On 18th October 2021, Build4People members from all work packages and local institutions met in a virtual discussion workshop in order to reflect on the Urban Quality of Life survey and next collaborative steps of this transdisciplinary work.
WP#1 – the responsible team for developing and conducting the UQoL Survey – hosted this event and invited the different WP’s to present and discuss the facets of UQoL from their disciplinary perspective. The selection of the most important aspects of UQoL, possible questionnaire items and possible other methods, that can measure the individual perspective of citizens of Phnom Penh within the project’s activities, were discussed.
In the beginning, Dr. Anke Blöbaum was introducing the concept of UQoL from an environmental psychological perspective with a focus on psychological stress models that describe how people perceive and evaluate environmental stimuli and how they cope with environmental stress.
Afterwards, Annalena Becker shared lessons learned from the first two Build4People household surveys and considerations of how to structure the upcoming questionnaire. Possible questionnaire items that consider the facets of the environmental stress such as urban heat and the perception of coping mechanisms, that help to support environmental stress, have been introduced.
In the two breakout sessions, all participating WPs shared their ideas and possible contributions to the survey questionnaire. The discussion was facilitated with the interactive online platform MIRO board.
After the presentation of the discussion content of each session, the participants of the workshop were able to discuss general challenges of the survey such as the prioritization of important aspects of the urban environment that have an effect on peoples’ wellbeing. In this regard, the project team decided to organize a further structuring process for the UQoL survey by differentiating between precise hypothesis about the factors’ influences on the quality of life of people, and open research questions that might also be tackled via other scientific methods and interactive participation formats within the Build4People activities, e.g. the Citizen Science Approach.
Further meetings will soon take place in order to discuss the main parts of the UQoL questionnaire, organizational aspects of the data collection and subsequently steps towards analysis and modeling of urban quality of life.