Viewpoint: Liveable towns and cities: approaches for planners

There are both potential pitfalls and opportunities for planners in the increasing use of 'liveability/liveable' terms in setting urban policy goals, in developing policies and strategies and in managing implementation routines and projects. The pitfalls are associated with the blandness often found with similar label terms, 'community' being the lead example, so that they tend to lose any meaning they originally had, being applied wholesale to any policy area or package which it is desired to promote in a friendly, un-challenging and un-challengeable sort of way. As such, liveability and liveable will have to take their chances along with the rest. In contrast, the opportunities are more associated with providing a robust guiding principle or touchstone embodying key values to be used in practice. These opportunities typically abound in three primary areas: in local place-making where planning has become stereotyped, bound up with regulation and has lost its sense of wider purpose; secondly, in promoting exchanges of learning and practice among and between cities and citizens, both nationally and internationally; and, thirdly, in providing an essential knot in the network of public policies which link planning in with related areas, for instance, with health and quality of life concerns, with sustainability and with arts and cultural activities.