A Guide To Wellbeing In Urban Environments

When we think about wellbeing, many of us may consider things like happiness, satisfaction, physical health and quality of life. We may also think about things that could affect our wellbeing, like money, family, friendship, where we live, what we own and what we’d like to own. We might consider ourselves happy, say, in our home life, but not in our working life (or vice versa), and this can impact our sense of wellbeing. And we might not only consider our own wellbeing, but the wellbeing of our family, the wider community or our town, city or country. As you might have gathered from the brief paragraph above, wellbeing and what it means in different contexts, can be quite complex. This complexity is reflected in the large number of descriptions available. For example, the World Health Organisation’s early report on wellbeing in 1947 began the discussion by arguing that ‘health is not the mere absence of diseases, but a state of wellbeing’. The new economics foundation built on this in 2009 by saying that wellbeing can be thought of as ‘the ultimate goal of human endeavour’, while Hetan Shah and Nic Marks suggested that, ‘wellbeing is more than just happiness. As well as feeling satisfied and happy, wellbeing means developing as a person, being fulfilled and making a contribution to society’. And Doh Shin and D Johnson suggest that wellbeing is ‘a global assessment of a person’s quality of life according to his own chosen criteria’. From this, we can see that wellbeing is more than just good health, and it is more than just happiness. In the next section, we will look briefly at two theories behind wellbeing and the people who study them, and what people have done to measure it.

source :

https://blog.soton.ac.uk/serg/files/2017/12/littlebookofwellbeing.pdf