A Spatial Multicriteria Analysis Approach to Urban Quality of Life Assessment

A pixel-based approach to urban quality of life assessment can be regarded as a spatial decision problem under the condition of complexity because it searches the urban space for evidence of hot spots of quality of life based on multiple and differentially weighted evaluation criteria. Such an assessment involves inappropriate scaling of several incommensurate criteria, much unstructured subjectivity in the decision maker's judgment, and the large data handling in a raster GIS environment. There is a need for identifying alternative approaches to tackle the ill-structured problem in urban quality of life assessment. In this context, this research proposes and implements a spatial multicriteria analysis approach to evaluate urban quality of life in a raster GIS environment. The implementation of this methodology is illustrated with a case study of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Results indicate that the proposed methodology may provide an alternative approach for evaluating the quality of life in an urban environment.