My home is my castle – Assessment of city love in Sweden

This paper offers a novel contribution to an evidence-based assessment of the attractiveness features (or perceived qualities) of cities or urban neighbourhoods, based on a quantitative evaluation of such areas by introducing and applying what is called ‘city-love’ analysis. To put this new concept in context, we offer first a concise overview of related and complementary notions (e.g. happiness, satisfaction, well-being, quality of life, contentment). Then we propose a new departure for attractiveness research pertaining to micro-based information on residents or users of cities by introducing the notion of a ‘city-love production function’. This function expresses the ability of cities to enhance the love or appreciation for a city or its neighbourhoods through an appropriate combination of five specific ‘city capital’ constituents. We test the validity of this so-called ‘Pentagon’ approach to city love by means of the city-love production function using a multivariate econometric model based on extensive heterogeneous statistical data on municipalities in Sweden and complemented with cell phone data. Our results are confronted with empirical ‘big data’ on the appreciation of Swedish places – and their characteristics – taken from social media platforms. The study offers also interesting findings from an advanced spatial-econometric and multilevel modelling approach. Our estimations show that the concept of the city-love production function allows us to quantitatively uncover important determinants of citizens’ love for their local environment.