Starting the Livable Cities think tank

Last week we had the first think tank on Livable Cities in Singapore. The expert group is really diverse - Indian, Serb-Croat, British, French, South African, Italian, Canadian, Singaporean, Brazilian. It was a great group, with a good dynamic who agreed on a draft mission statement for the work of the think tank:

"Transform cities into more resilient, inclusive, diverse and authentic places"

Important key words were really resilience (economic, social and environmental) - diversity and inclusiveness (including the world's 3 billion living in slums) and authenticity. And the need for both rapid and fundamental transformation was clear.

Some of the actions that the think tank is considering include:

• Understand the existing relevant metrics about "livability", challenge them, see where the gaps are to show that cities cannot only be measured along GDP indicators or carbon emissions. How do you measure what cannot be quantified about New York or Rio or Paris? What really makes livability?
• Review, survey or define resilience, inclusion, diversity, authenticity
• Evaluate concrete city case studies along the different axes of the vision (ie. resilience, inclusion, diversity, authenticity)
• Develop policy recommendations
• Link with other city initiatives (e.g. C40 group of Mayors etc)