A Customized Model for Assessing Urban Life Quality Based on Objective and Subjective Approaches (Case study, Qom city, District one)

The quality of urban life considers as a key concept for meeting the basic needs of citizens in the context of general welfare, social well-being and people's satisfaction, as well as an effective tool for evaluating public policies, ranking places and monitoring urban planning and management policies and strategies. For this purpose, urban managers need to plan a standard environment for citizens using the studied policies from urban developers which leads to a better life quality. These studies are different depending on what kind of approaches and the quality assessment methods were used. Therefore, different approaches were used to assess the urban quality life, however, there were no extensive study to consider physical, spatial and social indicators. Many researchers believe that the life quality is a multi-dimensional concept and could be expressed using objective and subjective approaches. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to measure the quality of urban life based on two objective and subjective approaches at districts level in region one of Qom city, Iran. In this way, based on the study area features and available data, two domains of accessibility and sound pollution accompany with their indicators were assessed. These lasts were done by calculating the quantitative data, performing the qualitative analysis and questioning the citizens. In fact, there is a direct relationship between life quality and district features. If these features could be spatially optimized, their access will be simplified and ultimately will have positive effect on districts' residents and their life quality will be improved. On the other hand, the factors causing sound pollution such as vehicles, crowdsourcing on the street, day-to-day construction activities, increasing industries in the vicinity of cities are reducing the quality of life. In this research, for accessibility domain, indicators like administrative, educational, commercial, health-therapeutic, sport-recreational, cultural-religious and green space were considered and for sound pollution domain, street network, urban land use and population density were considered. For extracting and modeling these ten indicators, in two principal domains of this research, the three layers of land use, street network and population were used. By producing classified maps of two domains of accessibility and sound pollution in objective and subjective dimensions, the correlation between objective and subjective outcomes was investigated. In addition, neighborhoods ranking in terms of urban life quality was assessed. The results of integrating these layers, with regard of objective approach, showed a particular pattern of life quality rate. This pattern demonstrated the highest life quality rate in city center and it decreases gradually when we distance from city center. However, the spatial analysis of statistical data showed different pattern. Finally, in order to provide a management tool, neighborhoods were ranked based on the final indicators extracted from TOPSIS method. The best sub-districts, based on objective and subjective approaches, were Nobahar and Bajak-3. One of the other objective of the study was to investigate the correlation between the results of life quality indicators in two objective and subjective dimensions. So they were analyzed separately using Pearson's correlation coefficient. The results showed a high correlation between objective and subjective results in commercial and green space indicators, and a significant positive relationship was observed in street network, administrative, cultural-religious, health-therapeutic and population density indicators, however, the other indicators demonstrated an inverse correlation. Overall, it can be concluded that the subjective results are more reliable than the objective results.