Liveable City from an Economic Perspective

The purpose of this article is to provide an overall image of what a liveable city is. Starting from the theoretical aspects presented in the first part of this work, and ending up with the practical ones, an attempt was made to provide an answer to the following question: why are some cities more attractive than others and what criteria should be fulfilled in order for the life of a city’s inhabitants to be considered qualitative, and that city to be deemed liveable. For a city to be liveable, it is bound to fulfil several conditions, the most important ones being related to economy, environment, infrastructure (healthcare, transport, education etc.), and also to aesthetics & culture, ambient, ways of spending leisure time, safety of life, vicinity etc. Albeit there is no generally accepted concept of Liveable City, a series of methodologies recognised globally provide an assessment of this very aspect (many of them sharing the same elements). In this article, by means of the Liveability indices, cities are classified into several categories. The cities listed in one category are shown to be present in almost all the other categories, on positions that are similar. Hence, the city of Tokyo can be found in five out of six categories proposed by the international organisations which elaborated such methodologies, along with the City of London (in four out of six categories) and with New York City (in four out of six categories) etc. In Romania, the cities that might be classified as liveable are: Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara, Brasov, Constanța and Sibiu. The Capital City of Romania, i.e. Bucharest, is ranked the 28th in a List of European Capital Cities, being outranked by Cities like Sofia, Lisbon or Budapest, which means it still does not fulfil many of the criteria for a liveable city.