Measuring Quality of Life: an Integrated Evaluation of Built Environment

Despite efforts developing the quality of life indicators to monitor the pro-gress and impact of urban policy, they do not necessarily reflect the resi-dents’ quality of life priorities. This paper proposes an integrated planning support tool to enable the evaluation of the built environment from the per-spective of residents’ quality of life (QoL). The planning support tool that consists of QoL indicators is applied to seven districts of Canberra, Austra-lia. The QoL level in each district is compared and key indicators to im-prove two of the districts that have lower QoL level are identified. The pa-per simulates the change in QoL level by improving the key factors using scenario analysis. The finding shows that there is a high potential that only minimum intervention to improve the most influential indicator has a sig-nificant impact on enhancing QoL. The paper proposes a method to map the cross-cutting indicator related to urban policy, and concludes with the implications to urban planning and further analysis.