Development of a Liveable City Index (LCI) Using Multi Criteria Geospatial Modelling for Medium Class Cities in Developing Countries

In recent years, research and development on liveable cities has gained much attention due to the complexity and diversity of liveability standards. Due to the already-existing grand-scale developments commonly found in most capitals, research on liveability is often conducted in smaller semi-urban cities. Using Khon Kaen District in Thailand as a case study, we have developed a Liveable City Index (LCI) based on residents’ opinions and experts’ recommendations with the integration of Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. The first stage of the survey (out of three), identifies marked variations in attitudes towards the liveability of a city. The survey evaluates nine significant factors (Safety, Economy, Environment, Education, Health, Transportation, Recreation, Population Density, and Public Utility) through the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) for LCI development. The LCI map reveals that only 3.49% of the Khon Kaen area corresponds to the highest and high liveable city levels. This contradicts the earlier ranking of the city as the most liveable city in 2010, which was only based on economic factors. Moreover, the proposed method was applied to another area—the Muang district of Suphanburi in western Thailand—in order to test its reliability, and the results were found to be similar. This clearly supports the integration of residents’ participation in assessing the liveability of a city, and it is evident that this proposed approach can be adopted in other areas for LCI development.