Urban Inequalities Measured through Citizen-Defined Wellbeing Indicators

Marginalisation and intensifying inequalities are a persistent issue in high income urban contexts including Western European cities. Yet, urban policy in these cities is not able to effectively address marginalisation as it works from a narrow framing of the problem, and conceptualises and measures the problem and solutions top-down instead of bottom-up (Verrest et al., 2021; Cardoso et al., 2022; Caprotti, 2018; Pouw, 2020).

Within this context a PhD research is being conducted that aims to (i) understand context-specific structural causes and dynamics behind urban inequality from a multi-dimensional wellbeing perspective, (ii) develop bottom-up indicators and a measurement tool to derive wellbeing needs on level neighbourhood level, (iii) field test these bottom-up tools and instruments in a series of real-life experiments together with citizens and community groups, (iv) renew urban policy practice with a key role for community self-organisation and locally-owned policy instruments. The research takes place in Amsterdam where it applies an action-oriented and community-based participatory approach, using co-creation, surveys and stakeholder dialogues as specific methods.

A first case-study in the research led to the creation of a robust bottom-up methodology to develop and measure multidimensional wellbeing indicators on neighbourhood level. This bottom-up method is now applied in two additional case-studies. First findings indicate that citizens’ self-identification of indicators provides credible data on needs and priorities of marginalised citizens, otherwise ill-captured in formal economic indicators (van Beek et al, 2024, under review; van Beek et al, 2024, submitted). Moreover important correlations are found between the multidimensional wellbeing indicators and patterns in wellbeing levels are found and currently further explored.

This submission proposes to present and discuss two particular parts of the PhD research: 1) the steps taken to develop and measure the context-specific wellbeing indicators, 2) the differences in wellbeing levels found between neighbourhoods and specific demographic groups.