A recent study of 156,000 UK adults found that urban living among residents aged 40 and older was associated with lower levels of social and economic satisfaction and general well-being.
“We find that urban residents have the highest incomes. However, we find no parallel psychological advantages. On the contrary, residents in highly urban areas score worse on all psychological measures covering well-being, social satisfaction, and economic satisfaction,” lead author Adam Finnemann from the University of Amsterdam and colleagues wrote in their study published in Science Advances.
Researchers estimate that by 2050, the percentage of people residing in cities will shoot up to 68% compared to just a 10% rise in the 1910s.
In high-income and developed countries, prior studies documented that people living in rural areas reported higher levels of happiness than their urban counterparts, which economists call the “rural happiness paradox.” Meanwhile, cities and urban life can be overwhelming, indifferent, lonely, and have multiple disadvantages like higher levels of air pollution, traffic problems creating congestion and longer commutes, and even a greater prevalence of poverty and contagious diseases.
Despite those drawbacks, cities are popular because they enable people to live in close physical proximity, which could result in a greater exchange of ideas, knowledge, and creativity. Because cities are known for being technological hubs that promise to create immense wealth and innovation, Finnemann and team investigated whether cities live up to the promise of creating more social and economic opportunities for their residents — or not.
The team studied the data of a large sample of 156,000 adults aged 40 to 70 years from the UK biobank. The study participants’ average age was 55, and more than half were women. Overall, 97% of them were white.
The authors observed that despite the abundance of people, social opportunities, and high incomes in cities, people residing in rural areas scored higher on general happiness.
“This suggests a broader conundrum, which we term the “urban desirability paradox,” to highlight the contrast between the popularity of cities and the psychological state of their residents,” they explained. “The increased social and economic satisfaction inequality is in line with urban accumulation theories, which document that cities disproportionately benefit the already advantaged.”
“The urban happiness disadvantage is robust across North America, Western Europe, and large parts of Oceania. The urban economic dissatisfaction is consistent with and can be explained by increased living costs, especially housing prices, in cities,” the authors wrote. “We deem it likely that the economic struggle generalizes as a result of the global housing crisis.
“Suburban and peri-urban areas have distinct characteristics that set them apart from highly urbanized and rural regions. Practically, our study raises a concern for the psychological health of the 56 million Britons residing in urban areas and invites further study into the possibility of geographically focused health and policy interventions targeting psychological health,” they added. “Moreover, by aligning with existing literature on well-being, global inequality, and global housing crisis, we hypothesize that the urban psychological struggles we identified are applicable beyond the United Kingdom.”
