Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
rates seen from the 1970s. Rising concerns about the need to improve health and
care availability and to continue the progress made in removing the historical ur-
ban disadvantage in mortality rates has led to new types of Healthy City policies,
which can be seen as another form of the social sustainability of urban populations.
Yet the very fact of making places more sustainable, whether in environmental,
economic or social terms, also makes places more liveable in the long term. For
example, reducing crime rates and removing persistent health problems in cities
makes them more attractive to entrepreneurs who wish to develop new economic
activities. Hence the broad concepts of liveability and sustainability should be seen
as two sides of a more general approach to improving the quality and maintenance
of life in urban places that are expressed in the various foci of each chapter.
However, unlike the progress in developing physical sustainability indices, as
seen in the EIU's Green Index described in Chapter 5, attempts to develop live-
ability scales and city rankings on these scales have been less successful. Perhaps
the best known at a global scale are the rating schemes developed by the Economist
Intelligence Unit (EUI) and Mercer International (MI). Since the indicators used
vary, with 30 in the former case and 39 in the other, it is not surprising that their final
ranking of cities varies, with only three of the same centres present in the top ten
cities of each list. Some of the individual indicators used are similar in concept but
may be interpreted in a contrary fashion, while 20% are quite different. In addition
the indicators used are scaled in different ways, on a five point scale in the case of
the EUI and a ten point one for Mercer, with varying weights also applied to catego-
ries of the indicators in the former case. However since the scaling is based on sub-
jective evaluations by a very limited number of people, mainly local correspondents
and head office personnel, there is clearly room for divergence. But a more general
problem for their general utility is the fact that these indexes are primarily used by
companies and governments to provide salary compensations for employees trans-
ferred or working in various countries. Hence the indicators reflect the needs of
middle-upper income people with good qualifications, not the concerns of the vast
majority of people in the various cities. So judged on the basis of these liveability
and quality of life scales for high earning expats, the ranking scales of the cities may
be useful, but are certainly far from adequate for the general concept of liveability
and quality of life for the whole resident population in the cities surveyed.
Given the complexity of many of these themes and their policy derivatives it is
not surprising that advocates of these various ideas have focused on developing one
of these approaches, ignoring the importance of other themes. Indeed, cities are of-
ten confronted by a problem that seems to take precedence over others, which leads
to the policies designed to solve the problem, whether adopting Resilience City
mitigations, creating Knowledge City opportunities to improve economic prosper-
ity, or using Safe City policies to reduce crime. However, a truly comprehensive ap-
proach to create more liveable and sustainable cities usually requires the application
of more than one of these themes. To focus only on one of a few themes runs the risk
of creating another phase of what might be called '
silo development
'. This means
that planning effort is too often concentrated on a single theme while forgetting
the need for policies that resolve other problems, or as in too many urban renewal
