Did you say well-being in the city?

Expert

Defining well-being

Well-being is synonymous with: satisfaction, contentment, bliss, happiness, euphoria, ease, joy, enjoyment, pleasure, voluptuousness, beatitude, comfort, sensuality, peace, prosperity, relaxation, opulence, ease, quietude, pleasantness, sweetness, good living[i]. But different ways of apprehending well-being are appearing[ii].

• The different approaches to well-being

Source: Bourdeau-Lepage, 2019, De l'intérêt d'analyser le bien-être, plenary lecture at the annual colloquium of the French Society for Environmental Law "Bien-être et normes environnements", Lyon, 17 October.

Despite these different approaches, there is a set of territorial elements that can contribute to well-being. Our research identifies them and proposes a tool: Tell_Me[iii]. We thus cross objective and subjective well-being in a relativistic perspective.

Identifying the territorial elements that contribute to the well-being of city dwellers

Tell_Me consists of a questionnaire and a set of 32 cards, each representing a territorial element that potentially contributes to the well-being of a person in his or her territory. A person solicited in the street takes 10 cards considered as the most important for his or her level of well-being to be the highest. They prioritize them and assign a value to them using tokens[iv].

Example of cards from the Tell_Me game

 

Tell_Me used on four districts of Lyon's 7th arrondissement in 2021 provides some lessons. Accessibility of the area, medical services and shops, cleanliness and maintenance of outdoor spaces, and the level of safety of goods and people are important elements for the well-being of Lyon residents. Two amenities are prominent: a healthy and nuisance-free environment and the natural landscape. This leads to the hypothesis that the inhabitants of the studied area are metamorphosing into homo qualitus[v], "a man who seeks to maximize his material and immaterial well-being and makes the satisfaction of his desire for nature and the preservation of his environment one of the constitutive elements of his well-being"[vi].

By knowing the expectations of the inhabitants in terms of territorial elements contributing to their well-being and by comparing them to the elements present in their area of action, the territorial actors can determine what the inhabitants lack and design living spaces and facilities that allow them to raise the level of well-being of the inhabitants. Beyond the knowledge produced, the use of Tell_Me by territorial actors also allows to reinforce the participation of the inhabitants, that of the discreet[vii].

However, placing well-being at the heart of urban planning is not a sufficient solution to design cities that are good to live in. It is only a prerequisite because it is also necessary to take into consideration the environmental effects of urban development and human activities.

 

---

 

[i] Center for Interlanguage Research on Meaning in Context, 2022, Electronic Dictionary of Synonyms, well-being output.

[ii] Bourdeau-Lepage, 2019, "De l'intérêt d'analyser le bien-être," plenary lecture at the annual colloquium of the French Society for Environmental Law entitled "Bien-être et normes environnements," Lyon, October 17 (video available online).

[iii] L. Bourdeau-Lepage, 2015, The Tell_Me tool, Lyon.

[iv] L. Bourdeau-Lepage (ed.), 2020, Evaluating well-being in a territory. Comprendre pour agir sur les facteurs d'attractivité territoriaux, Editions VVA Conseil.

[v] L. Bourdeau-Lepage, 2019, "De l'intérêt pour la nature en ville. Cadre de vie, santé et aménagement urbain," Revue d'économie régionale et urbaine 5, pp. 893-911.

[vi] The adjective qualitus does not exist in Latin. It is a play on words - in response to homo urbanus or eoconomicus - with the term "quality" in French, qualitas in Latin, which means: i) way of being [quality] and ii) what makes someone valuable, the Latin adjective being qualitativus.

[vii] i.e. people who are rarely heard, who do not participate in consultation exercises, public meetings, or in the master plan when it exists, because they do not have the time to go to these events or they do not dare to go and speak because they are not used to doing so, because they do not feel capable of doing so, sometimes stressed by the group effect.

Release date: July 2022