Measuring what matters A wellbeing economics approach to urban marginality in high-income contexts

This dissertation explores urban marginality in affluent cities, focusing on marginalized neighbourhoods in Amsterdam where economic growth coexists with deep social and spatial inequalities. It asks how citizen-defined indicators of wellbeing can be developed and measured at neighbourhood level, and how such participatory wellbeing measurement can empower residents and inform more inclusive urban governance. The research draws on wellbeing economics, conceptualizing wellbeing as the interaction between material, relational, and subjective dimensions of life, and integrates this with participatory governance theory and urban regime theory. It takes an action-oriented and community-based participatory research approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, experiential and statistical data, and multiple forms of expertise.
The empirical chapters show that, through meaningful co-creative processes, citizen-defined, multidimensional wellbeing indicators can be robustly developed and measured at neighbourhood level and generate analytically distinct and policy-relevant knowledge. Measurement results demonstrate how marginality, in an affluent city as Amsterdam, is a matter of varying and interacting relational, personal, and institutional deficits that are contextually shaped and locally specific. Concerns over foundational ‘basic safety’ wellbeing needs were found across neighbourhoods accompanied by substantial divergence in terms of priorities. Lastly the dissertation discusses the governance impact of participatory wellbeing measurement, and hence the empowering potential of participation, as conditional. While a necessary condition for revealing lived marginality and empowering citizens, it is not sufficient for achieving inclusive urban governance in high-income contexts. Realising its full transformative potential requires complementary changes in institutional arrangements, coalition structures, and the valuation of local knowledge within policy systems.