RESIDENTIAL QUALITY ASSESSMENT - ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES USING GIS

This paper focuses on the construction of residential quality scores as a preliminary step towards defining neighborhoods in urban areas. Two issues have been addressed: (1) the effect of spatial scale in the delineation of boundaries, and (2) variations in the assessment of residential quality when alternative methods are used. The spatial analysis undertaken in this research is integrated into a vector-based GIS environment to facilitate information exchange as well as the generation of topological information. The City of Syracuse (NY) is selected as the study area.