• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close

Urban liveability is a global priority for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Measurement of policy-relevant spatial indicators of the built and natural environment supports city planning at all levels of government. Analysis of their spatial distribution within cities, and impacts on individuals and communities, is crucial to ensure planning decisions are effective and equitable. This paper outlines challenges and lessons from a 5-year collaborative research program, scaling up a software workflow for calculating a composite indicator of urban liveability for residential address points across Melbourne, to Australia’s 21 largest cities, and further extension to 25 global cities in diverse contexts.

Urban liveability is a global priority for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Measurement of policy-relevant spatial indicators of the built and natural environment supports city planning at all levels of government. Analysis of their spatial distribution within cities, and impacts on individuals and communities, is crucial to ensure planning decisions are effective and equitable. This paper outlines challenges and lessons from a 5-year collaborative research program, scaling up a software workflow for calculating a composite indicator of urban liveability for residential address points across Melbourne, to Australia’s 21 largest cities, and further extension to 25 global cities in diverse contexts.

Output data prepared for analysis of 25 diverse global cities by the Global Healthy and Sustainable City-Indicator Collaboration study, published in The Lancet Global Health Series on urban design, transport, and health. 2022. https://www.thelancet.com/series/urban-design-2022 Boeing, G. et al. (2022) ‘Using open data and open-source software to develop spatial indicators of urban design and transport features for achieving healthy and sustainable cities’, The Lancet Global Health, 10(6), pp. e907–e918. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00072-9. Data outputs were generated through use of the global-indicators software tool, designed for this study and available from: https://github.com/global-healthy-liveable-cities/global-indicators Further detail on the methods used is provided in the following publication: Liu, S., Higgs, C., Arundel, J., Boeing, G., Cerdera, N., Moctezuma, D., Cerin, E., Adlakha, D., Lowe, M. and Giles-Corti, B. (2021), A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data. Geogr Anal. https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12290 The study made use of OpenStreetMap, Global Human Settlements and custom data, and is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/

Output data prepared for analysis of 25 diverse global cities by the Global Healthy and Sustainable City-Indicator Collaboration study, published in The Lancet Global Health Series on urban design, transport, and health. 2022. https://www.thelancet.com/series/urban-design-2022 Boeing, G. et al. (2022) ‘Using open data and open-source software to develop spatial indicators of urban design and transport features for achieving healthy and sustainable cities’, The Lancet Global Health, 10(6), pp. e907–e918. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00072-9. Data outputs were generated through use of the global-indicators software tool, designed for this study and available from: https://github.com/global-healthy-liveable-cities/global-indicators Further detail on the methods used is provided in the following publication: Liu, S., Higgs, C., Arundel, J., Boeing, G., Cerdera, N., Moctezuma, D., Cerin, E., Adlakha, D., Lowe, M. and Giles-Corti, B. (2021), A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data. Geogr Anal. https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12290 The study made use of OpenStreetMap, Global Human Settlements and custom data, and is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/

Measuring and monitoring progress towards achieving healthy, equitable and sustainable cities is a priority for planners, policymakers and researchers in diverse contexts globally. Yet data collection, analysis, visualisation and reporting on policy and spatial indicators involve specialised knowledge, skills, and collaboration across disciplines. Integrated open-source tools for calculating and communicating urban indicators for diverse urban contexts are needed, which provide the multiple streams of evidence required to influence policy agendas and enable local changes towards healthier and more sustainable cities. This paper reports on the development of open-source software for planning, analysis and generation of data, maps and reports on policy and spatial indicators of urban design and transport features for healthy and sustainable cities. We engaged a collaborative network of researchers and practitioners from diverse geographic contexts through an online survey and workshops, to understand and progressively meet their requirements for policy and spatial indicators. We outline our framework for action research-informed open-source software development and discuss benefits and challenges of this approach. The resulting Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators software is designed to meet the needs of researchers, planners, policy makers and community advocates in diverse settings for planning, calculating and disseminating policy and spatial urban indicators.