The Concept and Measurement of Community Well-Being: Lessons for Planners

ABSTRACT

Community well-being is considered a fundamental element of planning practice. However, it is not clear whether, and how explicitly, well-being is addressed in community (i.e. towns or cities) strategies or policy documents. If so, is theconcept used implicitly or explicitly? We reviewed policy documents from the 20 largest individual communities in Canada. Our findings suggest considerable difficulty with translation of data on well-being domains into actionable policy items. Canadian communities tend to focus on traditional, quantitative indicators of well-being. The more nuanced, subjective assessments of well-being are typically not reflected in Canadian communities’ strategies, plans, programs or policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Well-being
• community well-being
• indicators
• planning practice

Acknowledgements

Financial support for this research was provided by the National Research Foundation of Korea, under the Social Science Korea (SSK) program (Community Well-being Research Centre).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2924563).