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Is the Well-Being of Neighboring Cities Important to Me? Analysis of the Spatial Effect of Social Capital and Urban Amenities in South Korea

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Abstract

Much scholarly attention is paid to understanding subjective well-being (SWB) from a spatial perspective. Various features of a city including social capital may have significant impacts on SWB in addition to individual attributes and national characteristics. However, the extant empirical studies of SWB tend to focus on the national- or regional-scale analysis rather than the city-scale analysis. Particularly, few studies inquire into the impacts of social capital and urban amenities on SWB along with the spatial dependence at the city level. This paper aims to examine the spatial effects of social capital and urban characteristics on the SWB of cities. For this purpose, we construct a series of spatial panel models for SWB using data for 219 cities in South Korea, from the Korean Community Health Survey (KCHS) conducted in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. The results show that income, Gini-coefficient, social trust, social networks with friends, participation in charity activities, open space, and cultural opportunities all affect the SWB. Particularly, social capital and open space have spatial spillover effects on the SWB, even after controlling for socio-demographic variables. These findings will not only draw some important policy implications for urban planning and public management to improve the level of urban SWB, but also provide a piece of significant evidence for follow-up studies of its kind.

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Notes

  1. The local government system in South Korea can be divided into three level divisions: provincial (Do-Gwangyeoksi), municipal (Si-Gun-Gu), and sub-municipal (Eup-Myeon-Dong) units. The provincial unit governed by an elected governor includes multiple municipalities, the municipal unit is the smaller self-governing body with an elected mayor, and the sub-municipal unit is the neighborhood unit without any political power.

  2. The reason for reducing one municipal unit is that Cheongwon-Gun was abolished by the merger with Cheongju-Si in 2014.

  3. The queen contiguity weights matrix is a binary weighting matrix, which classifies regions as neighbors, who share either a border or a corner point. We have treated island units as missing values. The percentage of missing values is only 3.52% (8/227).

  4. The equalized income is calculated by dividing the household’s total income from all sources by the square root of the number of household members. Since the household income is measured by intervals in KCHS, we converted the interval incomes to the midpoint values of the corresponding classes. We then calculated the Gini coefficient using the midpoint values with the individual weights based on sampling probabilities.

  5. The “superficial social relations” here refer to “weak ties”. Based on Granovetter (1983) and Putnam (2000), social capital can be divided into strong and weak ties. Strong ties such as relationship with family members and close friends mainly provide emotional support, which directly contributes to SWB, while weak ties such as relationship with colleagues and neighbors predominantly provide information support.

  6. An anonymous reviewer suggested an alternative explanation: the spatial sorting of well-off people. People are happier in a place with good amenities. Due to their socioeconomic status, wealthy people would easily migrate to areas with a better quality of life, and sometimes overflow into the surrounding area. Good urban environments may attract richer people who are more satisfied with their lives. But this interpretation need further evidence with concrete data analysis, which is reserved for future study.

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  1. Department of Environmental Planning, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, South Korea

    Zhe Hong & In Kwon Park

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  1. Zhe Hong
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Correspondence to In Kwon Park.

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Hong, Z., Park, I.K. Is the Well-Being of Neighboring Cities Important to Me? Analysis of the Spatial Effect of Social Capital and Urban Amenities in South Korea. Soc Indic Res 154, 169–190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02542-1

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