Professor Jean-Claude Thill is holds a M.Sc. in Spatial Planning from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, and a Doctorate in Geography from the same institution. He is the Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  

 

Professor Thill’s research focuses on the spatial dimensions of socio-economic organizations, particularly the interfacing between transportation and mobility systems, and urban land use, urban forms and functions.

 

Professor Thill has served as Executive Director of the North American Regional Science Council, a branch of the Regional Science Association International, since 2005.

 

Professor Thill is the Editor-in-Chief of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Associate Editor of Geographical Analysis, and GIScience Area Editor of Networks and Spatial Economics.  He is on the editorial of a number of regional, national, and international journals in the fields of geography, GIScience, regional science, and spatial planning.

 

 

Jean-Claude Thill, Knight Distinguished Professor,
Department of Geography and Earth Sciences,
University of North Carolina at Charlotte,
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

Urban neighborhood quality of life is a multi-dimensional concept describing the overall well-being or livability of a neighborhood.  In this study, quality of life is defined as a function of social, physical, criminal, and economic conditions - factors that are not only interdependent, but also dynamic; as the quality of one neighborhood improves another may decline as populations are priced out and forced to relocate, as the housing stock ages, and as other local transformations occur.  This temporal evolution is highly spatial in nature creating clusters of neighborhoods which are rated similarly on quantified quality of life indices.  The purpose of this study is to examine the spatial and temporal evolution of urban quality of life in the urban core of Charlotte, NC, a mid-size and fast growing metropolitan area in the Southeastern United States. The study is based on a detailed dataset of quality of life measures created at two year intervals from 2000-2008.  We examine the spatial variation of qualify of life across the study area and the progression of neighborhood quality of life. We explore the role that spatial dependency plays in a neighborhood improving or declining over time. A spatial Markov modeling framework is employed to explicitly account for local spatial autocorrelation in the temporal trends. We also present results from a spatial structural equations model intended to capture the multidimensionality of the concept of neighborhood of life, as well as its spatio-temporal dimensions.