Measuring and modelling Quality of Urban life: A domain specific approach on housing, neighborhood, transportation and job well-being

During the last decade, urban planning scientists have become interested in the concept of quality of life (QOL) and this topic has re-emerged with a new focus on urban settings as a response to challenges that cities are facing. Particularly, urban growth and migration have been acknowledged as the consequences of QOL differences among places. These differences concern both objective features of living places and people’s subjective assessments of the Quality of Urban Life (QOUL).Therefore, in order to understand QOUL, we need to investigate how residents judge urban places, and use them to conduct their daily activities.
As the objective of this research is investigating Quality Of Life (QOL) with explicit focus on the role of the physical and urban environment, four main urban domains (housing well-being, neighborhood well-being, transport well-being and job well-being) have been examined in details. Following our domain-based satisfaction approach, all other main life domains viz. income well-being, health well-being, family life well-being, social well-being and leisure well-being are introduced and included in the final assessment of well-being. A bottom-up approach, which is common in quality of urban life studies is used in our analysis, where well-being in different life domains is used to predict overall QOL.
Based on the conceptual framework and the surveyed designed for this research, the data has been collected among the residents of the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.Using Path analysis method, the findings of this study assert that the most important predictor of QOL is income well-being followed by health well-being and social well-being, respectively. Satisfaction ratings regarding physical domains such as neighborhood and house have less impact compared with income well-being, health well-being and social well-being domains. Furthermore, job well-being and transport well-being have the least total effect on QOL. The dominate role of income well-being on QOL clearly reflects the importance of the financial aspects in maintaining a good life. Positive assessment of income is associated with all life domains directly and indirectly, and thereby has a huge impact on QOL.