A 4-Part Definition for Quality of Life and Why it Matters

People often use the phrase quality of life subjectively, referring to an individual’s health, comfort, and ability to enjoy life events. I am using the term to describe and define something tangible. It’s a definition for quality of life that places middle-class families in cities.

Quality of life’s cornerstone is living life at the human scale. When I walk out my front door, I can walk (or bike) to what I need over a week be it a grocery store, school, restaurant, athletic field, movie theater, dentist, or pretty much anything, and feel both physically and psychologically comfortable doing so.

The buildings surrounding me elicit a positive response because they reflect my human nature and the natural world around me. Importantly, I can see the sky without needing to crane my neck because buildings range from two to six stories in height.

When I walk down the street, I can see or imagine lives being lived behind the windows and doors I pass by. The people who shape such a place think in terms of design rather than density.

Life lived at the human scale is about the quality of the walk, sustaining a physical activity that has been a fundamental part of the human experience for the past 2.5 million years.

A Definition for Quality of Life

With the above in mind, the degree to which a city (or town) offers a high quality of life is the degree to which such a place is:

1. Built at the human scale, allowing its residents to comfortably walk or bike to everything needed or desired over the course of a week. (physical)
2. Able to provide convenient, direct access to nature. (physical)
3. Governed by people who understand the human scale and make decisions that sustain and enhance it. (social)
4. Populated by a middle-class society whose well-being, on balance, makes it possible to live comfortably and safely in the human-scale environment. (social)

This definition for quality of life brings me to a related question, namely what is home? Is it four walls and a roof? Is it a neighborhood? A larger municipal entity? Is it a feeling? Familiarity? Safety? Freedom? Or something else entirely?

For me, “home” is a psychological state shaped by the degree that quality of life’s four conditions are in place. When raising our three children, we experienced a relatively high quality of life for many years in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We lived in a human-scale neighborhood, had direct and convenient access to nature, and were surrounded by a middle class that enabled us to take advantage of everything the human scale could offer.

Unfortunately, the governance piece was missing and over time, municipal politicians, developers, and their urban planners worked to destroy what made the city a compelling place to live. Suffice to say a city’s continued quality of life depends on good governance.

Why Does This All Even Matter?

What We Build Matters

Many people are less enamored with the drive-everywhere culture that previous generations embraced so readily. Nielsen—the top market research firm in the world—surveyed millennials and found that 62 percent of them want to live in, “vibrant, creative energy cities offering a mix of housing, shopping, and offices right outside their doorstep.”

This translates to 51 million people in just one generation alone: a sizable chunk of the population who want to live in places where they can comfortably and safely use their own two feet to get everywhere they need to go.

There is a reason people are drawn to such a lifestyle. Plenty of research completed over the past two decades shows that relative to the auto-dependent suburbs most of us grew up in, walkable communities are better for us economically, environmentally, and socially, not to mention better for our health.

How we physically construct a community very much matters. Suburban sprawl is not the sole cause of the obesity epidemic, but eliminating walking from the average American’s lifestyle didn’t help. The intensifying climate crisis is not entirely because of vehicle emissions, but building auto-dependent places that maximize the use of oil is a significant part of the problem.

How We Treat One Another Matters

Living both inside and outside the United States has taught me that how we treat one another also matters. The reason my wife Christine and I could raise our three children without fear and stress in “urban” Halifax is not that Canadians are somehow more righteous. They’ve got a different history in terms of how its citizens have been treated which has produced a different outcome in terms of violence and fear in the present day.

Had British colonists been able to grow cotton in Nova Scotia, the stars and stripes would likely be flying today from every flagpole around, and the kind of fear, hatred, and polarization that characterizes much of American life would exist in Canada as well. The relative level of civility in day-to-day life in Canada is more a function of geography rather than enlightened thinking. I can peek under the covers and find most of the same social pathologies as the U.S. They’re just on a different scale.

Many in America (and Canada for that matter) would prefer an affordable alternative to the dominant drive-everywhere culture many of us came of age in. Providing alternatives is the job of municipal governments (with support at the state and federal level). Local governments pursuing the standard growth-at-all-cost agenda would be well served to pursue a quality-of-life agenda instead.

The first item on that agenda involves overcoming the rule of perpetual sprawl and realizing four achievements that promote human-scale development.  

The second, which is no less important, is to promote a shared understanding of a tragic domestic history that reverberates in the present day. It’s a patriotic education we need not fear, and can serve as a starting point for better conversations that strengthen our communities and a democracy under threat.