Cities are central to the economic and social development of European society, not only because over 80% of European citizens live in urban areas, but also because cities are at the same time centres of production, innovation, employment, and culture, and loci of segregation, deprivation, and ethnic conflict. The emergence of a European-wide urban policy, has given new impetus to the need for comparable indicators of the quality of life to monitor development and policy implementation. This paper reviews the literature on quality of life indicators, and argues that traditional measures of the quality of life need to be supplemented with two new dimensions that reflect more recent postmodernist thinking about the composition of urban landscapes, and the contribution to the quality of life of the emerging information society. We argue that the challenges of building appropriate indicators reflecting these new dimensions are considerable, even in urban environments so rich in information systems and data sources, if they are to qualify as ‘digital cities’. There are difficulties in finding common workable definitions of the indicators themselves, as well as definitions of the relevant populations, including city residents, and users. By raising these issues and suggesting possible avenues for addressing these challenges we contribute to a much-needed debate on how to define such indicators, which is the prerequisite for their development and use.
Contemporary cities are characterized by an increasing concentration of populations (inhabitants, commuters, tourists) using a limited set of services and resources. Accessibility of services can be evaluated according to educational, cultural and economic disparities, but also in terms of traffic, transport systems and other issues concerning urban mobility. The first part of the paper deals with the concept of accessibility as a crucial aspect to examine in order to evaluate quality of life in the metropolitan areas as well as in the medium cities and small towns. This part is developed according to a theoretical framework based on Amartya Sen's categories of functionings and capabilities . In the second part of the paper survey data regarding the accessibility of services in Italy are analyzed in order to test similarities and disparities among cities of different size.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.