Benchmarking, monitoring, modelling and valuing the healthy liveable city

This final project report describes the results of the project ‘Benchmarking, Monitoring, Modelling and Valuing the Healthy Liveable City’, the third project in the National Liveability Study series funded by the Prevention Centre. It sought to go beyond ‘why’ we should make the transition to healthy liveable cities, and ‘which’ interventions were likely to support this transition, to ‘how’ to design policy and interventions to create healthy liveable cities.

Although there is substantial evidence on why we should make the transition to healthy liveable cities, and which urban planning and transport interventions are needed, there is insufficient evidence on how interventions could and should be implemented to make this transition, and the likely consequences of those interventions.

This project extended our team’s previous liveability work by creating a national database of evidence-based liveability indicators, visualised and disseminated through the Australian Urban Observatory – a ‘virtual laboratory’ that can be used to identify and test urban and transport planning and design interventions.