Rethinking transit-oriented development in shrinking cities: Urban structure and life satisfaction in Tokyo metropolitan area

Shrinking metropolitan regions are already consolidating residents around railway stations under compact city and transit-oriented development policy, yet whether those residents report better lives has not been established. This paper examines how urban structure is associated with life satisfaction in the station catchment areas of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Combining an original survey of working residents with geospatial indicators of neighborhood walkability, the analysis employs ordered probit models and a recursive path model with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors. Residents of station catchment areas report lower life satisfaction than those outside them, and the difference persists after conditioning for leisure behavior and household type. Neighborhood walkability is positively associated with life satisfaction within station catchment areas, whereas housing conditions are the dominant correlate beyond them. The pathway linking walkability to well-being operates through the perceived quality of everyday life rather than its quantity: the indirect association through free-time satisfaction is significant, whereas the serial pathway through leisure quantity is not. Robustness tests show that work and family satisfaction carry comparable indirect associations, so leisure is the clearest instance of this mechanism rather than the only one. Furthermore, single-person households are concentrated in these areas and report significantly lower life satisfaction than other household types, though the pathway is not separately identified within that group. These findings challenge the assumption that accessibility and density inherently enhance quality of life, and suggest that compact city strategies in shrinking regions should prioritize the experienced quality of everyday environments rather than the intensity of concentration alone.