Title:	Investigating Quality of Urban Life
Authors:	Robert W. Marans Robert J. Stimson
Keywords:	Quality of Urban Life
Issue Date:	2011
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	All people and all places are concerned with quality of life (QOL). Therefore it is not surprising that the topic has attracted the attention of researchers from many disciplines since the 1960s. While the topic has been studied with regularity for nearly a half century by researchers in psychology, sociology, geography, planning, and other disciplines, the past decade has seen an acceleration of scholarly interest in QOL including a stream of studies investigating individual well-being and happiness. As most of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and with disparate populations in advanced nations being highly concentrated in large cities, it is inevitable that many QOL studies have focused on measuring and modeling aspects of life in urban areas or the quality of urban life (QOUL). This book addresses that focus. In planning for this volume, we established three objectives: (a) First, we believed it was important to provide a detailed overview of the approaches that have emerged over the past half century in studies of QOL in general and QOUL in particular. This includes, on the one hand, approaches focusing on the objective measurement of QOL and QOUL using secondary analysis of aggregate data and, on the other hand, approaches focusing on the measurement and analysis of subjective evaluations and appraisals of QOL and QOUL. More recently, efforts have been made to integrate the objective and subjective approaches in studies of QOL and QOUL. These efforts have been enhanced with the advent and development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies. This objective is addressed in Chaps. 1–6. (b) Second, through our own research on QOUL including empirical studies in Detroit, Michigan (USA), and in Brisbane, Queensland (Australia), we were aware of the emergence of other research employing survey-based approaches to collecting information on aspects of both QOL and QOUL. The research was conducted in a number of urban settings, both large and small, in many parts of the world. Some of those studies used similar sets of questions to those used in the Detroit and Brisbane surveys although the modes of administering the surveys differed. Likewise, the purposes of the various studies, the particular aspects of urban life addressed, and the level or scale of the urban environment varied from place to place. Thus, we wanted to provide a series of case studies conducted by people in our network of research colleagues that illustrated these different situations, approaches, and outcomes. This objective is addressed in Chaps. 7–14.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/50724
ISBN:	978-94-007-1742-8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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