UrbanScore: A Real-Time Personalised Liveability Analytics Platform

TL;DR

UrbanScore is a real-time, personalized liveability analytics platform that integrates multiple open data sources and AI to provide user-friendly scores for urban areas, aiding residents and planners in decision-making.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel real-time platform combining diverse open data, AI explanations, and adaptive scoring to assess urban liveability at a fine-grained level.

Findings

Median latency of 2.1 seconds for score computation

Scores ranged from 34 to 92, highlighting variability in liveability

High scores clustered along metro corridors with green spaces

Abstract

This paper introduces UrbanScore - a real-time web platform that computes a personalised liveability score for any urban address. The system fuses five data streams: (i) address geocoding via Nominatim, (ii) facility extraction from OpenStreetMap through Overpass QL, (iii) segment-level traffic metrics from TomTom Flow v10, (iv) hourly air-quality readings from OpenWeatherMap, and (v) user-declared preference profiles, all persisted in an Oracle 19c relational store. Six sub-scores (air, traffic, lifestyle, education, metro access, surface transport) are derived, adaptively weighted and combined; an OpenAI large-language model then converts the numeric results into concise, user-friendly explanations. A pilot deployment covering the 226 km2 metropolitan area of Bucharest evaluated 3,450 unique addresses over four weeks. Median end-to-end latency was 2.1 s (p95 = 2.9s), meeting the <3 non-functional requirement. Aggregate scores ranged from 34 to 92 (mean 68, SD 11), with high-scoring clusters along metro corridors that pair abundant green space with PM2.5 levels below 35 ug m-3. A detailed case study of the Tineretului district produced an overall score of 91/100 and demonstrated how the narrative layer guides users toward comparable neighbourhoods. Limitations include dependence on third-party API uptime, spatial bias toward well-mapped OSM regions and the absence of noise and crime layers, cited by 18% of survey participants as a desired enhancement. Overall, the results show that open geodata, commercial mobility feeds and conversational AI can be integrated into a performant, explainable decision-support tool that places "liveability analytics" in the hands of every house-hunter, commuter and city planner.