The interest of understanding quality-of-life conditions has generated several methods to capture its variation across the territory. For quality-of-life studies it is relevant to capture both objective as well as subjective (perceived) conditions. This usually requires the combination of different sources of knowledge, some officially generated by local governments but others directly generated by citizens. A combination of new methods and tools such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and crowdsourcing could bring new insights and perspectives to traditional approaches. This paper will look into three different case studies that empirically captured self-expressed needs and subjective quality-of-life conditions with the use of GIS and geocoded data. Although the cases are located in cities of three different continents (Latin America, Africa and Asia) they raise similar questions and concerns related to the construction, use and validity of the information. The results also show the policy relevance of better capturing unequal conditions for targeting remedy policies. Finally, this paper will briefly identify new geotools used in other sectors that could be also incorporated to better capture spatial variations of quality-of-life conditions.