Abstract: Recently,governments have paid attention to a Livable City as well as researchers and the media in China so that a Livable City has become a new focus in Chinese urban development,but they mostly focus on the concept of a Livable City and few could turn ideas into action.The paper points out that we should make the intrinsic meaning of a Livable City clear and confirm the definitions of Livability and a Livable City and principles of a Livable City,and then establish and quantify its index system.Through the evaluation of a Livable City,we would find the strength and weakness of the city as a Livable City,which would be helpful to confirm its construction orientation and developmental steps in the future.Based on relevant research literatures of theory about a Livable City and practice of urban construction and the concept of "a city for people",the paper systematically does research on evaluative content of a Livable City,index system design and evaluative methods of residential environment in inner cities.Firstly,The paper sets up the evaluative framework of a Livable City focusing on appraising 5 indexes such as convenience,amenity,health,safety and community of a city,which includes two index systems,that is,the index system of objective evaluation including 5 index and 21 sub-indexes and the index system of subjective evaluation including 5 index systems and 31 sub-indexes.Secondly,the paper discusses how to gather data.On the one hand,the objective data should be got from digital map,SPOT data,GIS data and so on.On the other hand,the subjective data should mainly gather resident survey data and fieldwork.Finally,the paper presents three main evaluative method systems such as Economical Value Evaluation,GIS tools and econometric estimation.Economical Value Evaluation,aiming to assess the value of residential environment adjustment and value difference of residential environment,includes Contingent Valuation Method,Direct Expenditure Method,Consumer’s Surplus Method,Travel Cost Method,Hedonic Price Method,Contingent Valuation Method and Computable General Equilibrium.Furthermore,the paper establishes a framework of residential environmental evaluation based on GIS to quantify different spatial levels of residential environment in inner cities and put evaluative results into maps directly, and then it would also analyze effecting factors,spatial differences and spatial structure of a city as a Livable City by multidimensional scaling,factor analysis,cluster analysis and multiple regression analysis.According to the evaluative results,we can prospect the trends in the determinants of livability and spatial trends in livability across areas,and give suggestions for the development of a Livable City such as that of determinants of livability,policy suggestions of infrastructure construction by different population groups and that of regional development in a Livable City.