Sustainable urban liveability: A practical proposal based on a composite indicator

Abstract

This article presents a proposal for a composite index to assess the degree of sustainable urban liveability. It makes two key contributions to this field of study. The first is a proposal for the concept of sustainable urban liveability that includes the need to meet a minimum number of environmental conditions in terms of resource consumption and the deterioration of the environment. The second contribution is the use of a non-compensatory aggregation technique in order to construct the composite index. This kind of aggregation technique does not allow trade-offs between partial indicators. In the particular context of sustainable urban liveability, it prevents poor performance by the natural environment indicators from being compensated by positive results in the remaining indicators. The proposed composite index for sustainable urban liveability is applied to the case of 58 Spanish cities. The results reveal significant differences in the degree of sustainable urban liveability for this group of cities, but more importantly, they highlight the potential of this proposal for urban management.