The Livable-City: How to measure a Catchphrase from a Transport Perspective: A Conceptual Attempt for Berlin

Kurzfassung

Every year, the news of the election of the world's most livable city on the basis of popular scientific city rankings attracts great attention in the media. Likewise, urban development concepts and urban planning often include the goal of making a city more livable. Nevertheless, the term livable is often used without a clear definition. This means that livability is used with a variety of attributes that are assigned to the term without any basis. Therefore, this paper analyzes the use of the term livability in popular science, urban planning, and science. The goal is to develop a suitable definition and the underlying concept of the term. Due to the function and effects of transportation on life in a city, the term gains special importance in the corresponding concept. Based on the data availability for Berlin, the present work therefore presents both a theoretical basis and a conceptual approach for a corresponding index to evaluate livability from a transport perspective. This contributes to the operationalization of a popular but often undefined catchphrase. The results are also based on an extensive literature analysis. In a further analysis, transport-related studies and concepts of European cities have been analyzed to identify attributes, indicators and evaluation systems that describe livability from a transport perspective. This paper thus fills knowledge gaps about the human-environment relationship described by the concept of livability and provides a basis for policy makers to create livable urban spaces in the course of transforming the transportation system.