Ciudades y calidad de vida en el Área Metropolitana de Valencia

Resumen:El presente trabajo construye un Índice Compuesto de Calidad de Vida para comparar la calidad de vida urbana en los 43 municipios del Área Metropolitana de Valencia. Se agregan siete facetas relevantes de la calidad de vida en un solo indicador, empleando para ello la metodología del Análisis Envolvente de Datos combinada con un enfoque de programación multicriterio. Los resultados muestran una clasificación jerárquica completa de todos los municipios del Área. Con excepción de la ciudad de Valencia, los municipios con más elevada calidad de vida poseen una densidad de población relativamente baja y carecen de una orientación industrial destacada.Abstract:Introduction Cities are key players with regards to modern economic growth. They are also the places where most of the problems of modern societies, like pollution, social exclusion, insecurity, unemployment and poverty show up to influence people’s quality of life. For a long time it was considered that the main strength of urban areas, including metropolitan areas, lay in its ability to raise local firms’ productivity by allowing them to reduce their cost of access to consumers and suppliers. However, current socio-economic research gives a greater role to the attractiveness enjoyed by cities as consumption centers. Greater access to a rich array of public and private goods and services can be obtained starting from a certain level of dimension of urban centers, and in combination with the availability of an attractive cultural heritage, creates an important competitive advantage to attract residents, especially for those endowed with a high human capital. This in turn affects the ability of cities to maintain a high rate of growth. Nowadays the potential growth of cities has at least as much to do with its attractiveness as a place to live as with the higher factors’ productivity, relative to non-urban areas, that may arise from the development of agglomeration economies. Goals Many cities are located in urban areas of great dimension, frequently organized around a central city that ranks higher in the urban hierarchy. The existence of metropolitan areas changes the context in which the growth of cities occurs, and also alters the patterns determining the quality of urban life. This paper aims to establish the relative position of the municipalities that make up the metropolitan area of Valencia (AMV) on a scale of quality of life, so that it becomes feasible to draw comparisons between them. A Composite Quality of Life Index (CQLI) is built up at local level, using data regarding the following dimensions: - Financial capacity of the resident population - Citizen security - Provision of welfare-related urban equipment - Environmental quality in residential areas - Availability of green spaces - Speed of movement from the place of residence to the place of work or study - Accessibility to the central city of the metropolitan area (Valencia) Methodology All the above dimensions revolve around quality of life, and result in a set of partial quantitative indicators that must be added to obtain the CQLI. Therefore it is necessary to choose a set of weights reflecting the relative importance of each of the above mentioned seven dimensions. This is one of the most problematic issues when the index is to be used to carry out comparisons between municipalities, as each of these may have different strengths and weaknesses with regard to particular dimensions. Weights’ determination can be carried out relying on the opinion of experts, which involves a substantial dose of subjectivity, or using the same weight for each of the components, which is more or less arbitrary. An alternative is to produce an endogenous determination of weights, using only the set of available information concerning decision making units (DMUs), municipalities in this case. Adopting this second perspective Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) offers interesting possibilities, which has been exploited in this paper in the construction of CQLI. This is a not conventional use of DEA, where a vector of outputs correspond to the dimensions of quality of life and inputs are reduced to a single virtual input equal to unity for all municipalities. This single input can be interpreted as a hypothetical resource manager guiding local community quality of life policy. The methodology used in this paper differs from the conventional DEA approach also in other aspects. The first concerns the failure of radial DEA models to achieve a sufficiently complete assessment of the gap between a particular DMU observed performance and best practice. The second has to do with the fact that conventional DEA models frequently operate with DMU-specific weights that can be quite unbalanced. The first problem has been addressed through the use of a non-radial measure of efficiency, the Slacks Based Measure (SBM), introduced by Tone (2001). As for the second problem, the literature has suggested various alternative solutions which have generally sought to restrict the excessive flexibility enjoyed by more conventional DEA models in outputs and inputs weightings. The use of multi-decision making models has opened new avenues to deal with this problem. For the purpose of this paper it has been of particular interest the procedure described by Despotis (2005), based on compromise programming, which finally results in the construction of a set of common weights for all DMUs. Results and conclusions Our findings allow the construction of complete ranking of quality of life among 43 municipalities of AMV. This ranking consistently shows that municipalities that usually occupy top positions according to QLCI are located North and West of the metropolitan area - plus the city of Valencia – and most of them have become residential areas of medium-high level. With some exceptions, municipalities located South of AMV have a less favorable position in terms of quality of life. These less-favored municipalities are also the ones that absorbed the first waves of industrialization in the past century surpassing the administrative limits of the city of Valencia and attracting a significant flow of immigration, and still have a job profile more biased towards industry than the rest of the AMV.