Quality of life and place sustainability: a residents’ view

The concept of sustainability applied to the territories implies an integrated perspective considering the economic, the social, the environmental and the institutional dimensions. A vision of sustainability is nowadays crucial to the success of places, a condition in which the adoption of a Place Marketing Policy to create value and to emphasize identities is definitively interiorized by the literature. The success is achieved when the actors (citizens, visitants, business sector and all the actors that live the territory) obtain satisfaction from the territory performance and meet their expectations. A territory environmentally qualified, economically valuable, socially coherent and consistent in its heterogeneity, where the local agents are active participants and not spectators of the territory changes represents the objectives and the crucial condition for the development of a strategic marketing policy destination. A theoretical framework based on the contributions of Breakwell (1992, 1993), Hidalgo and Hernandez (2001), Twigger-Ross and Uzzell (1996) was developed and applied to Portimão a city located on south-western Algarve, Portugal. The study aims to describe and understand the causal relations between independent variables (individual characteristics, residential time and quality of life attributes) and dependent measures (place attachment and place-related identity)