Background

Finding factors that influence the choice of a living space is not simple. While location analyses for companies are widely used, analysing a location to determine its suitability as living space is not discussed as frequently. Still, there are some pieces of literature that provide the necessary information. The most important paper that was used in this project is from Fahrländer Partner with the title: ' Wohn- und Lebensqualitäts-Index, WLQI: Vergleich der Wohn- und Lebensqualität in der Schweiz .' (engl. 'Living and live quality index, WLQI: Comparision between living and live quality in Switzerland'). It provides not only factors that influence the potential living space quality, but also the according weights for different user groups. Other papers were used to support or complete the information given by Fahrländer Partner. While factor 1 (F1) to factor 4 (F4) are all found in Fahrländer Partner AG (2014), F5 was slightly modified due to the availability of appropriate data. Fahrländer Partner suggests the 'Image' of a municipality or a place to have influence on the choice of a living situation. As no such dataset was available the share of unemployed citizens (between 15 and 64 years) per municipality was used instead, as suggested by Salvini & Heye (2012). From the studied papers, the following factors were chosen for our implementation
image Centrality
(F1)  Travel time to the next centre with nationwide significance.
(F2) Travel time to the next centre with regionwide significance by street transportation.
(F3) Travel time to the next centre with regionwide significance with public transportation.
image Location Quality
(F4)  Tranquility of a place


image Unemployment Rate
(F5) The image of a municipality, measured by the share of unemployed inhabitants.
As the horizontal segregation of living space qualities is examined in this work, a choice on user groups had to be made. Those user groups must be defined with their respective weights for each factor. Both definitions were taken and adapted from Fahrländer Partner. The user groups consist of a combination of the living situation and the lifestyle. In the table below all groups and their weights for each factor are shown.
image User groups according to Fahrländer Partner, that were also used for the implementation of the maps in this project.
image Weights per user group and influence factor used in this implementation. Adapted from Fahrländer Partner.

Methods