Happiness, wellbeing and public policies: an urban perspective.

The word Happiness, in widest sense, is used for all that is good, and often considered interchangeable with Wellbeing or Quality of Life (QoL), indicating both individual and social prosperity (worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/). In recent years economists have returned to happiness (Bruni, Porta, 2007), to explore why the increase of wealth does not correspond to greater social and individual well-being (Easterlin, 1974). Therefore the assessment of society progress need a change of paradigm, which does not mean reducing living standard but changing the model, trying to enhance possibility of genuine interpersonal meeting and relationships opportunities (Bartolini, 2010). A new, interdisciplinary, approach to happiness is developed since then to give an answer to the modest correlation between income and happiness. Further, in the last decades, that persons are able to assess their happiness or their satisfaction with their own lives has become clear. In particular the use of objective indicators of economic-social type is accompanied by subjective indicators on the perceived QoL. Quantitative indicators are, for example, the economic status, the housing system and the environment, the education system and the healthcare, the education level and the quality of the health of individuals; qualitative indicators are made up of satisfaction for life in general and in different environments and contexts such as family, work, sports, friendship, sex, healthcare, pension, social and cultural environment, etc. The subjective indicators are certainly not straightly observable and measurable. Recently the analysis of happiness, wellbeing and QoL was studied at the urban level (Florida et al., 2013; Ballas, 2013; Marans, 2012; Marans, RW & Stimson, RJ Eds., 2011) and in particular the use of wellbeing measures to direct the policy development, to monitor policy progress and evaluate their results (Dolan et al., 2011). Some authors (Florida et al, 2013) have analysed the factors that outline the happiness of cities, finding that beyond income, also human capital plays a significant role in the urban happiness. Starting from this premise, the paper intends to give a contribution while examining in depth the connections between urban happiness and policies, through the exploratory analysis on the approach used in Bristol, UK.