THE MOST LIVEABLE CITY?

The most liveable city?

We locals are smugly satisfied every time Melbourne is named the world's most liveable city, but what does that really mean?  What work is going on behind the scenes to make Melbourne 'liveable'?  And how will we retain our liveability crown in the face of growing population pressure and resource challenges? Life-long Melburnian Zoe Nikakis explores the issues.

The idea of 'liveability' seems to have been around for a while. Every time an index is released pronouncing Melbourne one of the most liveable cities in the world, its people pat themselves on the back while simultaneously bemoaning the inadequate transport system, the rising cost of living and the expense of housing.

It's a mystery. Is Melbourne really such a liveable city? How does it compare internationally? What will we need to do in the future to maintain our 'most 'liveable' credentials? What is liveability, anyway?

As part of the University's third Festival of Ideas, thought leaders from around the world joined local experts to look at these questions.

Advertisement The Economist Intelligence Unit's liveability rating quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual's lifestyle in 140 cities worldwide. It assigns each city a score for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.

Festival of Ideas guest Dr David Burney, the Commissioner of New York's Department of Design and Construction, says liveability is about both hard and soft infrastructure: power, water, waste management, transport and adequate shelter, but also soft infrastructure elements such as education, housing, the crime rate and the like.

"Soft infrastructure defines the modern liveable city," he says.

Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning Associate Professor Carolyn Whitzman says her favourite definition of liveability comes from the American Association of Retired Persons: that a liveable place has affordable and appropriate housing, with easy access to jobs, mobility options and adequate services.

Professor Rob Adams, Director of City Design for the City of Melbourne, says liveability is about choice and access.

"A city feels liveable if its citizens have choices – the choice to walk instead of drive for example. Walkability is probably one of the basic indicators of a liveable city."

By all these measures, surely Melbourne is indeed liveable – it is certainly walkable, with functioning hard infrastructure.

There are however, still problems to be addressed.

Associate Professor Whitzman says there is a great concept that comes from Portland (Oregon) in the USA of the 20-minute neighbourhood, where "appropriate services and jobs can be reached by walking, cycling, or taking public transport for a maximum of 20 minutes."

"By that criterion there is concern Melbourne is becoming two cities: the inner city and suburbs, where jobs and services are good but there isn't any cheap housing, and out of the city, where there is slightly more affordable housing but it's not near jobs and services.

And in Melbourne they're kind of the same thing, Associate Professor Whitzman says, because the biggest job growth in Australia is in education, health and the social services sector.

"If you create local primary schools, bulk billing health centres, and community centres, you're creating much-needed services as well as jobs."

Associate Professor Whitzman says projected population growth means we also need to look at how to use our roads more efficiently.

"We're reaching the point where a car for each family is no longer a viable alternative, because everyone driving around is going to lead to more congestion."

It's important that as we think about liveability in the city in future we remember how far the city has come.

Professor Adams says Melbourne's current high rankings across several liveability indexes is the result of sustained hard work and thought in the past couple of decades about what the city centre should be like.

"We've transformed the city from being monofunctional – the Central Business District – to multifunctional, making it a central activities district," he says.

"Melbourne has been through a process of change. One of the ways we did that was to think about the infrastructure we've got and use it differently.

"We're bringing people to live in the city, transforming and re-using buildings to work with what we've got but converting existing buildings into apartments.

"A lot changed in a very short period in terms of the way the city was perceived, became more walkable, had a greater population, became more vibrant."

We shouldn't be congratulating ourselves just yet though. Dr Burney says the world is in the midst of one of the most serious public health crises in our history that involves our built environment.

"The relationship between public health and city design has a very long history," he says.

"In the early 20th century, the important problems were infectious diseases like Tuberculosis and Yellow Fever, which were endemic to cities and were responsible for most of the fatalities. It wasn't immunisation that fixed it: it was changes to the built environment, the creation of parks and potable water sources, the proper handling of waste, tenement laws that decreased the population density, and zoning changes which brought in light and air.

"In our time, the greatest public health crisis is obesity and its related health problems, like stroke and heart disease. Changes to the built environment could again be the answer to this problem. As architects and planners, we've really been part of the problem.

"People are taking in too much energy through food, and have a sedentary lifestyle, which is largely the result of the way we arrange our environment.

"It's a world epidemic. In the US there are even drive-in pharmacies.

"We need to meet this challenge to promote more physical activity in the built environment by thinking about the ways changes and engaging in Active Design of the built environment to promote health, and making cities more walkable, by providing more parks and playgrounds, also fixes air quality and fuel consumption.

"Improving health is actually improving liveability as well."< /p>

There are other problems to be dealt with locally. Australia's population will double in the next 40 to 50 years, and, Professor Adams says, we can't go on as we have been in terms of infrastructure.

"Globally and in Melbourne, we cannot continue to use the infrastructure, and the processes for procuring that infrastructure, that we have in the past. We don't have the time," he says.

"Australian capital cities will retain their high liveability ranking only through the process of transformation, by moving away from the traditional large new build infrastructure projects towards greater utilisation of our existing infrastructure.

"We have to build up, not out.

"We need to set aside our mindsets around infrastructure and ask ourselves, where do we want to build, and where do we not want to build? Where do we want to put infrastructure so it can link to other infrastructure?

"We can now simulate what our environments are going to look like in the future. Design a good street and you'll get a good city."

Dr Burney says people are moving to dense urban areas because they're increasingly recognising the benefits, and can get all the services they need in a more dense and immediate environment.

In Melbourne, there is also a pervasive cultural idea that everyone wants their own house with a patch of grass or garden, as opposed to an apartment: an idea that Professor Whitzman says is no longer true.

"There's this stereotype that all Melburnians think they need a quarter-acre block, but I don't necessarily think Melburnians think that any more," she says.

"The apartments and townhouses in the inner suburbs are selling extremely well, people are voting with their feet and there's huge, unmet demand for family-friendly multi-household housing such as apartments with courtyards."

Despite this demand though, Professor Whitzman says it's important families who live in apartments and townhouses have access to green spaces, be it through green roofs, public gardens, or courtyards, such as you find in other cities around the world.

"There's no evidence that Melburnians are different from the rest of the world, and no reason we can't work it out."

Professor Whitzman says it's more an issue of practical barriers, public transport, services and infrastructure.

"The planning system hasn't caught up to reality yet, including Plan Melbourne," she says.

"Plan Melbourne talks about people moving to active transport, like walking, cycling, public transport, but the vision expressed isn't really different from the last plan for Melbourne.

"It's the implementation of this new plan and the infrastructure priorities which are in direct opposition to the vision. There's a disconnect between the vision of well-connected neighborhoods, stopping sprawl and the implementation strategies.

"In rich and poor countries around the entire world, there are almost no examples of the idea that a new road will solve any congestion problems."