ABSTRACT
When we think about how our material QOL is linked with others’, places often comes to mind, be they neighborhoods, municipalities, regions, or nations. More clearly and concretely than for technology, family, or career, we grasp how place provides the collective infrastructure for QOL-services, amenities, landscapes, and other features that are external to various users (residents, workers, shoppers, commuters, tourists, and other place occupants) and shared by them all-connoted by the idea of “public QOL.” This term begs analytical precision; sharing place-based QOL depends on the particular place feature in question, its context, and typical experience. Maps and city charters lend the impression that place features are accessible to all within its territory, but distance often determines practical access (hence the real estate broker’s motto: “Location, location, location!”), while markets, laws, and other systems of distribution effectively limit access further (as beachgoers will recognize when private residences enclose prime beachfront). Nonetheless, from the basic idea that place features are external to and shared by place occupants come the premises that place represents a social good; that the extent and kind of its benefits indicate a place’s QOL; and that the latter’s maintenance and enhancement are political matters. Sociologist Daniel Bell (1999) elaborates:
Social goods are not divisible into individual items of possession but are part of a communal service (e.g., national defense, education, beautification of landscape, flood control, and so on). These goods and services are not sold to individual consumers nor adjusted to individual tastes. The nature and amount of goods must be set by a single decision, applicable
jointly to all persons. Social goods, therefore, are subject to communal or political, rather than individual, demand.
