Where people live is important for their well-being. The territorial quality of life is shaped by a multitude of factors (from educational provision to health, for example). The dimensions of this territorial quality of life are unique to each individual and change as our lives change. Our Living Well tool aims to enable candidates to work in the territory where it is good for them to live.
The ranking of territories, especially in the press, is a recurrent subject. It allows to highlight a specific criterion but it is difficult to have an overall view on their advantages and disadvantages, and this, as objectively as possible.
Each criterion is based on different scores in order to build a set of "Good Living" indicators that are comparable between territories. This benchmark is therefore built on a panel of indicators all coming from official sources:
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Unions for the collection of social security and unemployment contributions
Unions for the collection of social security and unemployment contributions
Our repository is also participatory as it is incremented by the feedback of the newcomers we support via our Switch Up platform.
Income is an important element of individual well-being as it enables people to meet their basic needs and other important life goals. It is also associated with quality of life, perceived social status and social connections.
There are also strong regional disparities in health, which are partly explained by unequal access to health services. explained by unequal access to health services. However, access to health care is an important issue, especially in sparsely populated areas or for people with specific pathologies (long-term) or special needs (young children, the very elderly, etc.).
Personal safety is the extent to which people feel safe in their daily lives. Objective data is of course used in the calculation of this criterion, but it is supplemented by the subjective feedback of our newcomers. As the feeling of safety is very personal, this criterion is a combination of both objective and comparable data and the feelings of local residents. This criterion should be analysed at the level of the catchment area in order to be interpreted as accurately as possible
The quality of the local environment has important effects on the well-being of future generations and residents. future generations and the inhabitants. Various aspects of environmental quality need to be included, such as water, waste, facilities, etc. They can be very different in the same area and certainly require a more local look at the catchment area.
Education has many links to the attractiveness of the territory, such as employment and civic engagement. Moreover, it has been proven that education also has important long-term social effects on a territory that affect the overall productivity of places, reduce crime rates and increase the participation of the population in community life. For some regions, the industrial mix and a strong human capital base are strong drivers of attractiveness and competitiveness for employers.
Subjective well-being reflects the way people evaluate their lives. This criterion includes evaluations of life as a whole (usually referred to as 'life satisfaction'), evaluations of particular areas of life (e.g. 'satisfaction with time available for leisure'), feelings and emotions, as well as measures of how well we feel we are aligned with the goals we wish to achieve in life. This criterion is therefore the aggregation of several subjective measures.
Employment is another dimension of well-being that can have a significant impact on people's material conditions. Moreover, having a job helps people to maintain and develop their skills, and this affects other dimensions of well-being, such as health, connections and life satisfaction. Unequal access to employment is a major factor in interregional inequalities.
Many of the policies that most directly affect people's lives are adopted at local level. The rate of participation of the local community in decision-making is an indication of the degree of trust that the community has in their representatives and an indicator of the participation of citizens in the political process but also more generally in their involvement in their local life.
Accessibility of services is one of the key dimensions of well-being, affecting how people get what they need to satisfy their wants and needs. people get what they need to satisfy their wants and needs. Measuring service accessibility allows a better understanding of inequalities within communities and disparities between territories. If access to basic services (water, sanitation, electricity...) is a priori identical throughout the French national territory, access to advanced services (transport, health, ICT, daily shopping...) may be different from one territory to another.
In measuring well-being, housing is an important dimension. Adequate housing is one of the most basic human needs. Moreover, housing costs are often the largest component of household income. Housing is also strongly related to other dimensions of well-being, such as health, income and life satisfaction.
Good interpersonal relationships, support from social networks and general trust in others and institutions are seen as important sources of individual well-being and social cohesion. Community is an additional resource to material and cultural resources, but can also improve the performance of institutions and serve the common good.
