Subjective well-being as a component of social sustainability: assessment and evaluation in the context of China's urban development.

Abstract

In rapidly urbanizing world, urban sustainability has become a central focus of academic research, science and policy-making processes. This has resulted in evident efforts all across the globe aimed at reaching the aforementioned goals of creating sustainable cities, and in the development of instruments capable of tackling all the aspects and key issues of sustainable development in a balanced manner. Against this background, my work aims at analyzing the level of subjective well-being achieved in Chinese townships that are currently undergoing a fast, sometimes aggressive, urbanization process. In order to shed light on this issue, as an introductory section, I will analyze the concept of sustainable development, focusing on its implications in urban settings, and concentrating mainly on the concept of social sustainability and perceived well-being. I will try to answer the following questions: Why is perceived well-being important? What is the link between these two concepts? Do they overlap, trying to achieve the same goals, or do they conflict with each other? In order to gain a better understand of these issues, I will analyze the existing indicators that have been developed to measure these aspects of sustainability. Furthermore, it is important to state that even though sustainable development has become a global goal and priority, however, in implementing strategies and decision-making processes, unique characteristics of a specific society must be taken into account in order for a certain development model to be successfully applicable. Therefore, seen the different economic, social and environmental conditions, universal blueprints and templates are not available for widespread application ; nevertheless, successful examples implemented in other countries that have economic or social or cultural features in common with China are worth taking a deeper look at. In the second chapter, the main focus will move to China and its experience in this field. Therefore, it is fundamental to provide a brief historical excursus of the process that, in a few decades, has led China to accomplish a 56% urbanization rate. Secondly, I will analyze the state of social sustainability in China (as a whole, but with a major focus on in-process rural areas) and the role that perceived personal well-being plays in this sphere. Following this will be a review of the most important indexes and indicators that have been used in evaluating the sustainability of Chinese urban agglomerates and of the ones that were created specifically to apply to the Chinese situation. The third chapter will be dedicated to a case study based on the analysis of some questionnaires that I submitted in seven townships in Shandong Province, Tianjin Municipality and Beijing Municipality. The first part of this section will be dedicated to a quick overview of these places, their main characteristics and an explanation of which different stages of the urbanization process they are currently undergoing. This brief introductory frame will be followed by a description of the methodology used and, ultimately, by an analysis of the results. The last part will be dedicated to a discussion of the results obtained, in an attempt to provide a small contribution to shed light on my initial question.