To path indicator Subpages of “Nachrichtendetail“ To navigation To quick access To footer with other services
To content
Department of Spatial Planning
Studierende sitzt am Arbeitsplatz und schaut auf den Laptop. © Aliona Kardash​/​TU Dortmund

Disentangling neighbourhood quality in different urban contexts

An Ipswich neighbourhood in Suffolk, UK © Super Straho​/​Unsplash
Seraphim Alvanides co-authored an article on assessing neighbourhood quality for urban resilience with an international team from Australia and the UK.

There is now ample empirical evidence demonstrating that our immediate social and physical environment influences our health and wellbeing. The exact pathways of this “contextual” effect on individuals are not always clear from a theoretical perspective, but many studies have concluded that neighbourhoods play a key role in our quality of life. However, neighbourhoods are complex constructs, encapsulating a whole range of socioeconomic and physical characteristics, while there is no agreement on what exactly constitutes a neighbourhood. Our international team secured funding from the Urban Studies Foundation for a comparative study evaluating neighbourhood quality in Australia and the UK. The article combines multiple attributes of neighbourhood quality consistently for selected neighbourhoods across two cities: Sydney (Australia) and Newcastle upon Tyne (UK). We introduce a neighbourhood quality index (NQI) based on a range of domains (urban green, accessibility/mobility, land-use, socioeconomic status), ensuring data and methodological consistency across the two study areas. The NQI is constructed by scaling/adjusting the data to reflect varying levels of importance and uncertainty across different criteria, and by ranking various alternatives in comparison to the ideal and the non-ideal solutions. To assess the relative importance of indicators feeding into the NQI we first undertook an online expert survey of international urban design and planning professionals who ranked the various neighbourhood attributes we had identified. By testing our multi-domain NQI in two cities we demonstrate improved transparency and robustness compared to earlier methods. Our NQI is based on measurable socioeconomic and environmental attributes and offers a practical tool for policymakers to allocate limited resources more effectively and strengthen neighbourhood quality and resilience.

The first publication from this project, published prior to the one outlined above, is a systematic literature review of the various attributes constituting neighbourhood quality reported in peer reviewed publications (from 2010 to 2022). Applying specific search and selection criteria, we analysed 86 studies globally and identified six key attributes constituting neighbourhood quality: amenities, housing, physical environment, urban green/blue, accessibility/mobility, and socioeconomic environment. Our systematic review observed ambiguity over definitions of a “neighbourhood” alongside a wide range of methods and tools employed for data collection and analysis. We concluded that there is no consensus on functional definitions of neighbourhoods, nor on methods and measures for assessing the attributes of neighbourhood quality, thus presenting a challenge for researchers and policymakers alike.

Ozbil Torun, A., Göçer, Ö., Alvanides, S., Ellis, J.C., Shrivastava, R., Gocer, K., Kent, J. (2026): An integrated assessment of neighbourhood quality to enhance urban resilience. Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research. DOI: 10.1108/ARCH-10-2025-0469
 

Funding statement: The research reported here was supported by a “Pandemics and Cities” research grant awarded by the Urban Studies Foundation to The University of Sydney (Australia) and Northumbria University (UK). Award Number: USF-PCS-220104