Cities and quality of life. Quantitative modelling of the emergence of the happiness field in urban studies

Abstract

Where we live affects all aspects of our life and thus our happiness. In recent years, and now for more than half of the population of the Earth, our place of residence or activity has been increasingly transformed into an urban one. However, while the impact of happiness studies has grown in importance during the last twenty years, we note that concepts like subjective well-being or happiness itself find it difficult to penetrate the planning and design of cities and truly affect the field of urban studies. In this paper we map the temporal evolution of the fields of happiness and urban studies into dynamic networks obtained by paper keywords co-word analysis. In order to reproduce the changes in its topology, a one-parameter spatial network model is presented. The results suggest an explanation for the level of penetration of these two fields in particular, but they also explain how different related academic or scientific fields evolve and pervade each other as a function of “conceptual distances” which in this case are mapped into Euclidean ones. The results and methodologies developed in the context of the happiness and urban studies keyword network could be useful for a systematic study of other complex evolving networks.