Mixed feelings
City dwellers generally experience mixed, but always intense, feelings about the city.
While they may be attached to the city for emotional reasons and recognize its practical aspects, they still have difficulty dealing with the economic and social pressures.
Also, while they may describe the city as a place that is oppressive and difficult to live in, they also enjoy its economic and cultural vitality, and ultimately cannot imagine themselves living elsewhere. Urban dwellers are thus at the center of a system of interactions. Their ability to manage these various extremes conditions their degree of contentment with city living.
Reasons for liking your city
Question: What do you like the most about the city where you live?
(Check up to 3 answers)
(8,608 respondents)
While the city is appreciated for its vitality, modernity and cultural offering, it is also associated with certain downsides, not least of which are traffic jams, pollution and noise.
Freedom comes at a cost
One feeling cuts through all social situations, age groups and cultures: the theoretical freedom to do as you please.
The majority of city dwellers do feel a sense of potential freedom. More than eight out of ten respondents, all cities combined, saw the urban space as a world where anything is possible, which,as one New Yorker put it,provides, "access to everything, fast, with everything you want when you want and within easy reach."
Nonetheless, this freedom is heavily tinged with anxiety.
The economic requirements of city living, which individuals easily translate using the word "pressure," immediately undermine the positive notion of "anything's possible." Eight city dwellers out of ten, and more than 90% of respondents in New York, Beijing and London, believe that "to live well in the city, you need to earn a good living."
The cost of living is thus the major source of anxiety for most city dwellers.
Reasons for disliking your city
Question: What do you dislike the most in the city where you live?
(Check up to 3 answers)
(8,608 respondents)
Lost in the crowd
Because of its density and activity, the city is first and foremost seen as a place where you can meet people. More than two thirds of city dwellers see the city as making meeting people easier.This same perception is shared by more than 80% of respondents in Shanghai, Beijing and Chicago.
In Tokyo, Sydney, London, Paris and Lyon, people have a more reserved opinion about this aspect. This is because, for many people, cities also create a sense of being lost in the crowd and loneliness.
In any event, all cities and all population groups combined, city dwellers lament the poor quality of contact.
This superficiality that contrasts with the human density brings out feelings of psychological anxiety and isolation.There is also an underlying fear of total anonymity, translated by the idea that the city is stronger than its inhabitants.
This notion was clearly expressed by one Parisian who said, "The city gets along just fine without us. Sometimes, you feel very alone and you tell yourself that if you weren't there, the city would carry on regardless..."
For better or worse
Of course, the city arouses mixed feelings, both positive and negative, that explain the nature and strength of the bond between city dwellers and their city. There is what they love about the city, such as its convenience, the pleasure of living there, the friendliness; and in contrast there is what people hate about city living, such as stress, a sense of indifference or feeling unsafe.
In the final analysis, of the all the respondents'quotations, the number of positive descriptors heavily outweighs the negative perceptions (graph 3). Through this choice of feelings, it seems that overall, city dwellers like their city and enjoy living there despite the occasional downsides they may experience. The city is above all a practical place where you eventually find what you are looking for.
This practical aspect is quoted by a majority of respondents in ten of the fourteen cities, especially in Tokyo (75% of respondents), Shanghai, Lyon, Paris, New York and Chicago.
It is perceived as being of secondary importance only in Berlin, Alexandria and Mexico City.
The emotional relation then takes over. Overall, city dwellers are attached to their city, and in their eyes it represents friendliness, pleasure and happiness.
Negative feelings are quoted less often; the dominant negative feeling can be summed up by the word "stress."
It is referred to by one fourth of city dwellers and is predominant in Beijing, Mexico City, London and Shanghai. Saturation and feeling unsafe are quoted more marginally.
"In the city, you are never very far from the action, where it's all happening."
A Sydneysider
Dreaming of leaving
To stay in the city or leave ? Raise your children there or not ? The shared and at times contradicting responses city dwellers have to these questions illustrate the complexity of the feelings they have for their city. Powerful, ambiguous and sometimes hypocritical, these feelings reflect a visceral attachment to the city.
Although 86% say they are satisfied with living in the city, paradoxically, 33% want to leave it as soon as possible.Were people to act on this rejection, Paris would lose one third of its population; London would lose one half; and Mexico City two thirds. In the latter two cities,more than half the population would like to raise their children elsewhere. On the other hand, the desire to live differently in the city is a strong current: one person out of two would like either to move house or area. The proportion of city dwellers notwanting to raise their children in the city is similar to thatwanting to leave the city. However, this global consistency masks significant local differences that are at times even contradictory.
For example,respondents in Alexandria, Beijing, Berlin, Chicago, Prague, Shanghai and Sydney want to stay in their city and raise their children there. Similarly, those in London and Mexico City want both to leave their city and do not envisage raising their children there. On the other hand, paradoxically, in Los Angeles, Lyon, New York, Paris and Tokyo, more people want to leave the city, but they still want to raise their children there.
"It's really a luxury to know that you can do something if you want, but that you don't have to if you don't want." A Berliner