Assessing Quality of Life Across Mexico City Using Socio-Economic and Environmental Factors

Introduction

Urban areas are places of economic and social development where people can gain access to a wide variety of resources from which to make a living. In many cases, urban areas have become symbols of progress and improved standards of living, especially in the developing world (Aguilar & Ward, 2003). However, cities can also be places of great social, economic, and environmental impairment where multiple issues combine to produce areas of hardship and deprivation. In developing nations, where urbanization rates are among the highest in the world, urbanization is often a vague idea rather than a factual description (Cohen, 2006). In these cities, there is often extreme socio-economic polarization, and residents do not always share equally in access to resources and opportunities. In certain cities in the developing world, many zones or neighborhoods lack the basic infrastructure that most would identify as integral to life, such as paved roads, electricity, and running water (Brugmann, 2009). Measuring the disparity and inequity of the quality of life in cities is a challenge for researchers, particularly in developing nations where data are not always readily available.

To aid in this task, researchers have proposed various indices for quantifying urban quality of life in order to better measure disparities and inequalities (Kamp et al., 2003; Pacione, 2003; Li & Weng, 2007; Fan & Qi, 2009, Liang & Weng, 2011; Shen et al., 2013). These quality of life indices typically incorporate a variety of socio-economic variables (e.g., income, education, etc.) to produce numerical summaries describing quality of life that can then be mapped across different areas of the city (Kropp & Lein, 2012). Such indices have become important tools to summarize the complex social conditions, which often guide the creation of new policies to reduce urban struggles and promote smart and sustainable growth (Hagerty et al., 2001; Shen et al., 2011). Furthermore, it has been argued that the quality of life, or livability of a place, is a direct result of the interaction not only between social and economic characteristics of a city but also its physical domain (Shafer et al., 2000). Therefore, researchers have more recently begun studying socio-economic and environmental factors together through these indices to achieve a holistic measure of the quality of a place (Liang & Weng, 2011).

Due to the spatial nature of these quality of life investigations, geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing technologies are often employed for analysis (Green, 1952; Lo, 1997; Weng, 2010). For example, Li & Weng (2007) advance a method for computing an urban quality of life index (QLI) using GIS and remote sensing that merges socio-economic and environmental variables by incorporating all significant components derived from principal component analysis (PCA). The method weights each component according to the percent variability it can explain from the original socio-economic and environmental data, resulting in a comprehensive representation of urban quality of life.