Rethinking the metrics of progress: Building cities around joy, not just GDP

Originally published in Manila Bulletin

For centuries, cities have been designed with clear goals in mind: maximize productivity, fortify defense, facilitate trade, and ensure efficiency. The measures used to determine urban success have followed suit: gross domestic product (GDP), real estate values, traffic throughput, and infrastructure investments. These are quantifiable and easy to chart on a graph or balance sheet. Yet, they are remarkably poor at telling us how it feels to live in a city.

Cities are not machines. They are living ecosystems of human interaction—where people fall in love, raise families, grieve losses, find community, or seek solitude. If we ignore the emotional and psychological landscape of urban life, we risk designing cities that are efficient but soulless, lucrative but lonely. The time has come to radically rethink what we measure when we talk about progress.

GDP, while a powerful economic indicator, tells us nothing about the distribution of wealth, quality of relationships, or mental health of a city’s residents. Property values may rise while homelessness surges. Traffic may move more smoothly while public space shrinks and social disconnection grows. These dominant metrics offer a narrow and often misleading view of urban wellbeing.

Moreover, cities that optimize for economic performance alone can become victims of their own success. Consider the housing crises in major global cities—London, San Francisco, Toronto—where astronomical property values have pushed out artists, teachers, and service workers, fracturing the urban social fabric in favor of financialized growth.

What if we began measuring joy, belonging, and emotional health as seriously as we measure economic output?

Emerging initiatives are pointing the way. Bogotá pioneered “mimable” (lovable) cities. Paris has invested heavily in “15-minute neighborhoods.” New Zealand introduced a “Wellbeing Budget” that includes mental health, child welfare, and climate resilience. These efforts reflect a growing realization that quality of life cannot be captured by market indicators alone.

We might begin to assess how often strangers speak to each other on the street, how easy it is for children to play unsupervised, or how frequently public events bring residents together. These are not frivolous data points—they speak to trust, belonging, and shared identity. The strength of social ties is arguably as important to resilience as any bridge or tunnel.

Designing for emotional wellbeing does not mean sacrificing practicality. It means expanding the definition of what a functional city looks like. A joyful city is walkable, breathable, and beautiful. It offers places to linger, laugh, and meet. It blends nature with structure, quiet with bustle. It allows citizens not only to move through space efficiently but to feel good while doing so.

Urban planners, architects, and policymakers must collaborate with psychologists, artists, and citizens themselves to co-create spaces that nourish the soul as well as the economy. Metrics such as social cohesion indices, mental health access, public space usage, and even subjective happiness surveys can be used alongside traditional tools—not in place of, but in balance with them.

This is not about utopia. It is about recognizing that cities, at their best, are stages for the full range of human experience. They should be judged not only by how much they produce, but by how much they connect. Not just by how quickly people commute, but by how deeply they belong.

Rethinking the metrics of progress means embracing complexity and humanity in our urban calculus. It's time we built cities not just for growth, but for joy.

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