Wayne Seville has an excellent post at his blog, Greetings from Route 50. His piece on Quality of Life demonstrates clearly how arts and culture is linked with medical care and community health which is linked to economic development which is linked to higher education and so forth. But he says it much better, and he has pictures, so I'd like to send you over there to take a look.

These conversations are happening across the world. In Harlingen, Texas, folks are wrestling (rasslin'?) with what quality of life means for their community. Erie, Pennsylvania is looking at national quality of life rankings (PDF) as a key piece to economic revitalization. The City of North Las Vegas, Nevada is asking its residents to take a quality of life survey as part of its efforts to see if they are meeting their strategic plan.

And it's not just in the U.S. Just this week, Hong Kong is paying attention to measures of the quality of life, and Toronto is looking at quality-of-life impacts related to budget cuts while Montreal gloats.

You have new urbanists looking at quality of life factors to encourage sustainable neighborhoods, and environmentalists calling on quality-of-life reasons to stop drilling in neighborhoods.

All in all, it's a great time to be reaching out and pulling together and building networks of people interested in measuring the quality of life in communities. It's that important, and the time is now.