Urban livability indicators for secondary cities in ASEAN region

Abstract

Urban livability indicators have tremendous influence on policies and growth trajectories of cities or metropolises to the benefit of their communities. Livability is a threshold for measuring the social dimension of people wrought by exogenous factors like infrastructure, environment, social cohesion, transportation, health and education, among others. This research is aimed to generate prototype urban livability indicators for secondary cities in Southeast Asia, benchmarked on the livability indicators of Iskandar Malaysia, Davao City in the Philippines and Makassar in Indonesia. A three-round iterative Delphi survey (scoping, convergence, and consensus) was conducted to pre-qualified 60 experts with equal representations from the three metropolises. The significant phase was the scoping where experts have to supplement the given framework for their aspired urban livability sub-indicators under specific domain indicators. In the convergence phase, reconsideration of sub-indicators and preliminary ranking of domain indicators using the 5-point Likert Scale’s degree of agreement and Kendall’s W coefficient of concordance were performed. In the consensus phase, both domain indicators and sub-indicators were ranked separately and assigned corresponding weightings. With the total of 108 framework-based and supplementary sub-indicators categorized under the 11 domain indicators, the study conclusively yielded 75 common, comparative, interconnected, and consistent urban livability indicators ranked according to the aspiration of stakeholders in three ASEAN secondary cities. This research, through the employ of robust methodology, has generated comprehensive composite urban livability indicators for secondary metropolitan settlements in Southeast Asia; thus, the resulting final indicators can be potentially engaged to determine a comparative urban livability index of cities in the ASEAN region.