The sustainable well-being of urban and rural areas

ABSTRACT

Are well-being and sustainability ‘territorially differentiated realities’? This article draws on an experiment to develop sustainable territorial well-being indicators in the French urban area of Grenoble. Our discussion is based on a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of survey data produced in 2012 and 2018. From the interpretation of these indicators, we highlight the importance of taking account of territorial specificities in the deployment of sustainable well-being policies. Subsequently, our interest lies in the move to action: How should differentiation be approached in terms not only of observation but also of actions?

KEYWORDS:

• well-being
• sustainability
• urban and rural territories
• alternative indicators
• public policy actions

JEL:

• C1
• I39
• R10
• R58

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Héloïse Rissoan for her statistical help. They also thank two anonymous referees and the editor for their valuable comments, which helped to improve the manuscript.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For example, the research on urban malaise relates to the United States, but there is no evidence for Latin America (Valente & Berry, 2016). For a detailed literature review of the different results, see Lenzi and Perucca (2016).

2. The collective comprises urban policy stakeholders. Urban policy aims to reinvigorate urban areas that pose problems in combating inequality between regions. This partnership-based policy, which involves the French government and local authorities, has been developed over the past 30 years and relies heavily on indicators to determine ‘disadvantaged’ regions and to assess the initiatives implemented in these regions by government authorities.

3. To ensure representativeness, there was a quota for calls on traditional telephone lines, unbundled lines and mobile phones.

4. For the opinions of citizens and professionals, see http://www.lametro.fr/741-observation-du-territoire.htm.

5. The approach appears to be a way to extend and complement the capabilities approach of Sen (1999) and Austin (2016), with a particular focus on ‘synergistic satisfiers’. Indeed, synergistic responses are those that give people the most possibilities and are therefore means of ‘human freedom’.

6. The use of administrative data is justified in order to acquire information about some aspects that are missing in the investigation, including some sustainability elements (Stiglitz et al., 2009, p. 290).

7. The participative approach was divided into three stages comprising: (1) the European Council’s Spiral methodology (Council of Europe, 2011); three workshops consisting of members of the public, professionals and elected officials (Fargeon et al., 2016); and a hybrid forum (Callon et al., 2001).

8. The sectors and strata comprise groups of municipalities.

9. Three forms of governmental authorities were previously in place: regions, departments and communes (General Code of Land Collectivities, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006070633).

10. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Excel were used for descriptive analysis. We used R software for the logistic regression.

11. A first processing of these data was carried out for the actors in the territory by Fargeon et al. (2016).

12. Analysis based on descriptive statistics and component analysis.

13. For peri-urban districts, the landscape and environment are more important selection criteria than in the metropolitan area as a whole: 18% of inhabitants in the whole metropolitan area consider them to be important compared with 23% of inhabitants who live in peri-urban areas.

14. This work was done with the help of Héloise Rissoan as part of her internship at the IUT STID.

15. These three levels are the same as those used in Grenoble’s Intermunicipal Urban Development Plan (PLUI in French).

16. Fisher’s exact test was chosen because very few contingency tables met the conditions for chi-square testing.

17. A total of 34% are very satisfied with their lives in sparse areas versus 25% in the centre.