Infrastructure and well-being

This paper presents the main contours of debates about well-being and the connections between infrastructure, well-being, and sustainability. Broadly distributed well-being is the goal of national governments, and individual well-being represents a desirable positive state beyond physical health. Contemporary definitions of well-being originated in the field of psychology in the 1980s. Psychologists have highlighted three aspects of well-being: cognitive, affective and eudaimonic well-being. The cognitive evaluation of well-being, through the assessment of life satisfaction, is commonly used in large national and international surveys. There is a growing interest in comprehensive approaches to measuring well-being, and its eudaimonic aspect. The second half of the paper examines the relationship between well-being and three key infrastructure topics — mobility, public space and nature contact — by referring to classic and new examples from urban design, the social sciences, and urban restoration ecology. These examples suggest that dimensions of well-being — among them trust, optimism, belonging, delight and empathy — have consequences beyond the individual and are necessary for community commitments to sustainability and environmental justice.