Association of urban built environment with happiness of a city: a soul and body diagnostic of Bhopal

Abstract

Nearly five percent of Indians are suffering from mental illness with one in every five requires mental counselling, as well as it has been estimated that by 2025, 38.1 million years of healthy life will be lost to mental illness in India. Even worst, as per World Happiness Report 2020, India has ranked 180, downgraded from its previous rank of 111 in 2013. But Is Happiness an individual achievement only? Or an urban level contributor can help in achieving it? Is it can be bought at city level? Answering these questions, this thesis tries to find out the association between urban built environment & happiness of a city. Till date enormous attention has been given to various urban issues like transport and mobility, housing, urban decay, physical and social infrastructure, safety and crime, economy etc. However, a very less attention has been paid to mental health of a city. Now the time has come when both the mental and physical health of human beings are being considered as important aspects, then why not for cities? The present research first tries to establish the need for associating happiness with cities, and then tries to find out what are the urban measures/indicators that affects the happiness of a city the most, for which, various literatures from happiness report, happiness workshops, projects, happiness and wellbeing researches, and Bhutan Gross National Happiness has been referred. But measuring is a task. Thus, to answer the question that how to measure happiness, Diener Satisfaction scale, personal wellbeing index, B & T happiness function has been thoroughly studied. But all of these were not enough to establish the association between various spatial characteristics of urban built environment and happiness. Thus, the present research opted for ‘Body’ and ‘Soul’ Diagnostic of the city. Where ‘Body’ are the Spatial Characteristics and ‘Soul’ guides happiness, coined in the book ‘Soul of London-1905’. Using Regression model, It is then tried to establish the association between two, and listing of the spatial factors affecting the soul of the city the most. The pilot case taken for the study is the city of Bhopal, having urban population of 1.8 million and 463 sq.km. municipal area, the city is not only the 10th most liveable city of India, and ranked neither happy nor sad in the LG’ Happiness study of Indian cities, but the city also carries a dark image of world’s largest industrial disaster Bhopal Gas Tragedy. In order to analyse Bhopal on the said perspective, the research has then targeted to map 7 spatial characteristics as public transport accessibility levels, building density, crime rate, open space mapping, air quality, vegetation index and slums. While soul was studied via sentiment analysis using twitter data, after which she found that fear of safety, distance from open spaces, and distance from slums hampers happiness the most in the study area, along with a sense of positivity among the people living in higher density areas stating living in neighbourhood, in communities makes them feel better than in solitude.