Life-Oriented Behavioral Research for Urban Policy

This book presents a life-oriented approach, which is an interdisciplinary methodology proposed for cross-sectoral urban policy decisions such as transport, health, and energy policies. Improving people's quality of life (QOL) is one of the common goals of various urban policies on the one hand, while QOL is closely linked with a variety of life choices on the other. The life-oriented approach argues that life choices in different domains (e.g., residence, neighborhood, health, education, work, family life, leisure and recreation, finance, and travel behavior) are not independent of one another, and ignorance of and inability to understand interdependent life choices may result in a failure of consensus building for policy decisions. The book provides evidence about behavioral interdependencies among life domains based on both extensive literature reviews and case studies covering a broad set of life choices. This work further illustrates interbehavioral analysis frameworks with respect to various life domains, along with a rich set of future research directions. This book deals with life choices in a relatively general way. Thus, it can serve not only as a reference for research, but also as a textbook for teaching and learning in varied behavior-related disciplines.

Prof. Junyi Zhang's main research interests are in the fields of urban and regional planning, transportation planning, traffic engineering, human behavior survey and modeling, tourism policy, environment and energy policy. As of October 2016, he published more than 360 peer-reviewed papers especially from the interdisciplinary perspective. He has been serving as an editorial board member in more than 10 internationally well-recognized journals and as a reviewer for nearly 40 famous international journals.