What makes a place capable of sustaining life and human flourishing over time?
Habitability starts from a simple intuition: a place is not habitable because it performs well on a ranking. It is habitable because a set of ecological, social, economic and material conditions — and the relationships between them — allow life to endure and people to flourish.
From landing somewhere to measuring a place
Bruno Latour’s Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique (2017) is an important intellectual influence on this project. Latour asks how politics changes once climate, inequality and the material conditions of existence can no longer be treated as background. His invitation to “land” — to describe the ground and conditions on which collective life actually depends — helped shape the question behind Habitability: what does it mean, empirically, for a territory to remain a place where humans can thrive?
Habitability does not attempt to operationalise Latour’s philosophy. We take from it a direction of inquiry: places are material, connected and dependent on conditions that can change.
Habitability as something worth protecting
Baptiste Morizot and Laurent Neyret propose habitability as a cardinal value for environmental law: a way of focusing protection on the conditions and interdependencies that make life possible, rather than treating environmental objects as isolated entities. Their work is another direct intellectual inspiration for Habitability.
Our project is distinct. Their argument is philosophical, ecological and legal; ours is territorial, empirical and decision-oriented. But the bridge is powerful: you cannot protect habitability if you cannot observe how it is changing.
A wider scientific conversation
Habitability is also emerging as a scientific framing for climate risk. Work by Tom Spencer, Alexandre Magnan, Simon Donner, Matthias Garschagen, James Ford, Virginie Duvat and colleagues argues for a place- and people-based understanding of habitability under climate change, connecting livelihoods, health, well-being and cultures rather than reducing the question to a single physical threshold.
Harald Sterly, Marion Borderon, Patrick Sakdapolrak and colleagues push the idea further by emphasising that habitability is connected, unequal and context-dependent. A place can therefore not be understood independently of mobility, social difference, culture and its connections to other places.
Safe conditions, just conditions
The Earth-system literature adds another layer. Johan Rockström, Joyeeta Gupta and the Earth Commission connect planetary stability with human well-being through “safe and just Earth system boundaries”. Timothy Lenton, Chi Xu, Kristie Ebi and colleagues quantify how climate change may push large populations outside historically experienced climatic conditions. These approaches remind us that habitability has both biophysical constraints and human consequences.
This is also why Habitability cannot be reduced to environmental performance. A territory may be environmentally resilient yet inaccessible, unaffordable or unable to provide essential conditions for human flourishing.
Our working definition
Habitability is the capacity of a place, through its ecological, social, economic and material conditions and their interdependencies, to sustain life and enable human flourishing over time.
This definition is deliberately provisional. The research programme is testing how far it can be made observable without reducing a complex territorial reality to a simplistic ranking.
Three conceptual layers
Conditions of life. Climate, water, ecosystems and environmental stability establish fundamental conditions within which territories exist.
Conditions of human flourishing. Health, housing, economic opportunity, affordability, accessibility, safety and social conditions shape whether people can actually live well in a place.
Capacity to endure change. Resilience, adaptation, interdependencies and trajectories determine whether those conditions can persist as the world changes.
H-D-A-R — Habitability, Desirability, Affordability and Resilience — is our emerging measurement architecture. It is not intended to replace this broader conceptual definition.
Trajectory, not just ranking
The central empirical question is not simply “Which place is best?” but “Is this place becoming more or less habitable — and why?”
That distinction makes time central to the project. Habitability aims to observe present conditions, understand the forces changing them and, eventually, explore plausible future trajectories.
Selected intellectual foundations
Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, La Découverte, 2017. Also Face à Gaïa (2015) and Où suis-je ? (2021).
Baptiste Morizot & Laurent Neyret, “Le principe habitabilité”, Revue Européenne du Droit.
Tom Spencer, Alexandre K. Magnan, Simon Donner, Matthias Garschagen, James Ford, Virginie K. E. Duvat et al., “Habitability of low-lying socio-ecological systems under a changing climate”, Climatic Change, 2024.
Harald Sterly, Marion Borderon, Patrick Sakdapolrak et al., “Habitability for a connected, unequal and changing world”, Global Environmental Change, 2025.
Johan Rockström, Joyeeta Gupta et al., “Safe and just Earth system boundaries”, Nature, 2023.
Timothy M. Lenton, Chi Xu, Jesse F. Abrams et al., “Quantifying the human cost of global warming”, Nature Sustainability, 2023.
Conceptual note v1. This is a working research foundation, not a claim of academic consensus. It will evolve as the measurement framework is tested, challenged and compared with other approaches.
Habitability acknowledges its intellectual influences while retaining responsibility for its own definitions, methodology, data choices and conclusions.