Urban scaling of well-being, a cross-country comparison

Cities are complex systems and its many components strongly interrelated. Still, urban scaling studies have observed regularities in urban output across multiple national urban systems. Urban scaling studies examine how urban characteristics change systematically with population size. Previous research has shown that socio-economic outputs, such as GDP and patents, typically scale superlinearly, meaning that they increase more than proportionally with population size. In contrast, infrastructural quantities, such as road length, tend to scale sublinearly. Beyond average trends, scaling residuals identify cities that over- or underperform relative to their size, offering insights into additional drivers of urban outcomes and a tool for monitoring policy impacts.

 

While urban scaling research has largely focused on socio-economic and infrastructural features, studies have shown that health indicators such as obesity, smoking, diabetes and influenza also exhibit scaling relationships with city size. Moreover, recent work has found non-linear scaling relationships for well-being indicators in Dutch cities. However, urban well-being scaling has not yet been examined systematically across different national contexts. It therefore remains unknown whether the observed relationships between city size and well-being are the same across different national contexts. Furthermore, the potential of scaling residuals analysis for well-being policy remains to be explored.

 

This study uses a unique dataset provided by Gallup to study urban scaling for well-being for 18 countries, with varying geographical contexts and economic development stages. The dataset covers a range of topics related to well-being. The same questions and methodology are used for all countries, enabling country comparisons. We show that some well-being indicators exhibit scaling relationships and that scaling relationships depend on the country context. In addition, we explore whether out- or underperforming cities share common urban environmental characteristics.

With current rapid urbanisation it is important to increase our understanding of urban – well-being interactions. Urban scaling studies of well-being can increase our understanding of well-being patterns and outliers in a system of cities.