Urban quality assessment by means of indicators and indexes: application of an acoustic quality index and analysis of other significant indexes for smart cities evaluations

Quality of Life (QoL) in Urban Areas is becoming a strategic issue for city planners. In Europe, the rapidly increasing urban population amplifies the need of more attention on good quality urban areas creation and preservation. QoL assessment is a multidisciplinary concept involving environmental, social, urban planning features and subjective estimation. The general objective of the research is to provide a procedure for standardizing the evaluation of urban QoL levels and to perform its optimisation. The method is based on definition of indicators and indexes that, by means of relative weights (RW) and weighting factors (WF), can take into account an association of a large number of playing factors. The Noise Quality Index (NQI) has been obtained considering noise pollution, traffic intensity, population involved etc. RWs and WFs have been defined and calibrated to reach a significant objective judgment, taking into account the national/international legislation and displeasure levels. In this way the NQI contributes to weigh up QoL levels of different urban areas. In the paper wider analyses are presented to confirm the definition of the relative weights and the weighting factors presented in a previous work and are extended to urban areas with different destination (residential, commercial, etc). Moreover indexes on environmental quality, accessibility, other services to quantify Smart Cities requirements are discussed