Geographic Assessment of Urban Quality of Life Using Socio-economic and Environmental Factors Across Mexico City.

Abstract

Urban areas are places of economic and social development characterized by progress and improved standards of living, especially in the developing world where some areas have become places of convergence, resembling many affluent cities in the developed world. However, cities are also areas of great social, economic and environmental impairment where a multitude of issues can spatially combine to produce places of hardship and depravation. This economic disparity coupled with spatial segregation between the rich and the poor has led to the argument in Latin America that inequality in terms of income and socio-economic status is the most characteristic trait of the social structure of cities, even more so than poverty. In recent years urban quality of life studies have been developed that incorporate socio-economic as well as environmental data. Their results suggest geographic distribution of inequality might not only be restricted to pockets of socio-economic factors but that they might also be representative of environmental inequality. Yet very few studies have explored how the socio-economic information relates to the environmental factors or how to significantly describe the spatial patterns of quality of life as they relate to the socio-economic and environmental structure of the city. This paper evaluates a quality of life index for Mexico City that takes into account social as well as environmental factors and further analyzes the spatial characteristics of quality of life by applying geographic clustering techniques. Furthermore, it explores the relation between environmental and social factors through a regression model.