What Makes Australia’s Most Liveable City Best?


A survey of 5,200 Australians suggests that Adelaide is our “most liveable city”, followed by Canberra and Melbourne. But what factors make a place liveable, and how can individual cities improve?

Picture by Cimexus

The survey by the Property Council of Australia asked Australians to rank their cities based on 17 key criteria. (This puts in a different category to last year’s global Mercer survey on quality of life, which gave top ranking to Sydney.)

The key thing to note is that a top score of 64 and just 6.3 points between the top-ranked and bottom-ranked city, there’s a lot of room for improvement in every single city. The factors which dragged down the results the most? Affordable quality housing (with a 34 per cent average city approval rate across the country), environmental sustainability (37 per cent), traffic problems (41 per cent) and public transport (42 per cent). But individual cities showed wide variation across the full range of issues assessed, and in terms of how important residents perceived them to be.

These are the 17 factors considered in the report:

[block]
[left]
•Urban design
•Cleanliness/lack of pollution
•Outdoor recreation environments
•Dining and entertainment options
•Public transport
•Road network
•Personal and property safety
•Attractive natural environment
•Environmental policy
[/left]
[right]
•Education facilities
•Healthcare services
•Quality affordable housing
•Balance of housing types
•Employment and business opportunities
•Standard of living
•Climate
•Diverse and harmonious population[/left]
[/right]
[/block]

Which ones do you think matter the most, and how would you improve them? Share your thoughts in the comments. (For Sydney, I’d like to see properly integrated public transport, but I’m not holding my breath. Well, except to avoid the traffic fumes.)

Property Council of Australia


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