Design for community happiness—an approach and framework

The paper addresses the emerging notion of “happiness” and “community happiness” as means and an objective in site planning and community design highlighting its complexities and illusive nature in terms of scope, aspects, and components to formulate a conceptual “framework” and a design tool for monitoring, enhancing, and developing community happiness, in limited scale urban settings. The research presents and follows the proposition that “happiness” is inherently addressed in site planning and design processes and the closely related notions and drives of “sustainable development” and “quality of life”. The design for the “community happiness” framework is formulated through a sequence of relational matrices, for “happiness”, “sustainable development”, and “quality of life”, each comprising selected international approaches and agendas, related indicators, and key aspects, physical, and non-physical, emphasizing similarities and overlapping. The proposed “framework” and underlying propositions were validated through a pilot questionnaire, targeting a sample of specialists, and practicing academics. The participants generally accepted the research key propositions, adopted the method and the proposed “framework”, and interacted with them, emphasizing the relative weights of the selected “happiness” key indicators and relations to site planning elements, and criteria. The relative importance of the design criteria, the related “happiness” indicators, and the likely products, as well as the cost of achieving “happiness” deserve to be further addressed, in future research.