End Date: 2020

Urbanisation acceleration is fastest in cities within low-to-middle income countries, and globally, Asia is urbanising most rapidly. Well-designed, liveable cities are essential for providing infrastructure that supports economic activity, governance, commerce and trade, while providing access to health and social services, education, and civic opportunities.

However, rapidly urbanising cities face a number of challenges. Urban sprawl, environmental degradation, waste production and management, and noise, air and water pollution are major concerns for these cities and their residents. Consequently, there is urgency to increase understanding, capacity, and strategies that enhance liveability in low-to-middle income cities which go beyond Australian-centric definitions.

This Partnership Project will extend a knowledge sharing and capacity building partnership between RMIT University, United Nations Global Compact-Cities Programme, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, by building on the ‘Contextualising Liveability in Bangkok’ Pilot Project findings.  We will further refine our knowledge of context-specific liveability in a rapidly urbanising low-to-middle income city context (Bangkok, Thailand). This will involve development and application of a suite of open source liveability indicators aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals with the aim of developing long-term local capacity. It is anticipated that this proof of concept will likely be scalable and relevant to other cities globally.

The aims of this project are to:

1) Identify and source open source liveability spatial data inputs and indicators aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals and suitable for use in the Bangkok context;

2) Apply and test conceptually relevant liveability indicators across Bangkok;

3) Develop the capacity of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration for utilising liveability data in policy and planning; and

4) Generate translational outputs that maximise the useability and scalability of indicators for application for different cities.

FUNDING

VicHealth