Edwin Heathcoate has written a very fun essay on the idea of the “liveable” city, and why the cities deemed most liveable by various magazine surveys are far more boring than the messy, sprawling megacities that tend to suffer when measured by a liveability yardstick. Heathcoate offers his own thoughts on what makes cities great rather than liveable, e.g., a blend of beauty and ugliness, diversity, density, a social mix, etc.
My own thoughts are mostly in tune with Heathcoate’s: there are certain kinds of unevenness that make cities appealing. Cities that have highly distinctive neighborhoods, and that allow different cultural niches and consumption opportunities to flourish, strike me as the most liveable (for me). I think of it as relating to urban surface area: for different kinds of communities to grow in close proximity to each other, you need many different substrates. A mix of large business enterprises and professional services firms; a large voluntary sector, including major research universities with large endowments; a reasonably well-functioning, nimble, and innovative public sector; a mix of high-skill rich people, who can sustain specialized cultural and consumption experiences, and less-skilled new arrivals who can serve as economic complements, who can lend the city demographic and cultural vitality — these strike me as ingredients for an interesting city, and for a city that has the resources and the resilience to deal with the inevitable frictions that flow from the combination of density and diversity.