Abstract
Even though Egypt has made significant investments in new city development, many of these cities experience weak social cohesion, limited accessibility, and a lack of responsiveness to residents’ needs. While existing livability frameworks assess cities post-implementation, early planning lacks proactive assessment tools. Accordingly, this study proposes a livability-based directive approach for pre-implementation assessment, aimed at refining planning proposals and reduce the risk of livability deficiencies after implementation. A comparative literature-based review was conducted, extracting indicators from ten livability-related case studies (five from Egypt and five international) and two international livability frameworks developed by specialized organizations. These sources were selected to capture a wide range of livability dimensions and their measurement approaches, focusing on planning-related determinants of livability. Subsequently, indicators were screened using criteria aligned with early-stage application at the neighborhood scale and relevance to urban planning perspective. The findings indicate that the selected indicators are categorized under six livability dimensions: quality of physical and built environment, quality of social and community aspects, accessibility and mobility, economic conditions and opportunities, quality of the natural environment and health and well-being. The results also show that these livability dimensions are interrelated with accessibility emerging as a cross-cutting dimension linking the other dimensions. This guideline helps planners improve proposed neighborhood plans at the early stage, thereby increasing the probability of achieving the livability dimensions after implementation.