Well-being is the missing piece of the puzzle that can help cities to assess their community’s needs and measure their progress. By layering insights into subjective wellbeing with other data, cities can form a complete picture to make better decisions and understand where best to invest. This includes smart cities and digital transformation investment.
Research shows that individuals with high levels of wellbeing also report pro-social behaviors, good health and high levels of engagement and productivity. A city that assesses and promotes wellbeing will most likely be cohesive, community-minded and innovative.
A smart city uses information and communications technology (ICT) to enhance its livability, workability, and sustainability. In simplest terms, there are three parts to that job: collecting, communicating, and “crunching.” First, a smart city collects information about itself through sensors, other devices, and existing systems. Next, it communicates that data using wired or wireless networks. Third, it “crunches” (analyzes) that data to understand what’s happening now and what’s likely to happen next.
More than half the world’s human population now live in cities, and as that proportion continues to rise, cities are increasingly determinants of human health and well-being. Our cities are complex, diverse, dynamic, and rapidly evolving – and a multitude of factors in the urban environment can influence well-being.
In 2018, Smart Cities Council set up a consortium that completed a data science project to undertake something that had never been done before – to quantitatively assess and score social wellbeing. The project measured and quantified the subjective well-being of 14 cities around Australia. This approach focused on ‘subjective wellbeing’ - being the measurement of how people feel and think about their lives.
Following the project, this framework was released, working up the idea that social wellbeing could become the superior framework for smart cities action and investment.
By integrating the measurement of subjective wellbeing with other standard, objective measures of progress, cities can understand how wellbeing manifests in real-world outcomes - such as crime, economic growth, and health services demand. As a result, city policy makers gain actionable insights into their citizens’ concerns and expectations.
To understand citizens’ quality of life, a city could use proprietary analytics to quantitatively measure the subjective wellbeing of residents, and combine these measures with other quantitative quality of life indicators cities are already collecting. This methodology is rooted in over 20 years of research in the behavioral sciences, which have shown the importance of combining objective measures with direct measurement of subjective wellbeing to obtain a more holistic understanding of the health and wellbeing of a population.
A city could use publicly available data from both social media and digital sources such as blogs, microblogs, forums, discussion boards, review sites and social networking sites.
An analysis of this data provides deep insights into:
- The emotional state of citizens, and how people are actually feeling.
- Whether or not they are engaged in events, programs or activities in their communities.
- Whether or not they have a sense of accomplishment, or feel satisfied with where they are in life.
- Whether or not they have interpersonal relationships and how strong their connections are with their families, friends and the larger communities they are a part of.
- Whether or not they are involved in activities that help them find meaning and purpose.
- Whether or not they feel physically and mentally healthy.
To help align on what this means, and so much more, we have developed the Readiness Guide, along with a number of programs and events designed to help you work towards improving sustainability, livability, and workability in your city.