If there is one experience every citizen of Bristol knows well, it is the misery of trudging, sodden and panting, up a steep hill as the rain pours down on you. No word captures the feeling of grumbling discontent it inspires, and few would be foolish enough to put a number on it.
But some Bristolians are trying to do exactly that. They have become fed up of being fed up – and as a starting point to cheering up their communities, they are trying to measure the city’s happiness in order to increase it.
The Happy City Initiative in Bristol is one of the most well-known wellbeing research centres in the world. Founded by Liz and Mike Zeidler in 2010, the community interest company sees itself as something of a happiness activist: measuring, training and campaigning to put people’s contentment on the public agenda.
By examining happiness on a citywide scale the Zeidlers hope to broaden the focus of local policy-makers beyond purely economics. “We measure the things that we value better in order to see what effects we have when we change things,” explains Mike. His words echo those of former cabinet secretary and economist Gus O’Donnell, a prominent advocate of wellbeing metrics, who once said: “If you treasure it, measure it.”
Earlier this month Happy City launched a set of tools developed with the New Economics Foundation. The Happy City Index uses national data sources to score England’s cities across 60 indicators of mental prosperity, such as housing, health and transport, and evaluates the “city conditions” that promote wellbeing. It combines them with ratings for sustainability and equality to produce rankings of happy cities.
Another measurement tool, the Happiness Pulse, attempts to take a reading of an individual’s quality of life. The survey asks a range of personal questions – job satisfaction, frequency of exercise, how many neighbours you know by name – and creates a wellbeing score in three areas: Be (how you feel), Do (how you act) and Connect (how you relate to others).
Measuring quality of life instead of purely financial output is no longer a fringe movement in the UK. In April this year the Economist magazine decried GDP as an increasingly “poor measure of prosperity”. And the Office for National Statistics and the government-funded What Works Centre for Wellbeing, both partners of the Happy City Initiative, have become ever bolder in their endorsements of alternative prosperity metrics.
Yet little of this mindset seems to have trickled down to policy-making at a local level – partly because it can all sound rather happy-clappy. The Happiness Pulse, for instance, attempts to inform you “which sort of happy” you are based on your survey responses. (Today, apparently, I am in Smoothie Mode). But the researchers claim the combination of personal data with sweeping city statistics is necessary to paint a full picture of wellbeing.
Attempts at measuring happiness are typically “too broad” and fail to “capture people’s sense of belonging, autonomy or vitality,” claims Happy City researcher Dr Sam Wren-Lewis. “Our research found that a person’s overall wellbeing is predicted almost equally by those ‘life in the city’ indicators as much as by what’s happening in their personal life.”
In Bristol, perhaps more so than any other city in the UK, a deeper understanding of prosperity is crucial. On the surface the city is flourishing: its GDP per capita is the highest of all England’s “core cities” and its workforce is both well educated and well paid. Many cities view it as a model to aspire to.
A short bus ride from the city centre’s rainbow-coloured houses and trendy waterfront bars, though, a different, darker Bristol quickly emerges. A total of 16% of Bristolians live in the most deprived neighbourhoods in England. Child poverty ranges from just 5% in affluent wards to 50% in others. Worse still is the drop in life expectancy when you cross the Avon from the touristy city centre to the southern neighbourhoods – between some areas the average life expectancy differs by almost a decade.
In the run-down suburbs of Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston, home to Bristol’s booming docks and some of the city’s most abject poverty, there is little hope that making more measurements will solve the city’s problems. “What makes people around here happy is keeping busy,” says local electrician Dean Turner. “They just need work. You don’t need charities spending all this money to tell you that.”
But his son Darren, who recently left Avonmouth for the outskirts of Bristol, feels there is more to happiness than just employment: “Where I live now people smile at you in the street even when they don’t have much. I didn’t think a place like that existed in Bristol … If measuring happiness helps government get that, then maybe there’s hope for the city.”
Happy City’s research does seem to recognise the Turners’ concerns. A pilot study of the Happiness Pulse earlier this year found that more affluent neighbourhoods reported higher levels of wellbeing than deprived ones. Unsurprising, perhaps – but the researchers also found that above an income bracket of £25,000 to £36,000, wellbeing stopped rising with income. Money, after a point, isn’t everything.
Some wards, such as the multicultural inner-city neighbourhood of Easton, were even “resilient” to the unhappiness that their income levels would usually suggest. Researchers speculate that tight community bonds and high diversity of age and ethnicity may act as a buffer against low wellbeing, although they caution the pilot study’s small sample size makes such ward-by-ward comparisons tenuous.
Despite the caveats, senior figures in the city are eager to integrate happiness metrics into Bristol’s vision. Marvin Rees, the mayor of Bristol, has suggested Happy City’s measurements could be welcomed into the council’s decision-making processes: “We have the opportunity to measure what progress is, beyond just saying, ‘Let’s grow the economy’, which is often what we default to.”
Yet the prospect of letting local government and employers access wellbeing data fills some residents with dread. Bristol’s smart city infrastructure, which is one of the most advanced in the country, has already prompted fears of a “surveillance state”. Some fear that individuals’ wellbeing will become the latest piece of data to be collected, stored and sold off to the highest bidder. Happy City CEO Liz Zeidler has claimed that, within reason, she takes “no moral high ground” on which businesses the organisation works with.
It is an important note of caution. But bridging the divides in Bristol requires a better understanding of the challenges the city faces – challenges which many feel have been masked by misleading GDP statistics and an uncritical focus on growth at all costs.
Rigorous happiness indices may well be what policymakers in Bristol need to help the city flourish. Convincing Bristolians to accept them, though, could be something more of an uphill struggle.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook and join the discussion
