ICSBE 2013 - International Conference on Sustainable Built Environment : Enhancing Disaster Prevention and Mitigation

In recent years, livability is seen as one of the indicators for assessing quality of living in cities around the world. Melbourne was recently selected as the most livable city in the world. The selection was conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, who based their selection on a combination of factors related to the environment, health care, culture and infrastructure systems. However, the results of such a survey suggest that none of the top ten most livable cities in the world are the cities of the fast-growing countries in the global south. This leads to the perception that, using the same indicators, cities like Jakarta, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro, will never be seen as ‘livable' cities - a paradox to the facts that these cities own a much higher population than cities in the north, yet significantly contribute to the stability of the global economy, regardless of the fact that a significant number of residents of these cities inhabit informal and squatters' settlements.
With over one billion people in the world living in slums today , urban informality becomes part of everyday life in the urban global south. Therefore, the challenge of making a city livable in such a region is to bridge the gap between formal/informal systems, rich/poor citizens, healthy/unhealthy environment, etc. In the light of Amartya Sen's notion of development, bridging the above gaps means to minimize or eradicate factors that hinder such development, which Sen calls ‘unfreedom'. For Amartya Sen, development is seen as a way to achieve freedom by ‘removing unfreedom'.
Inspired by the above notion, the conference aims to better understand how livability is perceived in the fast-growing cities of the south. What kinds of ‘unfreedom' need to be tackled in the planning and design of the built environment in order to achieve such livability? This conference is intended to provide a venue for sharing the knowledge and experiences among actors of development in coping with the issues related to livability in the urban built environment, which include issues such as waste management, transportation, disaster mitigation, informal settlement, food security, and accessibility; and to develop instruments for assessing such livability in the urban global south.