Abstract
Liveability is one key characteristic of cities that enables them to attract globally-mobile resources (Tan and Kaur, 2014). Various annually published global liveability rankings also have an impact on the popularity of cities, which is crucial for emerging economies. The unpleasantness of the climate in Middle Eastern cities puts them at a disadvantaged place in terms of liveability rankings, reducing their competitiveness for international resources. We compare the criteria and methodology of several commonly-referenced rankings of urban liveability, and decide that the OECD's Better Life Index (BLI) is the fittest to our research, as it takes into account the financial and economic factors and adopts a quantitative method to measure liveability. However, like most rankings, the BLI fails to capture the complete reality of Middle Eastern cities, where financial and hospitality industries, among others, are booming despite the harsh weather conditions. Living and working in thermally controlled spaces is the norm for these cities, and thermal comfort, we argue, whether natural or by human intervention, ought to be included as a factor when assessing the environmental liveability unique for climatically challenging cities. We explore the possibility of quantifying thermal comfort by attempting to construct variables such as the area of thermally comfortable or controlled public spaces per capita, and the percentage of time in a day that could be spent in thermally/climatically comfortable space which provides the functions necessary in everyday life. In doing so, we encounter many difficulties. Although a growing number of cities are collecting geo-data, it is still not a universal practice to disclose such data in a consistent and uniform way. We also find that many other indicators for liveability are measured by subjective scoring. Although we are not able to fully construct a database of these variables, we offer our suggestions on how future research can progress on the quantification of thermal comfort and the revision of the existing liveability indexes.
