A case study of citizen complaints as social indicators

The purpose is to illustrate the applicability of the approach and the techniques of systems engineering to certain urban problems. Systems engineering can be an effective tool in the design and operation of organizations to accomplish such urban activities as police scheduling, waste disposal, river purification, fire house location, etc. The relatively unploughed ground of applying systems engineering to the quality of urban life is addressed here. The quality of urban life, an elusive but intuitively satisfying concept, is operationally useful to the extent that a city can identify and move toward achieving the goals of its citizenry. Social indicators measure the extent to which these goals have been achieved. For such indicators to be usable on line inputs for determining changes in urban subsystems, they must respond rapidly and sensitively to the citizenry's changing perception of the gap between goals and actual achievements. Indicators aggregated over long intervals of time, large physical areas, or population groups tend to be sluggish and historical. It is shown how unsolicited complaints and comments from the citizenry may help to define such operationally useful social indicators. A conceptual framework emphasizing adaptive urban subsystems is presented, and data are used to illustrate the feasibility of the approach.