QUALITY OF LIFE: A HISTORY OF MODERN ASPIRATION

Where do our ideas about the good life originate? How did our well-being as individuals and nations become tied to economic growth and what does that connection reveal? How has well-being been indexed, measured, and compared? Why are urban settlements and landscapes compelling sites to enact ideas about human livability? Quality of Life: A History of a Modern Aspiration is a book-length project that investigates these questions and uses them to argue for the centrality of quality-of-life concerns in regulating our ideas about urban design, community, environmental conditions, and human flourishing. With its ascendancy dating to the second half of the twentieth century, this project puts into relief how a range of actors, including policy makers, urban planners, cultural critics, architects, and ordinary citizens, wielded quality of life and all it connoted to shape their surroundings, particularly in cities and suburbs across the global north, and in doing so created a metric for global development and livability. Placing urban settlements as the center of analysis and using visual, archival, and textural sources, this historical project draws from political theory, sociology, and economics to show how this phrase acted as a goal and a status worthy of protection. This project begins by tracing the emergence of “quality of life” from older phrases and metrics such as standard of living, Gross National Product, and well-being, as well as its various applications in fields such as economics and public health before moving to cities and suburbs as the site of analysis to demonstrate how quality of life crystallized anxieties about environmental quality, green space, population pressures, urbanization, and crime. Ultimately this project investigates who has the ability to define and attain quality of life, who is left out, and how its pursuit has transformed the fabric of the modern world.