A Well-Being Index for Housing in the Central Districts of Madrid, Spain

Mapping urban well-being with Quality Of Life Index (QOLI) at the fine-scale of grid data

“…On the other hand, the micro-scale approach focuses on a single city, and evaluates its districts or neighbourhoods. So far, researchers have conducted analyses at different spatial scales, such as street blocks 12 , group blocks 15 , exogenously partitioned n neighbourhoods 9 , city districts 11 , or even buildings treated as POI data or walking circles around them 13 , 14 . Fine spatial resolution allows comparisons to be made between distinct parts of the city, identifying areas where the quality of life is low and where policy makers need to take urgent action; however, the size, proportions and shapes of the analytical units also matter.…”

“…Areas that are too large or irregular can themselves be very diverse, so that people living in the same unit can experience very different living conditions. For example, in the case of the Socioeconomic Well-Being Index, developed by Sánchez et al 11 , the analytical units are the central districts in Madrid, while in some of them (e.g. the Retiro district) the internal spatial pattern is composed of both densely populated housing estates and large areas of green spaces.…”

“…The index is calculated for each district in Istanbul, as the weighted, standardised mean of the indicators. A similar approach was proposed by Sánchez et al 11 to measure the quality of life in the central districts of Madrid using environmental and socio-economic variables. The indicators were evaluated using Frechet’s Distance.…”

“…However, although the proposed index took urban population density into account, it was only used as a variable in the model and not as a standardisation tool—the neighbourhood’s amenities were not calculated per capita. Studies 10 , 11 have evaluated urban well-being as the weighted sum of the indicators at the district scale. The disadvantage of this approach is the large area covered by one analytical unit—the districts are so large that they are internally very diverse in terms of quality of life, making the results unreliable.…”

“…Therefore, the primary hypothesis to be tested in the empirical part of this study is that Warsaw follows the same spatial pattern of high inner and low outer levels of QOL. Alternatively, some research reports clusters of high quality of life in various locations across the studied city, not necessarily in the central part 11 , 16 . Thus, the second hypothesis in this paper is that there are hot spots of exceptional living standards in Warsaw’s residential districts.…”