Urbanometric analysis of data-driven urban wellbeing – an exploration of spatially dependent city love in Flanders

This study offers a novel contribution to the emerging place-based wellbeing research. The paper examines spatial wellbeing dimensions of an interdependent system of places. It presents and tests an urbanometric approach for identifying the key factors that shape urban wellbeing (‘city love’) in an open system of functionally interconnected municipalities. The paper uses the Flemish urban-rural system in Belgium as an empirical test case. Based on an extensive data set, a Beta regression model is developed to measure the impact of both ‘soul’ factors (such as social capital, governance, and cultural services) and ‘body’ factors (such as green infrastructure and bike-walkability) on city love, while accounting for the moderating effects of regional agglomeration factors. The findings show the importance of connectivity between urban agglomerations, revealing that municipalities closer to urban centres rely less on local facilities, while those outside large cities depend more on local amenities for urban satisfaction. This paper offers a new quantitative perspective for data-driven urban planning, transforming the landscape of conventional urban studies and ways of analyzing the functioning of cities in a complex system of municipalities.