IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

What makes a city livable? The quality of services it provides and its social security? Its provision of qualitative housing and public spaces? Or its social inclusion and resilience to change? Livability indexes are a common tool to illustrate a city’s overall score on notions such as safety, education, health care, recreation, and so on. Based on these indexes (like the Mercer Livability index), multinational companies can more easily decide where to locate and how to pay local employees. However, a livable city does not only depend on its economic prospective on the metropolitan scale. It simultaneously needs to be a sum of livable neighborhoods. This presentation conducts a comparative analysis of two neighborhoods in the city of New York (which is used as the baseline of the Mercer Livability index), comparing these neighborhoods based on different parameters that can define their living qualities. The recently redeveloped waterfront area of Williamsburg in North Brooklyn is compared to the Coney Island Creek Area in the South of Brooklyn. Additional to investigating parameters of the livability indexes (e.g. economic environment, public services and transport, schools and education), the presentation will look into the neighborhoods’ ethnic and cultural diversity, their inclusion of minority groups, and the resilience of their response to shocks and stresses. The goal of this presentation is to highlight local-scale conditions in different areas within the same city, in order to gain insights regarding livability on the scale of the neighborhood.