Assessment of Urban Quality of Life Index at Local Scale with Different Weighting Approaches

The rapid increase of population and urban growth have caused huge challenges in ensuring and sustaining environmental and life quality in megacities. In this context, determining, measuring, and analysing the elements that influence city quality of life (QoL) have become important for sustainable urban growth and development. There is a growing interest in QoL assessments, yet reliable and transparent knowledge about the methodology is limited. In this regard, this study aims to contribute to the literature by achieving two distinctive objectives: (1) providing a methodology for investigating the robustness of different weighting approaches to produce a comprehensive and adaptable process for the construction of composite indicators; (2) measuring the urban quality of life at neighbourhood level by including geographical data. Data-dependent statistical methods i.e. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Entropy; and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques i.e. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Best–Worst Method (BWM) were applied to provide objective and subjective weighting approaches, respectively when calculating the urban quality of life (UQoL) index. The findings showed that there is no considerable difference in the pattern and overall ratio of the weights calculated from different methods; nevertheless, the degree of the weights varies according to the applied method. The results from sensitivity analysis applied to the selected indicator weights covering each method used in the analysis represent the effect of alternative criteria weights on the overall results and the findings point to the weakness of data-dependent methods. The study’s methodology can be applied to similar situations at local, regional, and global scales.