Abstract
Understanding the key ingredients and mechanisms that act to promote the health, safety and well-being of urban dwellers is an endeavour that engages scholars across many disciplines. In the face of significant urban growth, knowing and enhancing the drivers that underpin health, safety and well-being is a topic of rising importance with practical significance for policy and planning. The challenge for researchers is assembling the necessary evidence to be able to isolate and understand these key ingredients and mechanisms in a manner through which policy can be better grounded. It is only when we have this evidence that we will be able to design effective policy through which resilient communities that are able to maximise social and economic participation can be nurtured.
Population growth and urban expansion of cities act to change their social-structural and physical landscapes. This is aligned with contemporary shifts in mobility that together raise important questions as to their intersection with the health, safety and well-being of urban residents as well as the impact on the communities and cities in which they live and recreate. Precisely what elements at which geographic scales give rise to maximising health, safety and well-being continues to elude us. It is against this backcloth that this timely text, Mobility, Sociability and Well-being of Urban Living, is set. Positioned in a way that will appeal to the interests of geographers, sociologists, urban planners and transport scholars, this interdisciplinary edited book engages with three broad and interrelated concepts, namely, mobility, sociability and well-being. The editors of the book, Donggen Wang and Shenjing He, very thoughtfully bring together a series of case studies, the majority of which are drawn from China, although also including examples from Taiwan, Japan and the United States. With a particular emphasis on the geographical and spatial dimensions of well-being, the text follows a recent trend in quality of life and well-being research (Ala-Mantila et al., 2018; Tomaney, 2017) teasing apart social practices and the daily lived experiences of urban dwellers via a number of individual case studies.
The first chapter introduces the reader to the themes and structure of the text wherein the editors distinguish and define four distinct parts. These four parts are each extrapolated over the course of 13 chapters through a series of empirically driven contributions along with some literature review focused chapters.
Part One contains three chapters that place a focus on mobility and immobility at different geographic scales, with China as the case study context. The first chapter, authored by Lan, examines the way in which undocumented migrants face a number of structural mobility constraints allied with their strategies to overcome limits to physical mobility, via an ethnographic study of the African diaspora in Guangzhou. Engaging with the politics of mobility, Chapter 2, by Qian, also draws on Guangzhou as the study context to explore how the outlawing of informal motorcycle taxis has impacted the livelihoods and well-being of a subgroup of urban migrants who operate the service. The final chapter of Part One, by Ding and Wang, examines the way in which on-street parking within Chinese cities is competing for finite space and in doing so is exacerbating the deterioration in traffic conditions.
Part Two, entitled ‘Urban Living and Socio-Spatial Experiences’, includes three chapters, each of which places a particular focus on marginal groups in China. Chapter 4, by He and Wang, examines the urban experiences and subjective well-being of the new generation of migrant workers via two primary surveys, one of the Pearl River Delta region and a second in Guangzhou. Their findings reveal some interesting insights that point to a more adventurous and creative new migrant worker generation compared with their predecessors; however, the urban lives of the new migrant workers continue to suffer the same (or worse) levels of precarity, fashioned by state institutions and allied with societal and market forces. Chapter 5, by Hao, examines the issues associated with the redevelopment of Shenzhen’s urban villages, a locus where large numbers of migrant workers live, which offer affordable housing and are proximate to employment opportunities and amenities. However, Hao points to how the redevelopment of these urban villages under the banner of urban renewal acts to displace their residents and threaten the well-being of the displaced residents through ‘reducing co-presence and mobility’ (p. 108). Placing a focus on mobility and the quality of life for the elderly, Chapter 6, by Feng, looks at the co-residence of the elderly with their adult children in Nanjing. Findings from a primary survey reveal an interesting mobility trade-off (reducing out of home interactions as a consequence of household duties) where higher levels of life satisfaction are reported for elderly co-residing with adult children in situations where seniors have no retirement plans along with a low level of education.
Part Three contains three chapters and switches focus to look at urban travel and its associations with life satisfaction, with empirical case studies from the US and Japan. Drawing on a deep review of travel behaviour scholarship, Chapter 7, by Ettema et al., reports on the way that travel mode and modal change are related to subjective well-being. They highlight the positive implications of active transport on well-being over car travel, and how travel by public transport can (under certain conditions) be a positive alternative to the car. Chapter 8, by Cao and Wang, employs a structural equation modelling approach to US-based household survey data to unveil relations between travel behaviour and life satisfaction through travel satisfaction. Findings point to the importance of having a driver’s licence, which was positively associated with life satisfaction given its capacity to facilitate mobility. Also employing structural equation modelling drawing on panel data for Japan, Chapter 9, by Xiong and Zhang, explores the intersection of residential choices and travel behaviour on residents’ quality of life. They find that both current and previous life choices (health and leisure), along with specific life events (household change), play a more dominant role in determining a resident’s quality of life than either residential choices or travel behaviour.
The final part of the text examines well-being at the neighbourhood scale through four chapters. Wang and Wang, authors of the 10th chapter, offer a very useful broad review of geographical studies of subjective well-being (the appendix to this chapter is an especially useful feature, summarising studies exploring the geographic determinants of subjective well-being), introducing the theory, concepts and measures before concluding by charting some potential directions for future research. Chapter 11, by Yan, Gao and Breitung, examines neighbourhood determinants of life satisfaction among the elderly in Beijing using structural equation modelling. Important predictors of life satisfaction were found to be the presence of social support at the neighbourhood level, along with dwelling conditions and community-provided senior citizen services in neighbourhoods with high densities of elderly people, and access to services in neighbourhoods with low densities of older people. The 12th chapter, by Liu et al., looks into the role of social housing in residents’ emotional well-being across 13 social housing estates in Guangzhou, also employing structural equation modelling as their analytic tool. Their results highlight the importance of social cohesion at the neighbourhood level as the key predictor of emotional well-being, along with the role of housing conditions and personal social ties in regulating residents’ emotions. The final chapter, by Liao et al., explores the role of social support and well-being during a heatwave. Their regression modelling on a survey of Taiwanese adults revealed that social support at the community level was important in its capacity to ameliorate the negative consequences of a heatwave on emotional well-being.
The book progresses a number of valuable insights but arguably the predominant focus on the interplay of mobility, sociability and well-being from a Chinese perspective is a particularly welcome addition to the literature. This is a context underscored by an unprecedented rate and scale of urban change and stands as an important point of difference from the weight of scholarship in this area that is founded in European and North American contexts.
This edited book is a worthwhile addition to the well-being literature and is written in a very accessible form. It provides important insights into the role that geography and spatial scale play in understanding the interplay of mobility, sociability and well-being in our complex urban worlds. Further, each of the case studies collectively highlights the role and importance of different analytic approaches that are necessary to unpack the complexities and dynamics of well-being. It is likely (as the editors claim in the introductory chapter) that readers will find different chapters of particular relevance and therefore the book is best suited as an accompanying text for scholars with interests in the spatial dimensions of well-being. Indeed, the way in which chapters are largely standalone plays well into the likely way readers will find utility in certain topics contained within the text, thus mitigating the need to read from cover to cover. In conclusion, the book speaks to a wide audience, offering a useful compilation of material that collectively points to a future pitted with major challenges associated with placing the well-being of urban dwellers on an upward trajectory.