Building Knowledge about Quality of Life for Urban Planning

The comprehensive notion of community quality of life holds important opportunities for planning. Popular interest in the subject, both as a curiosity and as a goal of many interest groups, may assist with the public relations of planning and may provide a basis for negotiating consensus in planning goals. To date, planners have focused largely on individual elements of quality of life, such as transportation or housing; they have not defined and measured systematically the comprehensive community quality of life. This article describes a research method suitable for planning and contrasts it with alternative social science approaches that yield different results. The community-trend method stresses the role of quality of life within a system of ongoing development processes. The method also seeks greater policy relevance by grounding the measurements in local political reality.