Living in Lyon for just under a year, I’ve benefited from what European cities are famous for in the U.S., namely, the walkability and quality public transit. Simultaneously, I’ve spent enough time on trams to the suburbs to notice where the system stops working, and I find myself repeatedly frustrated by infrastructure gaps that fail the system’s users and feel entirely fixable.
In 2024, I wrote about the relationship between land use, infrastructure, and mental health outcomes, arguing that we improve wellbeing faster by fixing high-leverage environmental factors than by scaling individual interventions alone. I wanted to bring some data to that instinct. For this SQL project, I cleaned and queried the European Social Survey (2002-2023), 530,711 respondents across Europe, filtering to 20,809 French responses.
I initially planned to use a transport satisfaction variable but found it had less than 10% coverage for French respondents (2,010 of 20,809) and pivoted to the residential area variable instead, excluding refusals and non-responses from the wellbeing variables before running any averages. This is an imperfect substitution, because where someone lives is not the same as the quality of the transport they rely on, so it can point to patterns worth investigating rather than answer questions about infrastructure directly. The wider literature gives reason to keep looking. Conceição et al. (2023)1, the review behind my earlier reflection, synthesised 69 empirical studies and found evidence linking transport infrastructure, congestion and delays to negative affective states and psychological distress. The happiness and life satisfaction measures I used are subjective wellbeing scales, not clinical instruments, and I’m treating them as such.
The results didn’t go where I expected after reading that review. Residents of suburbs and the outskirts of big cities reported the highest average happiness (7.33 out of 10, n = 2,560) and life satisfaction (6.64) of any residential category, followed closely by country villages and rural homes. Town and small city residents scored lowest on both (7.14 and 6.36, n = 6,857), not big city residents. The oft-assumed gradient of urban is better and suburban is worse doesn’t show up here, and suburbs stay on top and towns at the bottom whether I look at the early survey rounds (2002-2008) or the recent ones (2018-2023), so pooling twenty years of data isn’t what produces the pattern.
| Residential area | n | Happiness | Life satisfaction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suburbs or outskirts of big city | 2,560 | 7.33 | 6.64 |
| Country village | 6,209 | 7.29 | 6.51 |
| Farm or home in countryside | 1,287 | 7.21 | 6.58 |
| Big city | 3,797 | 7.18 | 6.43 |
| Town or small city | 6,857 | 7.14 | 6.36 |
The differences are modest, the figures are unweighted, and confirming them would take proper statistical testing, which is my next step.
That caveat raises its own question in my eyes. If the people most affected by infrastructure inequality are reporting reasonable wellbeing on large population surveys, does that make it easier for policymakers to deprioritize them and go on with business as usual? How can we, the community of health innovators and developers, better center these communities and advocate for them in our work?