Urban sustainability and Gross National Happiness: a review of community well-being domains and dimensions

Abstract

The effort in measuring well-being and happiness by plethora of different indicators and frameworks are stepping up globally, despite critics for not being accepted as the national indicator to promote subjective well-being due to the methodological approach and choices of dimensions employed. This study, reviews current research on community well-being measurement to justify the inclusion of different sustainability metrics to optimize outcomes for national happiness and urban sustainability. Forty-four (44) scientific articles were identified, out of 300 research studies drawn from the electronic data search from the world of science focusing on key dimensions: economic, social, environment, governance, politics, culture, and health. Finding shows that social dimension and objective approach remains the most studied on community well-being with few studies on subjective domain. Finding suggests that a multidisciplinary conceptual framework towards a holistic view is desirable to allow for a more theory-based tool to evaluate multidimensional issues of community well-being at all levels.