Decoding happiness for citizen-centric spatial planning: a case of Bhopal

Abstract

Growth of a city is a continuous and never-ending process. As it begins to grow, further agglomeration materializes and city emerges as an epicentre. Urbanization has acted as tipping point leading to humungous population in and around cities. Incessant growth creates a deficit in urban-life, a factor often overlooked by city administrators and planners while ensuring essential services. Quality of urban-life is a function of life satisfaction and as well as the happiness of an individual. Decrease in one parameter affects the overall happiness of citizens. Happiness experienced by individuals is further sub-divided according to their physical attributes, social capital around them and the spaces they use. Some Scholars point out that happiness is positive emotions minus negative emotions, hence the various parameters of happiness become an important criteria to keep an individual happy. One of the most widely cited and major study on happiness is the development of Gross National Happiness (GNH) by Bhutan. GNH is an index based on thirty-three overall indicators, which comprehensively sum up the life of individuals, which includes emotional value, cultural diversity, value of the time and others. While there has been consderate studies in how social connections and physical attributes in one’s life affect happiness, there are limited studies on the effect of space (built environment) on happiness. Urban planning has traditionally dealt with enhancing overall socio-economic profile of citizens by tools such as land-use planning and improving transportation facilities. Recently, focus has shifted towards quality of life and liveability aspects of urban areas, but happiness still does not figure in the policy framework or plans for city development. This study aims to fill this gap by answering the question whether spatial planning creates inequality of happiness among occupants. Understanding the spatial inequality in happiness will lead to a more comprehensive approach of providing facilities and amenities to the citizenry. For quantifying the inequalities, we analyse the factors associated with builtenvironment (social capital, neighbourhood attributes and physical attributes) in two different urban settings. Old city area as well as its outgrowth area is chosen for this purpose. The context of both these areas is different in terms of demographics, built environment and street layouts, as collated from secondary research. In the next step, we chose some of the GNH indicators that can be directly linked with spatial planning with the help of necessary literature support. After administering an attitudinal study in both areas based on the indicators chosen earlier, we club the statements in groups by using dimension reduction. This is where we obtained three groups of social capital, neighbourhood attributes and physical attributes. After performing significance tests to know the quantum of differences between these factors and within these factors in both the areas. Study concludes that there exists inequalities in happiness of two different spatial contexts and that happiness should be included within the scope of various policies to remove these inequalities.