Cities and quality of life. Quantitative modeling of the emergence of the happiness field in urban studies. (May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Papachristou, Ioanna Anna; Rosas-Casals, Marti
• Is Part Of: Cities. Volume 88(2019)
• Page Start: 191
• Page End: 208
• Publication Date: 2019-05
• Subjects: Cities -- Complex networks -- Evolving graphs -- Ego-networks -- Happiness -- Urban studies; City planning -- Periodicals; Urban policy -- Periodicals; 711.4
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2018.10.012
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0264-2751

Abstract

Abstract: Where we live affects all aspects of our life and thus our happiness. In recent years, and now for more than half of the population of the Earth, our place of residence or activity has been increasingly transformed into an urban one. However, while the impact of happiness studies has grown in importance during the last twenty years, we note that happiness-related concepts find it difficult to penetrate the planning and design of cities, and affect the field of urban studies. In this paper, we map the temporal evolution of the fields of happiness and urban studies into dynamic networks obtained by paper keywords co-occurrence analysis. We identify the main concepts of the "urban happiness" field and their capacity to agglomerate into coherent thematic clusters. We find that while quality of life and well-being are highly interconnected with some well-defined urban categories, other happiness-related concepts, as subjective well-being or happiness itself, are located in peripheral positions where their influence is minimised. We present a one-parameter spatial network model in order to reproduce the changes in the topology of these networks. Results explain the evolution and the level of interpenetration of these two fields as a function of "conceptual" distances, mapped into Euclidean ones. In addition to other approaches (i.e., co-frequency matrix of bibliometric analysis), complex networks science appears as a valid alternative and opens the way for the systematic study of other academic fields in terms of complex evolving networks. Highlights: We use paper keywords co-occurrence analysis to map the temporal evolution of the fields of happiness and urban studies. We show how happiness concepts have penetrated the urban studies field during the past years. The intersection between happiness and urban studies fields is most adequately described by quality of life and well-being. Mapping of "conceptual distances" into Euclidean ones is used to explain the complex interplay between scientific fields. The methodology is universal and can be applied to the systematic study of complex evolving networks of any kind.