Uploaded on 2016-09-19 by Francisco Melo Vergueiro

1)The list that I have made for this exercise, regarding to the top liveable cities, is based in my personal experience and also on friends that live abroad. I tried to cross the information gathered at this personal experiences with the rankings available and the result is this: 1-Vienna; 2-Zurich; 3-Toronto; 4-Helsinki; 5-Hamburg. 2)In the time of globalisation, which brings much change to cityscapes, Culture is a vital resource, with the capacity to promote, and reinforce, the unique character, history and genious loci of a city and optimize the relation of the residents with their living environments. The Infrastructure of a city has great expression on the urban metabolism because it gathers and assemblies dimensions like water, energy, transportation and health. These dimensions are crucial on the daily basis routine of the inhabitants, and consequently much impact on quality of life. Other important characteristic is the Connectivity, not only the one that is associated to the city scale and urban mobility, in this case i´m focusing, again, on the phenomenon of globalisation (global scale). One pragmatic path of sustainable city managment supports itself on the premiss to connect citizens and cities with more, and better, collaborative initiatives and international networks so that mistakes in city management are not repeated while good ideas and solutions can be replicated and customised for implementation in more cities. Social inclusion it´s also an important indicator in this context, because a liveable city it´s supposed to be functional, permeable and inclusive for everyone. The contemporary city is an organism that lives and evolves with the real time contribution of the inhabitants. For last, I have chosen the Mobility, an important vector on urban dynamics with great impact on flows/stocks. 3)Regarding to the five charactetistics mentioned before, my city as implemented several strategies which and stimulate the context of liveable city:(1) Connectivity - Oporto is a certified city, with the ISO37120, conceded by the World Council on City Data. With this benchmarking indicators it´s easy to compare and implement sustainable strategies;(2) Infrastructure - iniciative promoted, by the city council, to drink tap water. The quality achieved allows everyone to drink, consequently enabling the reduction of costs and a ecologic stategy because the inhabitants have the possibility to choose between tap water or bottled water.; (3) Social Inclusion - creation of a playground network and requalification of public spaces to promote the inclusion of handicapped users;(4) Mobility - The city council made a partnership with a private company to create a sustainable model of public parking managment; (5)Culture - The city of Oporto has a great historic heritage and nowadays is one the top destinations in Europe. The city council promotes a lot of initiatives and investments on Culture because it´s the main platform to show the full potential of our heritage and unique character. I think our city should review city plans to include green infrastructures, optimize the network of public transportation and invest in electric transports, create programs to support and promote local culture and requalificate marginal public spaces to promote social inclusion.