| dc.description.abstract | Cities in many countries are taking steps to use happiness as a formal policy measure of well-being, in addition to more commonly used economic indicators such as Gross Domestic Product. Economists and public policy and public health scholars have researched the factors that are associated with happiness, linking higher self-reported happiness outcomes with financial status, gender, social interactions, personal health, and sense of security. However, the link between happiness and the built environment around one’s home or workplace has been understudied and remains poorly understood. While location quality — particularly pedestrian accessibility to commercial, recreational, institutional, educational, and transportation facilities — is known to affect home location values, how the same set of location attributes that affect housing prices may have a relationship with happiness remains unclear. In theory, more convenient home locations offer individuals the capacity for independent living (e.g., walking access to destinations), social interactions (e.g., chance encounters with community members), and a sense of belonging (e.g., through self-sufficient neighborhood amenities) — qualities that should also contribute to happiness. This thesis reports on an exploratory analysis of location quality and self-reported happiness in the United States and Japan. Using a customized pedestrian accessibility metric, this thesis examines how access to daily destinations is related to individuals’ subjective happiness, controlling for socio-demographic variables. In the U.S. data, we found that people living in areas with higher pedestrian accessibility to destinations were not necessarily more likely to report being happier, on average. In fact, there was a small tendency for individuals in these areas to report slightly lower happiness levels, on average, after accounting for other influences such as age, income, and marital status. Note that the relationship between pedestrian accessibility and happiness may be more complex than expected and may involve other factors (e.g., presence or absence of greenery). We conducted an additional analysis by dividing the Census tracts into two groups based on population density. In areas with lower population density, the relationship between pedestrian accessibility and happiness remained negative and statistically significant and showed the same strength as the overall analysis. For Nagasaki, Japan, there was not a statistically significant relationship between happiness and pedestrian accessibility, but this might be due to a problem in the street network data, so further investigation is required. In addition, a qualitative analysis of Nagasaki reveals that residents report that problems with the walking environment (e.g., narrow sidewalks, slopes and stairs, darkness at night, road surface differences, distance to facilities) influence their travel behavior and happiness. Nevertheless, although the results of this thesis have limitations, as described above, promoting pedestrian accessibility should remain an important consideration for policy makers when setting public policy goals, since pedestrian accessibility could, for instance, lead to improved physical and mental health, as well as other benefits. For both the U.S. and Japan, future work is necessary to understand the complex experiences of individuals that include spatial, psychological, and environmental factors related to the built walking environment. | |
