Foundational economy scholarship has developed a rich conceptual account of the goods, services and infrastructures required to sustain everyday life. Yet the empirical measurement of foundational livability remains comparatively underdeveloped, particularly where monetary resources, spatial accessibility and time use intersect. This paper addresses that gap through the Austrian Re:sI:Ze project, which combines three complementary dimensions: residual income, social infrastructure and time use. Drawing on the Austrian Household Budget Survey 2019/20, a municipality-level social infrastructure dataset and the Austrian Time Use Survey 2021/22, the project examines what existing data can reveal about foundational livability and where important research gaps remain. The descriptive findings show that necessary expenditure substantially reduces the effective financial resources of low-income, tenant, single-person and single-parent households. They also reveal marked territorial differences in access to childcare, education, health, care and social services, with particularly weak provision in smaller municipalities and when accessibility by public transport is considered. Time-use patterns further demonstrate persistent gender inequalities in unpaid work, which are especially pronounced in households with children and in municipalities with poorer infrastructure provision. Taken together, the three pillars show that foundational livability cannot be captured through income or regional averages alone. The available datasets, however, do not permit direct causal analysis of how changes in provision affect household expenditure, time burdens or ecological pressures. The paper, therefore, presents Re:sI:Ze as both an empirical proof of concept and a research agenda for developing more integrated, longitudinal and spatially sensitive measures of foundational livability.
