Beautification Needs to be Measured

The purpose of development is to increase peoples quality of life in order to make them happier so beautification and art projects are often included in many development plans. However when beautification is one of the tactics an economic or community development organization uses there needs to be some gauge to determine the impact of the project or to measure beauty.
It is of course challenging to try to measure something so abstract as beauty or happiness, however, such measurements are necessary to know if ones efforts are effective. After all there are many things that could have been done with the millions, even billions of dollars spent on beautification projects every year.
It's also important to remember when working towards getting some public art installed that the purpose of development is to service a community, not to service an elite few. I would argue that creating art for the sake of a small elite segment would be and is no different then developing the economy solely to help the richest people in society. In other words having arts entities control public art is a mistake, all public art should be controlled by the public in some way.
With all beatification projects pre and post surveys should be conducted to determine how much the people of a community would want a specific beautification project would do, to determine what types of projects people would prefer and what impact the project had on people over all.