Happiness and Place

Why Life Is Better Outside of the City

Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137436320
• eBook ISBN: 9781137436337
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about places - cities, suburbs and towns - and happiness of people living there. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Okulicz-Kozaryn examines the relations between human happiness and the infrastructure of the places they live. This thought-provoking book argues for the overlooked idea that we are happiest in smaller areas.

1

Introductory Matter

Abstract: This chapter introduces the book, defines happiness and other terms used, provides a brief overview of three major happiness theories, and summarizes the key points made.

Okulicz-Kozaryn, Adam. Happiness and Place: Why Life Is Better Outside of the City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137436337.0002.

1.1 Naming conventions

I will abbreviate thousands with “k” and millions with “m”, and unless prefixed with “$” for dollar amounts, all numbers refer to population size. I will round numbers and avoid terms like “approximately” for simplicity.¹

I will often refer to several cities and, for simplicity, I will drop the two-letter state abbreviations when referring to them: New York NY, Philadelphia PA, Camden NJ, Washington DC, Boston MA, Chicago IL, Dallas TX and its northern suburbs Richardson and Plano, San Francisco CA, Los Angeles CA. Likewise, I will drop country names when referring to several large cities outside of the US: London England, Warsaw Poland, Shanghai China, Nanjing China, Berlin Germany, Rotterdam Netherlands, Milan Italy. These are very large cities and it should be obvious where they are located. I will use the term “happiness” interchangeably with life satisfaction and (subjective) wellbeing—there is more discussion in Chapter 1.2.

The word “urbanite” simply means urban dweller, someone who lives in a city, while “urbanist” is a person glorifying city living and often condescending about non-city living. Academics in public policy, public administration, urban studies, and related disciplines are typically urbanists (I am an exception). Yet, we (academics in these disciplines) are also egalitarian and non- or even anti-elitist, but we do not realize that city living is quite elitist.²

The title of the book contains “city” and “nature”—alternative terms are “built”/“developed” and “natural”/“undeveloped” environments or simply “urban” and “rural.” Instead of scholarly “urban” I prefer simple “city,” although I will still sometimes use the more scholarly “urban.” I will also sometimes use the term “metropolis” or “metro”, not interchangeably with city, but to denote city and its adjacent areas, the so-called “suburbs.” Metro covers all areas of counties stipulated as metro as defined by the US Census. City is dense. Metro is less dense because it also includes suburbs; metro = city + suburbs.³ Most observations and conclusions pertain to both cities and suburbs—both are more artificial and less happy than smaller areas.

What is a city? Can a city be defined better? Definition is difficult and somewhat arbitrary, because this dichotomous term (city v not a city) depends on a continuous variable, population, and also to some degree on another continuous variable, density, and some more or less arbitrary administrative boundaries defining where city ends. Density and size correlate—denser places tend to be larger.

Importantly, by city I mean a large human settlement, larger than say 250k, but this number is very approximate. The idea is that a city is distinctively different from a smaller town in many ways: there are usually suburbs, there is almost always an airport, usually an international airport, and so forth. The term “city” as used here denotes an area bigger than the census definition of an urbanized area (>50k), and is synonymous with a large metropolitan area excluding less dense areas (some of the suburbs, etc). There are about 500 urbanized areas (>50k) in the US, out of which only about 150 are larger than 250k.⁴ A (core) city exceeding 250k often means a metro exceeding 1m (there are only about 50 such metros in the US). A metro (or more technically speaking Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)) is officially defined as an area with at least one urban core area of at least 50k, plus adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting ties. A concept of metro makes more sense in many ways than a concept of city which is just defined by administrative boundaries—an inherently artificial construct. Metro, on the other hand, is more meaningful because it is based on commuting, intermingling, and network ties. What is meant by city here, however, is a relatively high density area, which would not include most suburbs and, again, would equal a metro, excluding low density areas. It would be usually larger than a city defined by administrative boundaries, but smaller than a metro defined by counties that make up an MSA.

Another rationalization for a cutoff somewhere around 250k is that places bigger than that appear to be quite different from all other places in terms of happiness, but also in terms of trust, that is, these outcomes are worse for such cities than everywhere else as shown in Section 3.4.

Furthermore, a city is quite different within its boundaries—there is a core or central city, there is sometimes also a suburb withing the city limits, and so forth. Most of the discussion will focus on the size of place and sometimes density, but it will not dwell on within-city or across-neighborhood differences—something left for future research.

1.2 Happiness defined

Happiness is important, sometimes necessary. For instance, in order to become a US citizen, a person must be “well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.”⁵

A potential limitation of this book is that I am using only one metric, self-reported, subjective assessment of happiness. There are other ways to approach human flourishing or wellbeing such as good mental health (e.g., lack of depression), quality of life expressed in terms of objective qualities such as clean air, good roads, low traffic, low crime, etc.⁶ This book is about the scientific or empirical study of happiness. This research started a few decades ago only. Happiness was of course studied for centuries, but these were philosophical studies (thinking in an armchair), as opposed to empirical (using data).

There is nothing wrong with thinking in an armchair, and by no means is it better or more rigorous to study something empirically. This is simply the focus of this book the empirical study of happiness. Furthermore, there is now an outpouring of books about happiness that are neither empirical nor theoretical nor philosophical, but are simply opinions that are inherently unscientific.

A wonderful overview of happiness as studied in human history is provided in a book with the descriptive title “Happiness: A History” by Darrin M. McMahon.⁷ There were probably a few empirical studies of happiness earlier in the 20th century but it all really got started in the second half of the 20th century by three academics: psychologist Ed Diener, sociologist Ruut Veenhoven, and economist Richard Easterlin. The field is interdisciplinary.

Can happiness be studied scientifically? The first reaction that people display when I say that I study happiness is either enthusiasm about the topic, appreciation of the importance of the inquiry, or eye-rolling and sometimes simply ending a conversation with me (especially if I happened to try to talk to a financial economist or some other very down to earth person). In any case people usually express doubt about whether we can really measure happiness and compare it, because it seems a very intangible concept and difficult to compare across people, and especially cultures—it seems obvious that being happy for a person A means something very different for a person B. It turns out, however, that happiness can be measured with reasonable validity and reliability. Here, I will only discuss this very briefly, but the interested reader is advised to consult the references in the notes.

What predicts happiness? What makes people happy? It is beyond the scope of this book to answer this broad question, but there are many excellent reviews—for instance Ballas (2013) reviews literature with focus on cities, Dolan et al. (2008) is a recent general review; and the most complete database of findings is called the World Database of Happiness (Veenhoven 1995).

1.2.1 Definition, validity and reliability

What really is happiness? Happiness is typically measured with a survey item such as ”On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the life you lead?” and it ranges from say 1 = “not at all satisfied” to 4 = “very satisfied.” Happiness is often labeled in scholarly literature as SWB (subjective well-being). It consists of two dimensions: cognitive and affective. Cognitive judgments of one’s life satisfaction as compared with affective evaluations of mood and emotions is an overall judgment of life based on two sources of information: cognitive (life satisfaction or contentment) and affective (momentary happiness or hedonic affect).⁸ Sometimes scholars make a distinction between life satisfaction and happiness—life satisfaction refers to cognition, and happiness refers to affect. For instance, life satisfaction can be conceptualized as a cognitive aspect of happiness. In practice, however, it is usually difficult if not impossible to separate the two concepts. Hence, I will use the overall happiness definition and use the terms “happi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introductory Matter
• 2 Urbanization Is Here
• 3 Urban Malaise: Explorations of Problems and Dissatisfaction with City Life
• 4 Biophilia: Need for Contact with Nature
• 5 Summary, Conclusion, Discussion and Future Research
• References
• Index