Browse
You are looking at 61 - 70 of 3,091 items for
The 2020 World Happiness Report suggests that rural residents in Northern and Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand are generally happier than their urban counterparts. Similar findings have been reported in country-level studies and broader regional research, especially in Europe. Such findings go against conventional wisdom in the field and represent something of a conundrum to researchers and policymakers alike: the rural–urban happiness paradox. Is quality of life really better in the countryside? How and under which circumstances is this the case? Did influential writers like Edward Glaeser get it all wrong when suggesting that the city had now triumphed? What can we learn from digging deeper in the rural–urban happiness paradox and which critical questions does this leave us with for the future? What might policymakers, planners, architects and other influential actors learn from such an exercise? The purpose of the proposed book is to delve deeper into these matters by asking what quality of life in rural areas is actually all about. Since 2018 a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from four research environments at three Danish universities has been carrying out an ambitious research project to do just that. In this edited volume their findings are presented alongside chapters written by specially commissioned international authors from across Europe, North America, Asia and Africa.
In this chapter we analyse and discuss rural youth’s views of quality of life, how rural youth’s participation in civil society differs from urban youth and rural adults, and what factors affect quality of life for young people across different rural contexts. By combining qualitative interviews and quantitative survey data on rural youth, we elaborate how (1) sociality and proximity and (2) perceptions of the rural are important aspects to understand what characterises and constitutes rural youth’s civil participation in different rural contexts. As rurality is multifaceted, we argue that quality of life in rural communities should be approached with a threefold conceptual architecture: as covering a material dimension, a social dimension, and a representational dimension. These dimensions, in isolation and in a trialectic manner, constitute, support and undermine young people’s quality of life and civil society participation in rural communities. Finally, we discuss how centre-periphery and settlement density constitute different frames for civil society participation. We argue that in order to support quality of life for rural youth, one needs to address rurality as a flow of socio-spatial situations affecting rural youth’s quality of life and their participation in civil society.
Planning is central to the spatial governance of rural territories in terms of managing spatial change processes, balancing competing and emerging demands for rural space, and guiding the use of land as a fundamental rural resource that underpins the rural economy and essential rural social infrastructure, such as housing supply. At its core, spatial planning is concerned with making places better for people. However, in a rural context, planning has often been dominated by a preservation ethos, which seeks to protect rural places from development on the basis of farmland preservation or to preserve landscape quality, while often neglecting the social dimension of rural places. This has often led to a primacy of agricultural interests in shaping rural futures, which in turn has marginalised socially progressive planning practices. To address this deficit, this chapter explores the potential role of planning to enable rural places to flourish through adopting a well-being perspective. The chapter examines how well-being and quality of life perspectives have been translated to spatial planning debates; however, notably, this emerging practice tends to focus on measurement and monitoring in terms of planning outcomes with limited attention to the interrelationships between various well-being domains or the causal mechanisms at play. This chapter, instead, examines how planning can provide a critical enabling factor for ensuring rural assets can be translated to well-being-orientated outcomes. In turn, a well-being perspective provides an integrative and people-centred approach to planning that enhances how rural communities function that move beyond an outdated development-preservation binary.
The COVID pandemic, requiring everyone to be locked down at home, might have exacerbated the impact of living spaces on individuals’ quality of life by widening urban–rural differences in subjective well-being in France. By using a probability-based panel study, we explored changes in subjective well-being from the pre-pandemic period (2019) to about one year into the pandemic (April 2021). In addition, we investigated between-individuals differences based on rural–urban differential factors (i.e. compositional factors) and within-individuals differences based on events that have been experienced during the pandemic period (i.e. contextual factors). Small cities show greater levels of well-being regardless of specific compositional and contextual factors, suggesting that they have better reacted to the pandemic than other locations.
Individual well-being is a multidimensional concept based on physical and psychological dimensions. As far as psychological well-being is concerned, there are several factors affecting its value, including income, age, gender, education, civic status and employment. One of the most interesting variables which has been considered in the literature is related to the place of residence, differentiating the urban and rural settings. The purpose of this population-based country study is to examine the association between subjective individual well-being and urban and rural areas in Italy, comparing the data of two survey waves (run in 2008 and 2018) in a statistically significant sample of 1,500 citizens among the Italian population. At a general level, in ten years some variables have changed, but if in 2008 the score for perceived well-being was higher in the rural context, in 2018 results show a similar level of subjective well-being among rural and urban dwellers. The results reveal even more interesting aspects when one looks at the variation of the determinants of well-being in the two areas, showing that some immaterial aspects, such as social relations and cultural life, become relevant determinants of subjective well-being for both contexts, independently from the differences in the cultural and social supply in the rural and the urban life.
Japanese peripheral rural communities have been undergoing a dramatic demographic and social-economic decline, with many facing the concrete threat of disappearing over the next decades. Recently, however, there has been an increase in the number of people moving from urban to rural areas, primarily for lifestyle-related reasons. These rural in-migrants typically seek lifestyle change and more meaningful ways of living, driven by disillusionment with a stagnating economy and growing social and economic precarity. This chapter discusses the findings of a research project on domestic rural in-migrants in the islands of the Seto Inland Sea in Western Japan. The research focuses on people who migrated out of lifestyle reasons and are now living on the islands. The chapter qualitatively explores the ways in which respondents imagine, construct and (re)negotiate their desired lifestyles according to individual ideals of what constitutes quality of life, seen through the challenges and opportunities arising from living in small island communities. The results highlight the different ways in which in-migrants are experimenting with alternative rural lifestyles, and their struggles and successes in balancing economic and social needs with non-capitalistic notions of quality of life and well-being.
This chapter revolves around perceived quality of life in different places in Denmark. The chapter is based on a large survey (N=42,500) in combination with Danish register data as well as a wide range of geographical data used to create a new method to capture neighbourhood effects at a much smaller scale than administrative units. Findings in this chapter are two-fold. On one hand, there is no doubt that Danes, in general, are very content with life and are happy. Nevertheless, relatively large differences are found when comparing rural Denmark with urban Denmark, where the rural parts of Denmark are significantly more content with life than their urban counterparts. Furthermore, when comparing socio-economic status of the neighbourhoods in rural and urban settings respectively, it becomes clear that the rural well-off neighbourhoods are the happiest, while the urban least well-off neighbourhoods are the least happy. These results indicate that there are close-knit geographical differences in quality of life and that degree of urbanism could be ascribed to some of the measurable differences.
Central topics in research on the quality of life, well-being and health are the importance of interaction, social networks, inclusion and trust. This chapter presents some former research on the connection between voluntary work and quality of life. Further, it introduces some of the characteristics of participation in Norwegian volunteering by ethnic marginalised groups and some contextual characteristics of the voluntary sector in Norway. The capability approach of Amartya Sen functions as an overarching theoretical framework, highlighting both individualistic and contextual elements and how they interconnect and produce certain structures for social inclusion. The empirical contribution in this chapter consists of a case study on volunteering performed by ethnic marginalised women in a voluntary organisation called Neighbourhood Mothers. The data used for this chapter was collected in the municipality of Kvam Herad (a town of 8,467 citizens) in Western Norway county, and Oslo, the capital of Norway (a city of 693,494 citizens). The case study has found that inclusion in a voluntary organisation has a huge impact on ethnic marginalised women’s experienced well-being and quality of life. There are more marginalised minorities in Oslo than in Kvam. Still, the voluntary organisation seems to be a more important arena for social inclusion in rural areas than in cities, which is crucial for people’s experienced well-being and quality of life.
This chapter reflects on questions that all-too-often go unasked in quality of life research. Questions like, ‘Are higher levels of well-being always a good thing?’ and ‘Are there circumstances where high levels of well-being in a given community could be seen as a warning sign rather than a cause for celebration?’ To think through these questions, I examine a dataset drawn from two rural communities in Colorado (US). The project began in late 2019 and concluded in the summer of 2020, which means it draws from pre- and post-outbreak (COVID-19) data. One community is located on the rural eastern plains of the state, while the other is located in the Rocky Mountains within a frontier county – ‘frontier’ is a subset of the ‘rural’ classification to refer to US counties with population densities of six or fewer persons per square mile. These communities also differed in terms of their demographic compositions, with one being overwhelming white while the other had recently seen a considerable influx of immigrants. The research points to how ‘rural’ and ‘rural well-being’ cannot be understood monolithically, while also proving they can be good to think about from the perspective of troubling concepts like happiness and satisfaction.
The chapter revisits the main empirical and analytical arguments of the book, and discusses how deportation regimes, and the continuum of state violence they mobilise, extend transnationally as part of the global apartheid regime, and internally, as one of the mechanisms through which racialised state borders are produced and maintained within societies. It also considers how state violence colonises the identity not only of those who are exposed to it, but also those who enforce it. Finally, it discusses the position of academic research within deportation regimes, and what kind of knowledge is or can be useful for documenting and challenging borders and the violence which sustains them.