People in cities are less happy. The core characteristics of urban life (in particular size and density) contribute to urban unhappiness, controlling for urban problems.
Okulicz-Kozaryn,A.and Mazelis,J.M.(2016).Urbanism and happiness: A test of Wirth's theory of urban life, Urban Studies, doi:10.1177/0042098016645470
Okulicz-Kozaryn, A., Unhappy metropolis (when American city is too big), (2016).Cities,
Chen, J., Davis, D. S., Wu, K., & Dai, H. (2015). Life satisfaction in urbanizing China: The effect of city size and pathways to urban residency. Cities, 49, 88–97.
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Social scientists have long studied the effects of cities on human wellbeing and happiness.
The first American sociologists, Louis Wirth among them, were urban sociologists, similarly concerned with city characteristics, urban problems and happiness (Wirth, 1938).
Wirth's theory of urban life focused on how urbanism led to various negative consequences, including (1) cognitively, in terms of alienation, (2) behaviorally, in terms of deviance, and (3) structurally, in terms of anomie (normlessness), all of which would lead to unhappiness.
Debates about whether people in cities are unhappy continues today. There are certain aspects of city life—crowds, traffic, noise, stress, and higher costs of living—that are likely to make people less happy. There are also the positive characteristics of cities—their fast-paced life, diversity, greater opportunities, and heightened exchange of skills and knowledge.
A recent set of studies from the sociologist Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn sheds additional light on the relationship between where we live and how happy or unhappy we are. This study, authored by Joan Maya Mazelis published in Urban Studies, uses data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to measure happiness across more than 230 counties in the U.S. The findings suggest that people in cities are less happy comparing the counterparts in suburbs and rural counties.
Why are urban residents unhappy?
Is it cities themselves, in terms of size, density, and heterogeneity, that lead to unhappiness, or is it problems people typically associate with cities – notably poverty, crime and lack of support – that make people unhappy?
After controlling for urban problems, this study finds that the core characteristics of urban life (in particular size and density) contribute to urban unhappiness.
The study finds that those living in counties outside metropolitan areas tend to report higher levels of happiness than those living in central cities, by about .05 points on a scale from 1 to 4.
At one end of the scale, the study finds that the three unhappiest counties are all urban. Coming in at number one is St. Louis, with a density of 5,700 people per square mile—about 19 times the density of the happiest county and five times the density of two of the three happiest counties. The Bronx and Brooklyn (Kings County), New York, take the next two spots, each with a density of over 30,000 people per square mile.
At the other end, the three happiest counties (which scored above a 3.5 on the happiness scale) are mostly rural or a mix of suburban and rural, according to the study. These counties include Douglas County, Colorado, outside Denver, which has a density of 300 people per square mile; Shelby County, Tennessee, outside Memphis, which has a density of 1,200 people per square mile; and Johnson County, Kansas, outside Kansas City, which has a density of 1,110 people per square mile. Note that each of these places is located near a large city, which may allow residents to benefit occasionally from urban resources and amenities while still living in a much lower-density area.
Indeed, the study finds that denser counties tend to have less happy residents, even when controlling for factors like greater crime and poverty. While these variables do weaken the relationship between density and unhappiness, the effect remains negative and significant. This leads the authors to conclude that size and density—what they call “the defining features of cities”—are associated with greater unhappiness. Even if cities were to reduce their levels of crime, poverty, or unemployment, urban residents would still be less happy than those living elsewhere.
There is clearly a ‘city paradox’: cities provide sought-after resources, but we pay a price: the relative unhappiness of city life. High-density living fosters specialization, information exchange, labor pooling, skills matching, knowledge spillovers, and more. On the other hand it can also foster crime, spread of disease, stress, cognitive and sensory overload, and other problems. Cities act like a magnifying glass, bringing out the best and the worst in us.
The bigger the city you live in, the less happy you are?
In his , published in the journal Cities, Okulicz-Kozaryn explores this subject further by determining the tipping point at which a city’s size becomes too big and its residents become unhappy. In this case, the study defines happiness in terms of “subjective wellbeing,” a common definition of happiness, which includes both life satisfaction and one's mood.
Using data from the 1972-2012 U.S. General Social Survey, the study again finds that larger cities are far less happy than smaller ones. As the figure below shows, happiness gradually increases as population size declines. The one notable exception is a sharp decline in happiness in communities of around 5,000-8,000 people.
The study finds that unhappiness intensifies once a city's population reaches hundreds of thousands of people. For the most part, the 60 cities in the U.S. with populations larger than 300,000 are the least happy cities in the country.
Yet Americans are moving to metropolitan areas.
This study is about the USA and its results should not be generalized to other countries. For example, Berry and Okulicz-Kozaryn’s (2009) analysis of World Values Survey (WVS) data for 81 countries between 1995 and 2004 shows that in many parts of Asia undergoing particularly rapid urbanization, life satisfaction is consistently highest in big cities.
Then, how does city size affect the life satisfaction of Chinese urbanites?
Researchers from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Yale University, collaborating with the Research Center for Contemporary China (RCCC) at Peking University, conducted the Migration and Quality of Life Survey targeting at adults residing in urban China in 2011 to document how characteristics of the city of residence may increase or lessen the impact of individual variables on life satisfaction.
The survey employed spatial probability sampling specifically designed to target urban residents regardless of their official hukou status. It spread over 19 provinces, 27 prefectures, and 31 counties or city districts, we randomly sampled 1906 households and successfully interviewed 1288 individuals between the ages of 18 and 70 for a response rate of 67.6%.
Results indicated that variations in city size have an independent impact on residents' life satisfaction, particularly among the newest city dwellers after controlling for individual socio-demographic characteristics, health status, and household wealth, the new urbanites (rural-to-urban migrants and in situ urbanized rural residents) who settle in cities with urban populations between 200,000 and 500,000 are more satisfied with their lives than those who settle in either larger or smaller cities.
On the one hand, China now appears to display a pattern similar to that of Western developed countries where people report the lowest level of life satisfaction in large cities (defined as cities with more than 500,000 residents); on the other hand, China is still following a path comparable to that observed in Asian developing countries where life satisfaction increases as the urbanization process continues in small cities and towns (with populations less than 500,000).
Dear readers, do you agree with the above analysis?