Assessing the quality of life (QOL), its significance in urban planning and the feasibility of establishing a Quality of Life Reporting System (QOLRS) in cities, the historic city of Esfahan as the case example

摘要

Quality of life (QOL) represents the level of welfare as recognized by the people. Its key concept is the recognition of every single individual's expectation from life and its quality. Besides, the QOL introduces the differences between the hopes, wishes and expectations of individuals as against the opportunities and limitation of each society. In this paper the QOL concept, the community trends approach and methodology of launching a Quality Of Life Reporting System (QOLRS) are applied not only to assess the QOL and its impacts on the urban planning system in the historic city of Esfahan, but also to test the feasibility of launching a QOLRS in the city chosen as the case example, i.e., Esfahan. To reach this aim, information about the measures and indexes of QOL are obtained from two different streams, one from the official sources and the other through the direct contact with the citizens. After analysing the results, this assessment revealed the fact that the differences in the quality of employment, population resources, and community affordability measures were higher. While, despite a high degree of difference between the applied QOL measures, the difference in community stress, community participation and community safety measures are noticeable. The results also indicated the possibility of establishing a QOLRS in this city based upon the information sources used in this study, as well as the prospects of enhancing the urban development planning and management procedures through setting up an adapted process of organizational framework and control mechanism, production of planning visions and goals based on community agreements and evaluation and decision taking processes. Also it was deduced that the QOLRS can produce an appropriate blueprint for reaching consensus and a common language between citizens, planners and urban decision takers in a sectoral and centralized planning system of this city. The paper emphasises the necessity of reaching an integrated urban planning and management system through a well devised set of improvements to the inter-organizational relations and structure of the cities in general and this case example specifically.