Livability: Is it more than coffee?
2010 July 2
I have read too many blogs talking about livability in confusing ways, there is no clear sense of what this term means, and it will quickly become trite and embarrassing. Does anyone have an honest and useful way to talk about livability?
3 Responses
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I find merely posting the graphic without any context, and no discussion of the methodology is a bit disingenuous. Of course livability ratings are going to look trite if we just continuously throw top 10/20/50/etc lists out on the internet with no explanation of what they mean.
While I think there are plenty of cases where this happens, the Economist is not one of them. Had you linked to the entire report, readers could have investigated the methodology themselves and seen that to the Economist, the term “liveability” is not trite or meaningless.
I think that the Economist Intelligence Unit does a pretty bang-up job identifying a basket of variables which factor into a logical conception of livability. Granted a number of these are qualitative variables and therefore susceptible to subjective judgment, while others are normative variables that require an a priori judgment, for instance, that more widespread availability of sports is a positive thing. Still, these “problems” are inevitable when trying to define and measure something that is inherently subjective.
Implicitly deriding serious studies, which is the effect of your two-sentence post, certainly doesn’t help us develop an “honest and useful way” to define and debate livability.
Erik, you can accuse me of unreasonable brevity, but I have no intention of deriding serious studies. Quite the contrary. I guess it’s a comment on the state of blogging, or my own naive style.
Thanks for posting the link to the Economist site. As you saw there, the authors defined livability in neutral, even useful terms. But that reminded me that, as you have said, rating systems are not a good way to jump start a serious conversation because, as interesting as their criteria are, they embody the values of the authors. In this case, they have linked livability to wage premiums. In Cascadia, it seems the opposite may be true. Many of uslink livabiliity to a willingness to accept a lower wage rather than a higher one.
What are your key criteria? Wht criteria do you think policy makers should include in their rating systems when they evaluate how to spend public dollars or make public policy?
The common references to walkability seem to me to be small minded. Yet, they occupy a prominent place in our Federal government (DOT) website and in debates on planning in Cascadia. Where are references to civility, or equity? Or economy (defined as using scarce publiic dollars wisely, for the benefit of future generations)?
The Economist’s methodology, similar to their big mac index, is a solid snapshot of what factors are thought to influence location choice at a particular point in time. While useful for discussion, I agree there is a danger in extending it blindly.
Like many other ‘top ten’ lists (colleges comes to mind), the provincial-esque competition for higher ratings seem to carry political and popular influence without much regard for what makes up the score. And the danger is that we keep reinforcing it. In reality, cities like Vienna and Vancouver rely on attracting folks from places like Karachi and Kathmandu to stay on top. To capture all the nuance of these complex decisions in a single number seems to me like a tall order.