The Quality of Life in Latin American Cities: Markets and Perception

A growing number of cities around the world have established systems for monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective information with subjective opinions and cover a wide variety of topics. This book assesses a method that takes advantage of both types of information and offers criteria to identify and rank the issues of potential importance for urban dwellers. This method---which combines the so-called "hedonic price" and "life satisfaction" approaches to value public goods---was tested in pilot studies in six Latin American cities: Bogota, Buenos Aires, Lima, Medellin, Montevideo, and San Jose of Costa Rica.

The Quality of Life in Latin American Cities: Markets and Perception proposes a monitoring system that is easy to operate and that entails reasonable costs but also has a solid conceptual basis. Long the ideal of many scholars and practitioners, such a system may soon become a reality and have the potential to make a significant contribution to the decision-making processes in any city concerned with the well-being of its residents.