Liveable City for Who?

Liveability has become a familiar objective in policy, development and city rankings, yet the term can conceal significant differences in how urban environments are actually experienced. This chapter asks a more fundamental question: liveable for whom? A city may appear successful through investment, infrastructure, density and international indicators while remaining unaffordable, exhausting, inaccessible or uncomfortable for many of its residents. Conditions experienced positively by drivers, affluent residents or tourists may be very different for pedestrians, workers, children, older people or people with disabilities. The chapter therefore approaches liveability from ground level, examining whether ordinary urban environments provide dignity, comfort, access, social connection and opportunities for participation. It gives particular attention to Malaysian street-edge life, where informal gathering, food, commerce, thresholds and shaded spaces reveal forms of social behaviour that conventional measures may overlook. Rather than suppressing such patterns, urban design should learn from them. Liveability is ultimately presented not as a label or ranking but as a practical test of whether planning, design, environment and social life work together to allow diverse people not merely to inhabit the city, but to flourish within it.