Subjective well-being in Helsinki capital region – examining living place satisfaction and quality of life

New infill projects and densification tend to be connected with the discontent of the existing inhabitants. However, other benefits to density, such as improved service supply and increased social interaction can compensate for the loss of privacy and space. Accordingly, concentrating on e.g. satisfaction with the neighborhood itself is insufficient, and the overall experience of wellbeing is more relevant a measure when discussing densification.

The factors of good life are remarkably similar for everyone, and multiple studies report a relationship with health, family status, income, and age. However, urban planning cannot, at least directly, affect these socioeconomic factors. Nevertheless, a strand of planning literature has linked experienced well-being with the contextual variables, such as accessibility, and adding a spatial dimension has been found to enhance the explanatory power of models explaining some indicator of subjective well-being. However, it has been also argued that contextual social sustainability is more strongly associated with social structures of the urban form than urban form per se.

We study whether contextual factors explain subjective wellbeing, namely satisfaction with the conditions of living place and general quality of life, and whether there are differences in the relationships between area and contextual variables and these two indicators. As our data, we use Finnish Regional Health and Well-being –survey, which contains a wide array of background variables along with the self-reported experiential and wellbeing measures. When controlling for relevant socioeconomic background variables, we can study the independent effect of contextual and social capital variables and compare the results of different urban zone classifications.

The results indicate, for example, that people are the most satisfied with their living conditions in the pedestrian zones, but the effect of urban zones on the general quality of life is not as strong. The effect of perceived contextual disadvantages, such as unsafety, noise and traffic, affect satisfaction with living place conditions more than they affect the overall quality of life. These results also demonstrate that comprehensive indicators such as quality of life give more balanced a view of the effects of density than looking only at satisfaction with the neighborhood.