Journal of Engineering Research - Egypt (Oct 2022)
Sustainable Urban Quality-of-Life in Neighborhoods: Bridging the Gap between Satisfaction and Performance in Four Types of Neighborhoods in GCR - Egypt
Abstract
Urban sustainability and quality of urban life are two norms concerning the evaluation of neighborhood in term of performance and satisfaction, respectively. Urban sustainability aims to enhance economic, environmental, and social aspects for current and future generations; it depends on objective measures of performance to ensure that sustainable community perform well. On the other side, Quality-of-life aims to ensure residents satisfaction about their community in recent times. Isolating sustainability indicators from the practical context of resident’s satisfaction and their aim for high quality-of-life may cause ignorance and low applicability of sustainability. On the other side, applying quality-of-life may be associated with negative impacts on sustainability. Accordingly, urban sustainability is met with public ignorance by residents and practitioners, due to people most concern for high quality-of-life. The reason is the lack of considering residents satisfaction in assessing urban sustainability. An involvement of resident’s satisfaction with quality-of-life as key factor in achieving urban sustainability is required to establish an applicable social sustainable quality-of-life guideline for urban development. The research depends on a case study of four types of neighborhoods to provide clarification of three interlocking concerns, trace how urban sustainability behavior and quality-of-life satisfaction varies across neighborhood categories, define the relation between quality-of-life satisfaction and sustainability performance and define how neighborhoods urban form can compromise to build sustainable quality-of-life. The results found that satisfaction does not emerge as an important predictor of sustainability; it failed to find significant relation between residents’ satisfaction and social sustainability. It is found that both traditional and new planed NHs stands short against achieving sustainability in term of satisfaction and behavior, respectively; compared to early planned NHs that achieve optimized values of sustainable quality-of-life.
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