As boasts about the vivacity of urban life go, it’s hard to top Samuel Johnson: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” the great lexicographer said.
City-lovers have sometimes taken the quip as a broader claim about the virtues of metropolitan living. But of course that only goes so far. Canadians, for example, don’t need to be told that Johnson wasn’t referring to our own London.
The capital of western Ontario is perfectly nice, but weariness with the historic insurance hub shouldn’t set off any alarm bells; it was never built to compare with its namesake, much less in Johnson’s colorful, jostling 18th century. Some cities are simply grander than others.
A recent study from researchers at McGill University and the University of British Columbia, on the other hand, comes with a more jarring conclusion for Canadian urbanites: Residents of our cities are less happy, on average, than their rural counterparts.
Are cities making us miserable? Are all the restaurants, nightclubs, skyscrapers and stadiums just so many glittering lights, masking a paved-over pit of despair?
Well, this is where the procession of caveats begins, dense as a throng of strap-hangers pouring out of a subway car at rush hour.
They begin with the nature of the survey question that gives the research its definition of happiness. In a standard formulation, people were asked how satisfied they are with their lives as a whole, on a scale of zero to 10.
Already, the phrasing puts cities in a hole. Cities tend to attract strivers – people who define their well-being not in terms of how satisfied they are but how hopeful; not in terms of how well they are doing but how well they are on track to do. If the founder of a video-game startup in Montreal tells you she is not currently satisfied with her life, come back in three years.
The Torontos of the world also breed a culture of complaint that is partly a product of living conditions and partly a figment of water-cooler badinage. Commuters who take the streetcar to their jobs can be worked into a fine lather over traffic on expressways they rarely drive, if the subject comes up. It’s the kind of atmospheric mopiness that can pull down one’s survey answer by a fifth of a point without impinging in any way on quality of life.
A fifth of a point, it bears noting, is what we’re talking about here. “The average gap between urban and rural life satisfaction,” the researchers write, is 0.18 points. That’s statistically significant, but it doesn’t scream that Canadian cities are warrens of misery, either.
In fact, Canadians are remarkably happy, overall. The country’s gloomiest quintile still has an average life satisfaction of 7.7 out of 10 – a solid B-plus.
Factor in the demographic profile of Canadian metros and the prospect that cities themselves are causing the happiness gap looks even less credible. (Not that the researchers advance such a thesis; they explicitly avoid drawing any causal links in the paper.)
Immigrants flock to cities, of course, but it’s no secret that life can be tough for them. They may have to pick up a language, requalify for the job market and acclimatize to a strange culture (not to mention climate). That doesn’t reflect badly on cities – if anything, their economic opportunities and social networks lower the hurdles that immigrants face.
It’s true, though, that city life can be harsher than rural – and the study points to some unsurprising ways that’s true. Notably, the researchers found that, in happier parts of the country, commutes were shorter and a smaller share of people spent more than 30 per cent of their income on housing.
Policymakers should take note: You’ve heard it from voters a thousand times before, but unaffordable real estate, poor transit and daily traffic snarls really do seem to make people less happy. Act – and build – accordingly.
Still, annoying as they can be, expensive apartments and clogged streets are also symptoms of urban success. They mean people want to live in cities, despite everything. We see it across North America, as once-moribund downtown cores spring back to life with glittering glass condos and a nightlife that strains against last call.
Whatever they tell survey-takers, Canadians, like people the world over, continue to vote for cities with their feet, no more tired of London (or Toronto or Calgary or Vancouver or Montreal) than they are tired of life.