Does satisfactory neighbourhood environment lead to a satisfying life? An investigation of the association between neighbourhood environment and life satisfaction in Beijing

Abstract

Associated with the dramatic expansion of Chinese cities are the unprecedented scale and pace of changes to urban living environment. There is an imperative to assess residents' perceptions of neighbourhood environment and the impacts on life satisfaction. Drawing on a large-scale residential satisfaction survey conducted in Beijing in 2013, we examine the finegrained spatial distribution and determinants of residents' life satisfaction. A multilevel ordinal response model is employed to investigate the roles of neighbourhood satisfaction, perceived relative income, socio-demographic characteristics, and contextual factors in predicting life satisfaction. Results show that satisfaction with key neighbourhood characteristics including safety, physical and social environments, and travel convenience is statistically significantly associated with life satisfaction. Income relative to that of peers in local areas or to that in the past is a more important predictor of life satisfaction than absolute income. Other individual-level variables, such as age, family structure, hukou status, health, commuting time, and housing-related variables including housing tenure and floor space, are significant correlates of life satisfaction.

The Neighbour’s Effect on well‐Being: How Local Relative Income Differentials Affect Resident's Subjective Well‐Being

“…Our findings relating SWB with relative income are in line with Ma et al (), who find a significant negative effect on life‐satisfaction if respondents perceive themselves to have a lower income than peers in their neighbourhood. Interestingly, when this variable is included in their model the direct effect of income disappears entirely.…”

“…A growing body of empirical evidence supports this notion of comparative utility as underpinning indices of well-being (Hagerty 1999;Blanden et al 2005;Clark et al 2008;Ma et al 2018). One of the solutions put forward (Easterlin 1974;McBride 2001) is to measure well-being by weighting individual utility (as a function of consumption) by the consumption of the rest of the cross-section, thereby controlling for the whole population being better off:…”

Examining Relationships between Social Capital, Emotion Experience and Life Satisfaction for Sustainable Community

“…Previous research on the factors affecting life satisfaction focused on the influence of gender and age on life satisfaction [28]. Later, some scholars proposed that personal and family income, residential areas and social fairness perceptions, as well as individuals' perceptions of their own economic conditions, have a significant impact on residents' life satisfaction [29,30]. Accordingly, summing up past research in the academic field, we can conclude that the factors that affect the residents' life satisfaction mainly include objective factors such as family work environment, life events, socialization relationships and subjective factors such as values, self-esteem and cognition [31].…”

Sustainable Urbanisation and Community Well-Being in Suburban Neighbourhoods in Beijing, China

“…Dang et al (2017) show that neighbourhood type (based on housing classification) was significantly correlated with subjective well-being, with residents in commercial housing neighbourhoods reporting higher levels of subjective well-being than those in work-unit and affordable housing neighbourhoods. By mapping environmental satisfaction at the sub-district level of Beijing's urban core, Ma et al (2018) found that subjective neighbourhood evaluation had greater influences on life satisfaction than the objective residential environment. In another study of older adults in Shanghai, Liu et al (2017) confirm that elements of the residential environment such as good accessibility and quality housing bore a stronger impact on subjective well-being than individual resources.…”

“…It was not until recently that a few studies explicitly examined the linkage between personal wellbeing and residential environment at finer spatial scales (e.g. Dang et al 2017;Liu et al 2017;Ma et al 2018). The unit of analysis of these studies nonetheless very much focused on individuals, rather than the neighbourhoods to which they belonged, and the survey samples were drawn from the urban core, rather than the most expanded and pressurised outer metropolitan areas.…”