Rural Quality of Life

Recent research suggests that rural residents in the global North are happier than urban populations in the same countries. This goes against received wisdom in the field, where the opposite is usually assumed. Is quality of life better in rural areas? What can we learn from digging deeper into the rural-urban happiness paradox, and which critical questions does this leave us with for the future? The complexity of answering these questions calls for a multi-disciplinary outlook, reflected in the contributions from 49 authors drawn from across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
Rural quality of life consists of four parts. The first part sidesteps the urban gaze by entering everyday rural life to ask the fundamental question: what is quality of life in the countryside? With a specific focus on the built environment in the countryside, the second part attends to the built interventions made by local communities, planners, architects and policymakers, often driven by policy goals that explicitly emphasise quality of life. The third part takes a closer look at the role of civil society in contributing to geographic differences in quality of life. With or without concrete evidence, this has often been highlighted as an explanation and therefore calls for careful, critical scrutiny. Finally, the fourth part presents quantitatively informed studies of differences in quality of life between the city and the countryside, using national and international data sets.
Rural quality of life investigates what quality of life in the countryside is all about - in everyday life, through interventions in the built environment, in civil society and in measures of subjective wellbeing.
¿Pia Heike Johansen is associate professor of rural sociology at University of Southern Denmark
Anne Tietjen is associate professor of landscape architecture and urban design at Copenhagen University
Evald Bundgaard Iversen is associate professor of public management at the University of Southern Denmark
Henrik Lauridsen Lolle is associate professor in political sociology at Aalborg University
Jens Kaae Fisker is associate professor in political geography at Stavanger University