Author Description

The Place, Health and Liveability program aims to explore the relationships between built and sociocultural environments and health. To help inform their work, this report reviews the academic and policy literature on liveability indicators. It identifies and evaluates measures of liveability in the areas of crime and safety, housing, education, employment and income, health and social services, transport, public open space, social cohesion and local democracy, leisure and culture, food, and natural environment. This research will also inform the current framework of Community Indicators Victoria and MUtopia, a modelling and visualisation platform for developing sustainable precincts. The report finds that though diverse range of indicators and indices are now being used to measure liveability and to compare cities and regions, inadequate attention has been paid to the validity of liveability measures or their usefulness for research, policy, or practice. In particular, intra-city or neighbourhood-scale indicators should be informed by the known causal pathways between policy, built environment characteristics, individual behaviours, and health and wellbeing outcomes.