Victims of their own (definition of) success: Urban discourse and expert knowledge production in the Liveable City

Abstract

The notion of 'liveability' has endured for over fifty years within policy discourses, shaping urban strategy and planning across the world. This Debates paper examines the current state of liveability discourse. Liveability is unpacked to consider the rhetorical work that it does to frame urban problems, select and order concepts, and build narratives that shape policy action. Liveability discourse has a dual role: it defines normative goals for a city and also reifies and demands particular forms of expert knowledge to justify and maintain its discursive power. This power is created by connecting the vague rhetoric of the 'liveable city' to expertise represented in liveability rankings and indicators. The experiences of apparently 'liveable' cities show how liveability discourse creates a representation of the city that is in contrast to the experience of many residents. The use of aggregate metrics and reliance on indices generated from undisclosed data sources and 'expert judgement', obscures the differentiated quality of life and everyday experience for urban populations. Therefore, liveability discourse has exerted and maintained stronger discursive power to undermine urban livelihoods than to improve them, due to the phenomena and qualities that it conceals. Liveability's distinct type of discursive power must be recognised and mobilised to support a counter-narrative that reconnects urban policy with everyday urban life.

TAKING CITY RANKINGS SERIOUSLY : Engaging with Benchmarking Practices in Global Urbanism

“…Compounding this limitation is a lack of methodological transparency. Whilst it is acknowledged that most rankings focusing on business costs, the cost of living and liveability factors are sold for profit and their creators thus have a business case for concealing their methodology, methodological transparency nonetheless represents an integral factor in the ranking's usefulness for urban practitioners (Huggins, 2010; Meijering et al ., 2014; Leff and Peterson, 2015; McArthur and Robin, 2019). If practitioners are to be able to navigate the methodological limitations of benchmarking studies for the purposes of policymaking, then a careful interrogation of that methodology is required, but this is impossible if the methodology is not made public (Kitchin et al ., 2015).…”

CITY BENCHMARKING, GLOBALIZED URBAN SCHOLARSHIP AND THE VIEW FROM ABOVE: Reflections on a Few Absences

“…As discussed elsewhere (Robin and Acuto, 2018), globally comparable urban knowledge (including indices and rankings), especially when made freely available, can represent valuable sources of information for decision makers in cities where information is otherwise poor. The partial visions of the world they offer can also spark debates between local stakeholders around what cities should and could look like (as is the case with the Liveability Rankings; see McArthur and Robin, 2019). This in my view represents a potentially fruitful and grounded engagement with particular instances of comparative urbanism from below, as it would provide further and much‐needed evidence on the ability of benchmarks, rankings and indices to actually shape urban trajectories (both positively and negatively), and on their effects on different groups and localities within cities beyond the already well‐known cases.…”

Latin American smart cities: Between worlding infatuation and crawling provincialising

“…In this way, success could be defined through co-production, as local actors explore what liveability [and in this case smart cityness] means to them and how it could be enhanced and monitored (not necessarily [or solely] through quantitative assessments). (McArthur and Robin, 2019: 1724)…”