Uploaded on 2017-09-14 by Luiz Gustavo Della Noce

1. How would you define livability? Ability to live in an urban center with well-being, comfort, attendance to basic individual and collective needs (mainly transportation, health and education), attendance to personal and professional needs and wishes (professional goals, different life styles, conditions for sociability), access to cultural and artistic goods and services, equality of conditions regardless of origin, social class, ethnicity, religion, gender; conditions of individual safety (related to urban violence) and a healthy environment. 2. If you need to define livability with the following terms, how would you rank them? (1: most important - 7: least important) 1. Housing 2. Health 3. Transportation 4. Environment 5. Opportunity 6. Neighborhood 7. Engagement 3. Choose three cities in the United States (preferable cities in different states). New York, Miami, San Francisco City Liveability score Customized Liveability score Change New York 62 63 +1 Miami 53 54 +1 San Francisco 52 53 +1 All of the cities I have chosen have had positive changes from the items I consider most important: housing, transportation and health. They are for me the most basic items for the well being of any person or family, regardless of the conditions that exist. As I come from a mega city in a developing country (São Paulo, Brazil), these items are very sensitive to us because they are poorly addressed by the government and by most public policies. Any survey in São Paulo (and this can also be extended to all major Brazilian cities) will point to housing, health, transportation and urban violence as the main factors of worsening people's quality of life. Items such as environment, social participation, or neighborhood relationships end up in the background. I think that in the case of large North American cities, these items are more or less well resolved, and a more sophisticated view of liveability is in question. I'm sharing a formerly squatted building in downtown São Paulo, one of the many that were occupied and transformed into tenement houses, in very subhuman conditions. Buildings like this one are all over São Paulo due the scarcity of affordable housing, and tranportation from the outskirts of the city. We made a remodelling project that was able to house about 60 families, which is pictured in the image.