So what is "livability", really?

Just got back from a great lecture, "The Life and Death of Cities: Accounting for Environmental and Social Sustainability". It tied in very well with the recent release of the Mercer Quality of Living Report, in which Vancouver placed 4th in the world. The other popular report is by the Economist; World's Most Livable Cities, in which Vancouver was most recently 1st.

The Mercer report ranks based on:

• Tangible values for qualitative perceptions to establish an objective assessment of the quality of living for transfers to more than 420 cities worldwide.
• Carefully selected factors representing the criteria considered most relevant to international executives.

That's right, "criteria considered most relevant to international executives". Now I'm not sure how that puts Vancouver way up there, but it does make sense why Calgary is up so high, along with other major business and financial centres of the world. It also doesn't explain why Seattle is so far down; to me it's almost as great as Vancouver. If it had a "Whistler" less than two hours away like Vancouver, it would be an equal! Anyways, go check out the report for yourself: http://www.mercer.com/qualityofliving

The Economist World's Most Livable Cities bases its report on:

"...the challenges that might be presented to an individual's lifestyle in 140 cities worldwide. Each city is assigned a score for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure."

Now this sounds much more like a "livability" report, versus the very economically based Mercer Report.

Both reports are well summarized on Wikipedia.

But I'm still not totally clear on what livability really is. I find Vancouver incredibly livable; I wouldn't live here if I didn't. But we all like different things, so a lot of that is subjective and personal. The problem with the indexes above is that they are very numbers based and generally the numbers are too focused and not broadly defined. For example, the unemployment rate tells us how many people are working or not. But what does it tell us about those who are working? How good are their jobs? And how much are they actually working?

What about issues like urban sprawl? I don't think there is a single city in the world that can claim zero sprawl, but where in a city we live makes a huge difference on our quality of life. Generally, people move to the burbs because real estate is cheaper. But on the other hand their transportation costs are far higher, they spend huge amounts of their lives commuting, and there are clear social and community issues with everyone living in their own house separated from everyone else - never mind the cost in utilities to live that way. In which case how does Vancouver end up so highly ranked, if they are indeed ranking the region as a whole. While Vancouver proper (population 578,000) covers only 115 square km, Metro Vancouver covers a massive 2878 square km, with a population of just over 2 million; how is that livable and sustainable? The scary thing is that Vancouver is good by comparison...

Calgary: pop. 1.1 million (only slightly higher for the Metro region)
City area: 726 square km
Calgary Metro: a whopping 5107 square km!!

So on a city level that's 6 times the area for less than 2 times the population.
On a metro level that's nearly double the area for only half the population!

Toronto: pop. 2.5 million, metro 5.6 million
City area: 630 square km
Metro: 7125 square km

That's a bit smaller than Calgary but more than double the population.
On a metro level that's 5 times as many people in less than 1.5 times the area.
Compared to Vancouver, at a city level, Vancouver is about 25% more densely populated. At the metro level, Toronto is actually about 12% more dense.

Now it may seem like I'm bashing Calgary (and OK, maybe I am a little), but the scary thing is that so many cities, particularly in North America, have grown like Calgary. It's an unsustainable and poorly livable design. As more and more people move to our cities, we need to start getting this right. Over 50% of the world now lives in a city; the level is 80% in developed nations. Clearly, in the developing world there are a lot more people that will be moving to cities, because they aspire to the culture and lifestyle of the developed world. Now is the time to teach them the way, and if that means losing our status as most livable city by bringing them to greatness, it's totally worth it and the whole world will be better for it.