Assessment method of urban quality of life at the neighborhood scale

Abstract

Accelerated urbanization without adequate planning can create inappropriate urban spaces and negatively affect people’s quality of life. As a result, studies on urban quality of life have become increasingly relevant, mainly by proposing indicators at the local level, such as the city, neighborhood, and building levels. Key contributions of these studies include creating a database with diverse information sources and refining a set of international and national indicators. However, they also highlight ongoing challenges in developing urban quality of life indicators, such as difficulties in harmonizing data due to varying methodologies and, notably, limited access to data, especially in Brazil. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a method to evaluate the urban quality of life at the neighborhood scale, from a study in a Brazilian neighborhood. Its results include (1) the elaboration of the evaluation method; (2) the implementation of the quantitative and qualitative evaluation and analysis of the results; and (3) the presentation of these results through visual devices that support the discussion and dissemination of the method. The main contribution of the proposed method is the inclusion of the perception of inhabitants in the weighting of indicators of urban quality of life.