ABSTRACT
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The world has experienced dramatic urban growth in recent decades. According to statistics from the Population Reference Bureau (2005), about 47% of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 2000. Spatial variation, social stratification, and segregation persist throughout all postindustrial cities. Therefore, study of quality of urban life has drawn increasing interest from a variety of disciplines such as planning, geography, sociology, economics, psychology, political science, behavioral medicine, marketing, and management (Andrew, 1999; Foo, 2001); such information is an important tool for policy evaluation, rating of places, and urban planning and management. Various concepts concerning urban quality of life (QOL) are encountered in the literature, such as urban environmental quality, livability, living quality, quality of place, residential perception and satisfaction, sustainability, etc. Because different disciplines address different aspects of urban quality of life based on different notions and theories, neither a comprehensive conceptual framework concerning urban QOL and human well-being nor any agreed-upon indicator system to evaluate physical, spatial, and social aspects of urban quality exists (Kamp et al., 2003). Practically, the quality of life is a collective attribute that adheres to groups of people. Bonaiuto et al. (2003) studied the perceived residential environment quality and neighborhood attachment in the city of Rome from the environmental psychological view and proposed two distinctive instruments.
