Lessons from exploring the relationship between livability and biodiversity in the built environment

Urban design and ecology usually operate in silos despite their shared goal of advancing sustainable cities. Livability is predominantly concerned with the quality of the built environment, often neglecting ecological considerations. Conversely, biodiversity focuses on preserving life forms and ecosystem functions, often overlooking the intricacies of the built environment. This disjointed approach limits our understanding of the interactions between these fields and hinders interdisciplinary practice. Our research explores the existing relationships between biodiversity and livability to expand our understanding of the exchanges between the two disciplines, and their combined effect in improving our cities. To achieve this, we employed an expert elicitation method grounded in a heuristic, exploratory, and knowledge-based approach. This methodology enabled us to first deconstruct the broad and often ambiguous concepts of livability and biodiversity into concrete domains, each with its own specific components, and then examine the connections between the two fields in the urban environment. The results of this study reveal that although urban designers and ecologists approach the concepts of livability and biodiversity through strict disciplinary lenses, the two share significant areas of interaction. Our findings indicate that biodiversity acts as a hidden driver of livability. Functional Diversity emerges as a key domain of biodiversity, impacting domains of livability such as Comfort, and Sense of Place. Conversely, specific livability components such as Environmental Hazards Mitigation, Maintenance, Civic and Social Involvement, and Infrastructure Accessibility have the biggest impact on biodiversity across all domains. • Urban biodiversity is a hidden driver of livability. • Sense of place, comfort, and safety are closely tied to key biodiversity components. • Species diversity and landscape composition are tied to livability components. • Achieving sustainable cities requires a cross-disciplinary approach. Biodiversity and urban design interlink in complex ways, more collaboration needed.