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Community Well-Being or Quality of Place? A Few Notes and Their Application in Czech Republic

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New Dimensions in Community Well-Being

Part of the book series: Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being ((CQLWB))

Abstract

Community well-being is an umbrella term for different ways of describing community development. The combination of words community and well-being is a result of the application of the psychological term well-being to territorial planning, or generally, to a geographical context. This paper includes an analysis of the concept of well-being in its original psychological context, and an assessment of the suitability of its application in the form of community well-being. Quality of life, in our understanding, is based on the examination of a good life. In psychology and other sciences oriented towards the subjective dimension of quality of life, the attention is focused on ‘how’ a person lives his/her life; on the other hand, in geography and other sciences oriented towards the objective dimension of quality of life, the attention is focused on ‘where’ a person lives his/her life, i.e. the ‘place’. The key element of the geography of quality of life is the phenomenon of a ‘good place’ as a place, where a good life is lived. The described approach provides a framework for the analysis of different-size groups of municipalities and small towns, using self-reported evaluations of the quality of life of their inhabitants.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some authors (Michalos 2014; Veenhoven 2014a) use the term ‘qualities of life’.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by the SGS grant of Faculty of Science, Humanities and Education Technical University of Liberec, project No 21105 and the research project APVV-0018-12 “Human geography and demography interactions, nodes and contradictions in time-space network.” We would like to express our very great appreciation to Mrs. Catherine E. Dimmock-Benko, B. Ed., M. A, external teacher at the Department of Languages, for her willingness to provide the linguistic correction of this article. The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their critical evaluation to enhance the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, Humanities and Education, Technical University, Liberec, Czech Republic

    František Murgaš

  2. Department of Human Geography and Demography, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Michal Klobučník

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  1. František Murgaš
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  2. Michal Klobučník
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Correspondence to František Murgaš .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Public and Nonprofit Studies, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA

    Patsy Kraeger

  2. School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

    Scott Cloutier

  3. Entrepreneurial Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, USA

    Craig Talmage

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Murgaš, F., Klobučník, M. (2017). Community Well-Being or Quality of Place? A Few Notes and Their Application in Czech Republic. In: Kraeger, P., Cloutier, S., Talmage, C. (eds) New Dimensions in Community Well-Being. Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55408-2_3

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