One Page Summary

According to WHO (World health Organization) either in wealthy or poor cities, unsustainable and unplanned development of urban housing, transport, and food systems, along with social and lifestyle factors, are drivers in the epidemic of noncommunicable diseases, which are linked to risks and hazards such as air pollution, poor diet, physical inactivity, traffic injury and domestic injury. This clearly states that there are linkages between sustainable cities and better public health and more in general in Quality of life.
But Cities are complex entities and it is hard understand,  in simple and neutral terms, the impacts of urban policies on people’s Quality of life while also helping policymakers and residents to understand how “things are going” at neighbourhood level.
That’s why is important to monitor urban life with indicators, that can be measured both within cities as well as between cities, which can help report on identifying lacks of services, environmental issues or barriers that need to be addressed and ultimately to track progresses over time.

But if Liveability indexes's importance is well recognized in the academia they are not widely used as a supporting tools for decisions in real life. Qirate wants to fill this gap.

We want Sibiu to be the first city to drive its new residential development using Quality of life as metric for a human-centred planning scheme that aims at creating a true liveable neighbourhood.

Qirate as a data-informed decision support service, will rate the liveability of  the planned areas at street level by summarizing all the available information and suggested crowdsourced improvements with several indicators allowing to understand the ratio between built environment and green areas; air quality; planned transport and public services;  accessibility and quality of  public green spaces; street safety and security with walkable and bikable access to jobs and schools; Health services, ranging from primary care clinics to hospitals and emergency response. For doing so Qirate will improve communities’ governance and stakeholders’ participation through local challenges. 

Qirate will generate the scenarios so to have a more realistic view of the future urban ecosystem and along with the urban liveability.  Qirate  will also help planning a smart and greener development of the physical environment for a long-term resilience to climate change and natural disasters thanks to the integration of geospatial data.