Abstract Summary
Cities have played a central role in shaping the last century’s technological and economic acceleration. The share of individuals living in urban areas has itself accelerated, from 10% in the 1910s to a projected level of 68% by 2050. This development means cities will increasingly shape psychological well-being. The popularity of cities is largely driven by an “urban promise” of substantial social and economic opportunities. The opportunities arise from synergies between people, companies, ideas, and technology, resulting in significant wealth, innovation, creativity, and knowledge. A central question is if this "urban promise" translates into an urban psychological advantage in well-being, social satisfaction, and urban satisfaction. In this paper, we tackle this question by comparing people living in cities with the rural population. We do so through a large sample of 156k individuals aged 40 to 70 from the UK (Before the conference starts, we hope to have similar data available for the Netherlands). Our study employs a novel measure of urbanicity that can disentangle city, suburban, periurban, and rural parts. Using this novel measure we explore two research questions. First, how does the average well-being as well as social satisfaction and economic satisfaction vary across the urban-rural gradient? Second, we investigate the pervasive urban problem of inequality. We do so by studying how the variation/inequality in the three psychological domains changes with urbanicity. In terms of results, we find that urban residents have the highest incomes. However, we find no parallel psychological advantages. On the contrary, urban residents score worse on all psychological measures covering well-being, social, and economic satisfaction. We denote this stark contrast between the "urban promise" and the psychological reality the urban desirability paradox. Our second line of findings concerns the variation in the psychological measures. We find that urban residents show more variation in reported well-being, social satisfaction, and economic satisfaction. This pattern is consistent with the problem of urban inequality in domains such as income, health, and accessibility. Our last strain of results pertains to optimal distances. We identify distances from cities with the highest well-being, social, and economic satisfaction. These distances are city-size dependent but can be illustrated as follows. For UK cities with a population of around 100,000, the optimal distance is 6 km from the city center. For a city with a population of 1M, the optimal distance grows to around 20 km.
