Quality of life in cities – Empirical evidence in comparative European perspective

This study in­ves­ti­gated as­pects of ur­ban qual­ity of life in Eu­ro­pean cities. To this end, the Flash Eu­ro­barom­e­ter 366: Qual­ity of life in Eu­ro­pean cities was used. The sur­vey pro­vides opin­ions of 41 thou­sands in­hab­i­tants from 79 Eu­ro­pean cities, which en­ables analy­sis of in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween cit­i­zen char­ac­ter­is­tics, neigh­bour­hood and city con­texts and sat­is­fac­tion with life in a city. The study analysed the fol­low­ing di­men­sions po­ten­tially re­lated to sat­is­fac­tion with life in a city: (1) avail­abil­ity of ser­vices, en­vi­ron­ment and so­cial as­pects in cities and neigh­bour­hood; (2) so­cio-de­mo­graphic fac­tors; and (3) city char­ac­ter­is­tics such as eco­nomic de­vel­op­ment, labour mar­ket pres­sures, size, lo­ca­tion, qual­ity of in­sti­tu­tions and safety.Find­ings in­di­cated that sat­is­fac­tion with life in a city var­ied con­sid­er­ably both in­side cities and across Eu­rope. Dis­sat­is­fac­tion with pub­lic trans­port, cul­tural fa­cil­i­ties, avail­abil­ity of re­tail out­lets, green space, air qual­ity, trust­wor­thi­ness of peo­ple, pub­lic ad­min­is­tra­tion and ad­min­is­tra­tional ef­fi­ciency, con­tributed sig­nif­i­cantly to dis­sat­is­fac­tion with life in a city. How­ever, when cit­i­zens felt se­cure and sat­is­fied with their place of liv­ing, they were also more likely to be sat­is­fied with life in a city. Fi­nally, cities with high per­cent­age of peo­ple sat­is­fied with safety in a city tended to be those in which cit­i­zens were also more sat­is­fied with life in a city.JRC.DDG1.01-Econometrics and applied statistic