An approach to determine and improve the quality of urban life in the context of municipal services: Med-sized city cases

The interaction between social, physical and economic environment in the urban areas defines the quality of urban life, which is significantly influenced by the local politics and implementations. Defining a methodology in order to determine and improve the quality of urban life with respect to municipal services, which is the main interest of urban managers and urban planners, is the main focus of this study.In order to guide urban planning and urban management processes; developing a guideline based on the quality of life indicators and measures in order to monitor the changes and developments, displaying the current image of quality of life in urban areas and introducing the factors that affect the quality of urban life are the main objectives of this study.The guideline developed for quality of life is composed of 9 basic categories regarding municipal services, which include 19 indicators and 43 measures. Field studies have been undertaken in 22 med-sized urban settlements. Based on the evaluation of the data collected during the field studies: 1) urban areas are analyzed comparatively using maximizing techniques and quality of life portrays are determined by spider graphs, 2) urban areas are listed based on the quality of life index values determined by using factor analysis method and 3) the location maps of urban areas are formed by using multidimensional scaling method.Finally, regression analyses are performed to find out the degree of influence of the factors that are supposed to affect the quality of urban life. Priority areas are determined within this framework in order to develop politics and implementations to improve the quality of urban life. It has been concluded that, developing the budgets of municipalities, education level of the population, economic and employment conditions of the citizens and the communication and participation opportunities provided by municipalities, highly improve the quality of urban life.