The Australian National Liveability Study

The Australian National Liveability Study was conducted by the Healthy Liveable Cities group at RMIT from 2016 to 2022, as a continuation of a research programme commenced in the McCaughey VicHealth Community Wellbeing Unit at the University of Melbourne where the group was previously located.  This particular project space on figshare has been created to archive some of the outputs of The Australian National Liveability Study 2018 program which drew upon and expanded a scripted workflow for creating urban liveability indicators and a composite liveability index for address points, with flexible aggregation to larger area scales.  This process was developed initially for an Urban Liveability Index (Higgs et al., 2018, https://doi.org/10.25439/rmt.15001386.v2; and Higgs et al., 2019, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12942-019-0178-8) for Melbourne, before being expanded for Australia's capital cities (Arundel et al., 2017; https://apo.org.au/node/113921) and Australia's 21 largest cities to support linkage of environmental exposures for the Australian Early Development Census (Villanueva et al., 2022; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095549) and area summaries for the Australian Urban Observatory (Davern et al., 2020; https://doi.org/10.25439/rmt.12380576.v1).

The final Australian National Liveability Study 2018 datasets comprise a suite of policy relevant spatial indicators of local neighbourhood liveability and amenity access estimated for residential address points across Australia's 21 largest cities, and summarised at range of larger area scales (Mesh Block, Statistical Areas 1-4, Suburb, LGA, and overall city summaries). The indicators and measures included encompass topics including community and health services, employment, food, housing, public open space, transportation, walkability and overall liveability. The datasets were produced through analysis of built environment and social data from multiple sources including OpenStreetMap the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and public transport agency GTFS feed data. These are provided in CSV format under an Open Data Commons Open Database licence. The 2018 Australian National Liveability data will be of interest to planners, population health and urban researchers with an interest in the spatial distribution of built environment exposures and outcomes for data linkage, modelling and mapping purposes.