plan aims to reach out and involve as many stakeholders as possible. Their knowledge and experience in the field will be of great value to all participants.

**Fairness:** Issues of ‘fairness’ can also challenge the integrity of performance indicators. Much of what the local or international community views as good or bad service is often beyond a city’s responsibility. For example, airports, utilities, health and education services, are often not a city’s direct responsibility, yet the quality of these services has a direct bearing on the city’s perceived quality of life and competitiveness.

**Cost** : The cost of measuring performance is one of the key factors determining feasibility. Cities that have regular household or firm surveys may design a monitoring system based on city indicators by either using their existing sources of data or by adapting these. However, many cities do not have such surveys and will need to find the sources to finance the data collection and processing. Finding permanent sources of financing is the most significant challenge in developing city indicators. However, given the importance and usefulness of the exercise, it has been shown that partnerships with chambers of commerce, international business associations, and academic institutions often help to fill this important need.

# **6.3 Including Subjective Measures within City Indicators**

# **6.3.1 Measuring Well-Being and Happy Citizens**

An emerging field of research involves ‘subjective well-being’ as a broader measure of ‘happiness’<sup>16</sup> . Initially limited to individual humans, this research is now trying to determine the degree of ‘city well-being’ (see Annex 7).

Empirical research has proven that in industrialized countries well-being appears to rise as the national income rises, up to a certain level. Above such a level (about US$15,000), increases in well-being are so small that they become almost undetectable (Eckersley, 2000). Wills (2006) proposes to expand the data beyond objective indicators and to create data that measure subjective well-being, and more specifically, personal well-being. The personal well-being index developed by Professor Robert Cummins is applied on a comparative basis in different countries and cities by the International Wellbeing Group<sup>17</sup> and serves as a good model. These subjective indicators may provide the basis for intercity comparisons of subjective well-being. Cities that are found to have higher levels of subjective well-being may provide useful information on which values and dimensions of life are more important for citizens.

In developing countries and cities, citizens’ sense of well-being does not automatically match the objective conditions of their economic environment. For example, it has been shown that in cities like Bogotá, subjective well-being of citizens can be as high as in other cities, such as Sydney, Australia, which are “objectively” more developed (Wills, 2006). Just as people tend to have an ‘emotional baseline’ (Gilbert, 2006) so too could cities have an ambient level of subjective wellbeing.

The Personal Well-being Index (PWI) consists of seven domains of the overall measure of lifesatisfaction: (i) standard of living, (ii) health, (iii) achieving in life, (iv) personal relationships, (v) safety, (vi) community connectedness and (vii) future security. The National Well-being Index

> 16 Subjective well-being includes cognitive evaluations about achieving important values and goals in the life span of the individuals as well as the affective measure of how well that person feels, whereas happiness comprises only the affective elements of pleasure and avoiding pain.

> 17 http://acqol.deakin.edu.au/inter_wellbeing/ int_wellbeing_group.

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