Residents’ Satisfaction With City’s Conditions and Services Predicts Residents’ Perceived City Quality of Life and Subjective Well-Being

The present study had two primary aims. First, we examined the role of perceived local environmental conditions in the production of subjective well-being. Second, we tested the validity of a city quality-of-life indicators model in a global context. To address these aims, we analyzed data from the 2019 Gallup World Poll, which included 162,740 respondents from 137 countries and provided subjective indicators of urban conditions across a broad international sample. Guided by the concept of personal utility, the model proposed that residents’ perceived quality of life in the city would be positively associated with satisfaction with the city’s conditions and services, including infrastructure, social services, and the physical, economic, and social environment. The model further proposed that perceived city quality of life would mediate the associations between satisfaction with these conditions and services and subjective well-being, indexed by life satisfaction and affective well-being. This mediating process was interpreted through the lens of bottom-up spillover theory. Results from multilevel modeling supported these hypotheses. In particular, satisfaction with local economic, social, and environmental conditions emerged as a coherent domain that was associated with subjective well-being through perceived city quality of life. We discuss the policy implications of these findings, along with the study’s limitations and directions for future research.