A Systems Approach to Livability and Sustainability: Defining Terms and Mapping Relationships to Link Desires with Ecological Opportunities and Constraints

I offer a protocol for assessing the sustainability of livability. This protocol draws on a framework developed to assess vulnerability, and offers two key pertinent features. These are (a) a capacity to incorporate multiple and shifting stakeholder values and (b) a means of moving from expressions of livability to underlying ecological attributes that deliver or constrain system change. The applicability of these features to both assessing the sustainability of livability and a reappraisal given system change are illustrated using data from a study site in the French Alps. The central place of values intrudes into livability and sustainability so as to complicate the situation. Even so, the protocol presented here is able to ground the abstractions and equivocation in a transparent and explicit set of announcements. Laying the steps out in the open allows for consistency in comparison and replication without artificially removing the labile flexibility embedded in livability and sustainability. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.