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While Quality of Life (QOL) has long been an explicit or implicit policy goal, adequate definition and measurement have been elusive. Diverse "objective" and "subjective" indicators across a range of disciplines and scales, and recent work on subjective well-being (SWB) surveys and the psychology of happiness have spurred renewed interest. Drawing from multiple disciplines, we present an integrative definition of QOL that combines measures of human needs with subjective well-being or happiness. QOL is proposed as a multiscale, multi-dimensional concept that contains interacting objective and subjective elements. We relate QOL to the opportunities that are provided to meet human needs in the forms of built, human, social and natural capital (in addition to time) and the policy options that are available to enhance these opportunities. Issues related to defining, measuring, and scaling these concepts are discussed, and a research agenda is elaborated. Policy implications include strategies for investing in opportunities to maximize QOL enhancement at the individual, community, and national scales.

Abstract:In this paper we propose a rethinking of the concepts of center and margin in geography. We review extant literatures from structuralist political geography and science-studies and explore alternative theoretical approaches to develop the concept of axes of centrality. Using theories of performativity to understand centers and margins as produced across an array of axes allows for an expansion of the concept. Contemporary experiences of transnational migration offer a useful way of thinking about how bodies produce places differently as global centers and margins. Drawing on material from two studies of transnational communities, one of white, English-speaking South African return migrants, and one of British East African Asians, we take a biographical approach, demonstrating how two individuals with extensive migration histories have performed England, South Africa, Uganda and India as variously central and marginal across the life course. We develop the concept of "axes of centrality" to demonstrate how centers and margins are most usefully conceptualized not as places in themselves, but as located in and between bodies in a variety of ways as they move through and perform space at a variety of scales and over time.We propose an understanding of centrality and marginality that takes into account the embodied conditionalities under which places become imagined and reimagined as central and/or marginal. England over the course of their lives, we flesh out these changing global geopolitical discourses by examining how centrality and marginality are constituted, reworked, and challenged in biographical context. In doing so, we explore the productive, and critical, possibilities for a much more spatially and temporally nuanced understanding of the power relations that constitutes centrality and marginality. KeywordsWe begin with a brief review of some of the major geographical schools of thought on the notion of center-margin relations and then trace the performative theoretical traditions that inform our reworking of centrality and marginality. We propose that recent work on transnational migration and the mobile body is a useful means through which to understand center-margin relations as performed by the mobility of bodies and argue that post-colonial regimes of WESSA and BUA transnational life exemplify this performative ontology. We offer empirical evidence on the mobility practices that connect WESSAs and East African Asians to the UK in ways that not only draw on normative understandings of center-margin relations but also fundamentally disrupt them. We show how a diversity of marginal and central subjectivities and positionalities are performed in multiple temporalities and spatialities and conclude by calling for a radically diverse and contingent theory of centers and 8 margins that attends to the particularities of mobile bodies along what we call intersecting "axes" of centrality. Centers and Margins in GeographyThe best-known and perhaps most influential codification of the concept of center ...

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