on Ranking

can we define "livable and lovable" cities?
That's the nice slogan from a new Phillips Corporation initiative praised today in the Atlantic by NRDC's Kaid Benfield. The Phillips think tank suggests that we can gather all the qualities of a "livable and lovable" city into three virtues:

Resilience, which replaces the more bureaucratic and depressing word sustainability, but means roughly the same thing. Some great work has already been done on the concept of resilience. There's already a Resilient Cities movement, and an excellent book on Resilience Thinking.

Inclusiveness, which is about "social integration and cohesion," demonstrated for example in the lack of discrimination or social exclusion based on race, religion, age, and all the other usual categories.

Authenticity, which means "the ability to maintain the local character of the city," including "heritage, culture, and environment."
Below is their graphic summary. (The PDF [Download] is much sharper!)

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Ricky Burdett, who founded the London School of Economics’ Cities Programme, says: “These surveys always come up with a list where no one would want to live. One wants to live in places which are large and complex, where you don’t know everyone and you don’t always know what’s going to happen next. Cities are places of opportunity but also of conflict, but where you can find safety in a crowd.

“We also have to acknowledge that these cities that come top of the polls also don’t have any poor people,” he adds

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/dd9bba18-769c-11e0-bd5d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1NS4tOZPr