability Survey administered in three regions in Oregon, this paper studies the livability impacts of accessibility and transportation options in the broader context of residential preferences and choices. Findings show that residents valued accessibility and transportation options in both livability conceptualization and their residential choice process within a similar a hierarchy of preferences. Expanding accessibility and transportation options can enhance livability, but its effectiveness is limited if other situational factors critical to residents’ residential choice are not adequately addressed.

Livable neighborhoods for sustainable cities: Insights from Barcelona

The paper proposes a reflection on the superblock model - or supermanzana, in its well-known Spanish application - in the context of the debate on the 15-minute city and on the functional reorganization of mobility and public space to improve the quality of life, health and accessibility in urban areas.The impacts of car traffic on the livability of cities and neighborhoods, in terms of safety, air pollution, noise, but also in terms of consumption and quality of public space, are widely acknowledged. These issues are not new to the debate: since the first decades of the 20th century, with the advent and rapid diffusion of the automobile, concerns on the impacts of vehicular traffic and issues of urban livability and traffic separation have been raised by urban and transport planners. As a consequence, various models of neighborhood planning emerged, proposing solutions to limit these impacts.The supermanzana model takes up the principles of neighborhood planning by identifying a main road network and setting up a system of superblocks within the meshes of this network, in order to improve accessibility, equity, health and livability; it aims on the one hand to transform public spaces at the neighborhood level and on the other hand to reorganize the existing urban structure. The application of the supermanzana model in Barcelona offers an interesting contribution to the debate on the 15-minute city, showing how the principle of traffic separation can be applied to existing, dense urban contexts, reclaiming public space to more livable neighborhoods and sustainable cities. The analysis of the case study of Barcelona can contribute to research and policy, learning from this experience and especially from the critical issues that emerged.

Cross-sectional evidence of the cardiometabolic health benefits of urban liveability in Australia

Recognition is increasing globally that urban planning interventions to improve neighbourhood liveability enable healthy sustainable lifestyles and assist in the prevention and management of chronic disease. We present the spatial urban liveability index (ULI) as a tool to inform localised interventions that would create healthier, more sustainable cities and examine its associations with cardiometabolic and wellbeing-related health outcomes. The ULI and associated indicators were calculated for Melbourne address points and spatially linked with health outcomes for participants from the 2014 Victorian Population Health Survey. Residing in higher liveability areas was found to be positively associated with a more physically active lifestyle and negatively associated with BMI—more so than for a comparable walkability index. Although walkable neighbourhoods underpin a liveable city, areas with diverse ‘community, culture and leisure’ destinations displayed strongest beneficial associations with cardiometabolic health outcomes, suggesting that access to diverse local destinations may encourage more active sustainable living.