Dataset of the livability performance of the city of Birmingham, UK, as measured by its citizen wellbeing, resource security, resource efficiency and carbon emissions

Abstract

This data article presents the UK City LIFE1 data set for the city of Birmingham, UK. UK City LIFE1 is a new, comprehensive and holistic method for measuring the livable sustainability performance of UK cities. The Birmingham data set comprises 346 indicators structured simultaneously (1) within a four-tier, outcome-based framework in order to aid in their interpretation (e.g., promote healthy living and healthy long lives, minimize energy use, uncouple economic vitality from CO2 emissions) and (2) thematically in order to complement government and disciplinary siloes (e.g., health, energy, economy, climate change). Birmingham data for the indicators are presented within an Excel spreadsheet with their type, units, geographic area, year, source, link to secondary data files, data collection method, data availability and any relevant calculations and notes. This paper provides a detailed description of UK city LIFE1 in order to enable comparable data sets to be produced for other UK cities. The Birmingham data set is made publically available at http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/3040/ to facilitate this and to enable further analyses. The UK City LIFE1 Birmingham data set has been used to understand what is known and what is not known about the livable sustainability performance of the city and to inform how Birmingham City Council can take action now to improve its understanding and its performance into the future (see “Improving city-scale measures of livable sustainability: A study of urban measurement and assessment through application to the city of Birmingham, UK” Leach et al. [2]).

Engineering future liveable, resilient, sustainable cities using foresight

“…The need for contextual understanding of cities arises from specific urban diagnostics research, 'city observatory' activities and analysis of big data (noting that, like materials, data quality degrades with time, only more rapidly), from which assessment methods extract the critical influencing factors (Leach et al, 2016(Leach et al, , 2017a(Leach et al, , 2017b. Crucially, a civil engineer must work seamlessly across disciplinary silos to embrace social, environmental, political and cultural perspectives, with an appreciation of their languages and methods of working.…”

The Liveable Cities Method: establishing the case for transformative change for a UK metro

“…It is helpful to make explicit the components of the city and infrastructure systems related to the problem and those that will be impacted by potential interventions by mapping them and establishing the dependencies and interdependencies between these systems. DRC, Boyko, et al, (2012), LC, Leach, et al, (2017b;2017a), iBUILD, Bouch & Rogers, (2017;In Press), ULB. Covered explicitly in the LCM.…”

“…This requires judgement and synthesis, drawing on expertise, experience and knowledge of the local context. This also requires knowledge of the city's current performance and UK City LIFE1 has been used here to assess the current performance of Birmingham, UK (Leach, et al, 2017a) alongside an in-depth review of Birmingham's transport ecosystem (Leach, et al, 2016b). The results of this analysis can be found in Table 2, noting that they have been vastly simplified in order to retain clarity (UK City LIFE1 contains a total of 346 potentially-relevant indicators of city performance, from which the most-relevant have been chosen to illustrate the method).…”

Identifying Context-Specific Categories for Visualizing Livability of Cities—a Case Study of Malmö

“…To the extent that built, societal and social environments can affect such aspirations, livable city rankings are meant to capture and reflect this condition on an aggregated level [5]. Table 1 presents a selection of nine such rankings 1 Although there are ranking schemes that create a more holistic and comprehensive measurement of livability, including City Analysis Methodology (CAM) and UK City Life [22], these were not included in Table 1 since they are only applied to cities within the UK. CAM is an innovative urban analysis framework that aims at providing a holistic evaluation of livability in UK cities with regard to well-being, resource security and CO 2 emissions [23].…”

“…CAM is an innovative urban analysis framework that aims at providing a holistic evaluation of livability in UK cities with regard to well-being, resource security and CO 2 emissions [23]. The UK City Life, similarly, aims at providing a comprehensive and holistic evaluation of livability in UK cities [22]. These two schemes show more openness towards the development of a more holistic approach in measuring urban livability than the international schemes selected for this study.…”