How to make our cities more livable? Longitudinal interactions among urban sustainability, business regulatory quality, and city livability

Ensuring city livability and urban sustainability is one of the grand societal challenges of the twenty-first century. This study analyzes the longitudinal relationships between the three dimensions of urban sustainability and city livability, while exploring the moderating effect of business regulatory quality. We test those relationships in a sample of 66 European cities from 2007 to 2019. Our findings suggest that while social urban sustainability is a positive and strong direct predictor of high city livability over time, the relationships between economic and environmental urban sustainability with city livability are more complex since they are conditioned by business regulatory quality. Economic and environmental urban sustainability have a stronger positive effect on city livability when there is an effective and supportive regulatory framework for business development that helps translate economic and environmental efforts into dwellers' well-being improvements. On the contrary, when the quality of business regulations is low, the effect of economic urban sustainability is weaker and the effect of environmental urban sustainability on city livability is negative. Therefore, this study provides new insights into the interrelations between urban sustainability, regulations, and city livability that can help guide livability improvements in cities.