Abstract
This study develops a tool to assess livability in European cities covering two components of livability: human wellbeing and environmental impact. First, we propose a conceptual model to assess cities’ livability, that extends the concept of urban livability to include a component related to environmental sustainability. Second, we address the measurement of cities’ livability. For this purpose, a new composite indicator was constructed based on a data envelopment analysis model specified using a directional distance function. In addition to assigning a summary measure of performance for each city, the composite indicator can be used to guide improvements concerning different livability objectives. One of the innovative features of the model proposed is to enable, by the specification of different directional vectors, focusing separately on each component of livability (e.g., human wellbeing and environmental impact) or alternatively considering cities’ potential for improvement in all indicators simultaneously. In addition, it is possible to incorporate a new type of weight restrictions, specified as assurance regions type I, that reflect the relative importance of both desirable and undesirable outputs in percentage terms. Finally, this paper approached the assessment of the evolution of cities’ performance over time using the Luenberger productivity indicator.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, R., Athanassopoulos, A. D., Dyson, R. G., & Thanassoulis, E. (1997). Weights restrictions and value judgments in data envelopment analysis: Evolution, development and future directions. Annals of Operations Research, 73, 13–64.
Angulo-Meza, L., & Lins, M. E. (2002). Review of methods for increasing discrimination in data envelopment analysis. Annals of Operations Research, 116(1–4), 225–242.
Artemis Information Management. (2012). Final draft glossary on Urban Audit statistics. Technical report, Artemis Information Management SA: Luxembourg.
Australian Department of Infrastructure and Transport. (2010). State of Australian cities 2010. Technical report, Department of infrastructure and transport—Major cities unit, Canberra, Australia.
Australian Department of Infrastructure and Transport. (2012). State of Australian Cities 2012. Department of infrastructure and transport—Major cities unit, Canberra, Australia: Technical report.
Chambers, R. G. (1996). A new look at input, output, productivity and technical change measurement. Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station. University of Maryland, College Park.
Chambers, R. G., Chung, Y., & Fare, R. (1996). Benefit and distance functions. Journal of Economic Theory, 70(2), 407–419.
Cherchye, L., Moesen, W., Rogge, N., & Van Puyenbroeck, T. (2007). An introduction to benefit of the doubt composite indicators. Social Indicators Research, 82(1), 111–145.
Cherchye, L., Moesen, W., Rogge, N., Van Puyenbroeck, T., Saisana, M., Saltelli, A., et al. (2008). Creating composite indicators with DEA and robustness analysis: The case of the technology achievement index. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 59(2), 239–251.
Chung, Y., Fare, R., & Grosskopf, S. (1997). Productivity and undesirable outputs: A directional distance function approach. Journal of Environmental Management, 51(3), 229–240.
Cook, W. D., & Kress, M. (1990). A data envelopment model for aggregating preference rankings. Management Science, 36(11), 1302–1310.
Despotis, D. K. (2002). Improving the discriminating power of DEA: Focus on globally efficient units. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 53(3), 314–323.
Despotis, D. K. (2004). A reassessment of the human development index via data envelopment analysis. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 56(8), 969–980.
Despotis, D. K. (2005). Measuring human development via data envelopment analysis: The case of Asia and the Pacific. Omega, 33(5), 385–390.
Dyson, R. G., Allen, R., Camanho, A. S., Podinovski, V. V., Sarrico, C. S., & Shale, E. A. (2001). Pitfalls and protocols in DEA. European Journal of Operational Research, 132(2), 245–259.
English Department for Communities and Local Government. (2006). State of the english cities: Liveability in english cities. Technical report, Department for Communities and Local Government, London, England.
European Communities. (2004). Urban audit methodological handbook. Technical report: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg.
European Communities. (2014). Urban development, Urban Audit. http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/activity/urban/audit/index_en.cfm. 21 April, 2014.
Fare, R., & Grosskopf, S. (2005). New directions: Efficiency and productivity (1st ed.). New York: Springer.
Fare, R., Grosskopf, S., Lovell, C. A. K., & Pasurka, C. (1989). Multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable: A nonparametric approach. Review of Economics and Statistics, 71(1), 90–98.
Fare, R., Grosskopf, S., Norris, M., & Zhang, Z. (1994). Productivity growth, technical progress, and efficiency change in industrialized countries. American Economic Review, 84(1), 66–83.
Fare, R., Grosskopf, S., & Pasurka, C. A, Jr. (2007). Environmental production functions and environmental directional distance functions. Energy, 32(7), 1055–1066.
Fried, H. O., Lovell, C. A. K., & Schmidt, S. S. (Eds.). (2008). The measurement of poductive efficiency and productivit growth. USA: Oxford University Press.
Hashimoto, A. (1996). A DEA selection system for selective examinations. Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan, 39(4), 475–485.
Hollingsworth, B., & Smith, P. (2003). Use of ratios in data envelopment analysis. Applied Economics Letters, 10(11), 733–735.
Koopmans, T. (1951). Analysis of production as an efficient combination of activities. In T. C. Koopmans (Ed.), Activity analysis of production and allocation (pp. 33–97). New York: Wiley.
Kuosmanen, T., & Matin, R. K. (2011). Duality of weakly disposable technology. Omega, 39(5), 504–512.
Liu, W. B., Meng, W., Li, X. X., & Zhang, D. Q. (2009). DEA models with undesirable inputs and outputs. Annals of Operations Research, 173(1), 177–194.
Lovell, C. A. K. (1995). Measuring the macroeconomic performance of the taiwanese economy. International Journal of Production Economics, 39(1–2), 165–178.
Lovell, C. A. K., Pastor, J. T., & Turner, J. A. (1995). Measuring macroeconomic performance in the OECD: A comparison of european and non-european countries. European Journal of Operational Research, 87(3), 507–518.
Macpherson, A. J., Principe, P. P., & Smith, E. R. (2010). A directional distance function approach to regional environmental-economic assessments. Ecological Economics, 69(10), 1918–1925.
Mahlberg, B., & Obersteiner, M. (2001). Remeasuring the HDI by data envelopment analysis. Technical report, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria.
Merriam-Webster. (2013). Livability. http://www.merriam-webster.com. 19 July 2013.
Morais, P., & Camanho, A. S. (2011). Evaluation of performance of European cities with the aim to promote quality of life improvements. Omega, 39(4), 398–409.
Newman, P. W. G. (1999). Sustainability and cities: Extending the metabolism model. Landscape and Urban Planning, 44(4), 219–226.
Newman, P. W. G., Birrell, B., Holmes, D., Mathers, C., Newton, P., Oakley, G., et al. (1996). Human settlements: Australia state of the environmental 1996. Technical report, Collingwood, Australia: CSIRO Publishing.
Newton, P., Baum, S., Bhatia, K., Brown, S., Cameron, S., Foran, B., Grant, T., Mak, S., Memmott, P., Mitchell, G., Neate, K., Smith, N., Stimson, R., Pears, A., Tucker, S., & Yencken, E. (2001). Human settlements: Australia state of the environment 2001. Technical report, CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the Department of the Environment and Heritage, Canberra.
Oregon Department of Transportation. (2011). Livability and quality of life indicators. Technical report, Oregon Department of Transportation. http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/TD/TP/docs/LCP/Livability.pdf?ga=t.
Picazo-Tadeo, A. J., Reig-Martinez, E., & Hernandez-Sancho, F. (2005). Directional distance functions and environmental regulation. Resource and Energy Economics, 27(2), 131–142.
Pichardo-Muiz, A. (2011). The role of diseconomies of transportation and public safety problems in the measurement of urban quality of life. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 6(4), 363–386.
Sahoo, B. K., & Acharya, D. (2010). An alternative approach to monetary aggregation in DEA. European Journal of Operational Research, 204(3), 672–682.
Sahoo, B. K., & Acharya, D. (2012). Constructing macroeconomic performance index of indian states using DEA. Journal of Economic Studies, 39(1), 63–83.
Sahoo, B. K., Luptacik, M., & Mahlberg, B. (2011). Alternative measures of environmental technology structure in DEA: An application. European Journal of Operational Research, 215(3), 750–762.
Scheel, H. (2001). Undesirable outputs in efficiency valuations. European Journal of Operational Research, 132(2), 400–410.
Thanassoulis, E., Portela, M. C., & Allen, R. (2004). Incorporating value judgments in DEA. In W. W. Cooper, L. M. Seiford & J. Zhu (Eds.), Handbook on data envelopment analysis. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Urban Audit. (2010). Urban audit glossary. Technical report, Urban Audit, Luxembourg.
Wong, Y. H. B., & Beasley, J. E. (1990). Restricting weight flexibility in data envelopment analysis. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 41(9), 829–835.
Zhou, P., Ang, B., & Poh, K. (2007). A mathematical programming approach to constructing composite indicators. Ecological Economics, 62(2), 291–297.
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through project iTeam (Pt/SES-SUES/0041/2008) and Mesur (PTDC/SEN-ENR/111710/2009).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix
Appendix
See Table 11.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zanella, A., Camanho, A.S. & Dias, T.G. The assessment of cities’ livability integrating human wellbeing and environmental impact. Ann Oper Res 226, 695–726 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1666-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1666-7