Quality of Life as “Contexts for Places”

Leonard Nevarez

Vassar College

Eastern Sociological Society meetings

Thematic Session: The Role of Places in the Quality of our Lives

February 25, 2006

As this rather awkward title indicates, with this paper I hope to reverse the causal

arrow that has been asserted in so much recent thinking and policy on the relationship

between place and quality of life. In particular, the term I want to put the skeptical

quotation marks around is quality of life. The thrust of recent debates among public

intellectuals and policy-makers have narrowed our understanding of this idea (hereafter,

QOL) around two poles: first, a limited set of geographical and social features that are

some times evoked with a related term, quality of place, and second, a culturally

relativistic set of individual aspirations for the “good life.” I want to look at these

debates ethnographically, as signs of a growing crackpot realism in regards to the role of

places in the quality of our lives. My choice of phrase there is not accidental; it’s one of

the more potent insights associated with C. Wright Mills (e.g., 2000: 313). And as

sociologists come to take seriously the role of place in society—a development I

wholeheartedly endorse—I hope we can inject a bit of critical sociological imagination

into the idea of quality of life.

 What is QOL? Can we really know?

Ubiquitous in contemporary discourse, “quality of life” warrants a definition that

remains slippery on further look. Quality denotes a variable degree of excellence, and

thus highlights the evaluative basis of this idea, while life points to the various physical,

social, and symbolic aspects of human existence, in either the singular or collective sense.

A concrete sense of the term comes from the contrast to its semantic opposite: quantity of

life, or more commonly “standard of living,” which simply assesses the amount of human

existence and resources for life. As illustrated by modern medicine’s extension of human

lifespan or economists’ concern for national GDP, is not innately inadequate as an idea or

a practice except insofar as quality of life makes it come up short. Indeed, this is the

point made urgent by QOL’s rhetorical use by environmentalists, urban planners, and

patient’s rights advocates: QOL highlights the one-dimensionality of technocratic

approaches to the enhancement of human existence versus the individual’s right to self-

determination.

In regards to its social context, QOL generally refers to activities and goals in the spheres

of health, consumption, and social reproduction, much like “standard of living,” that term

which QOL extends and critiques. Beyond this, it’s worth nothing that some researchers

have proposed concrete “domains” for QOL. Notably, in a meta-analysis of QOL studies

that used scales containing a number of life domains, Cummins (1996) identified seven

overarching domains: material well-being, health, productivity, intimacy, safety,

community, and emotional well-being (see Figure 1).

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 FIGURE 1 HERE: CUMMINS’ QOL DOMAINS AND INDICES

Even though we have agreed to set aside scholarly conceptualizations, this understanding

is, among other reasons, for its conceptual loading; in this case, the idea’s individualized

orientation is apparent.

As this variety might suggest, QOL is essentially, for some almost hopelessly,

subjective in the particular domains of human existence that it can evaluate and that the

beholder of QOL may select to emphasize. Frequently, QOL is operationally defined as

“well-being,” e.g.:

Quality of life is defined as an overall general well-being which comprises

objective descriptors and subjective evaluations of physical, material,

social and emotional well-being together with the extent of personal

development and purposeful activity all weighted by a personal set of

values (Felce and Perry 1993: 13).

Although this definition (like most from the overlapping arenas of medicine, psychology,

and social health) narrows the idea around an individual concern, it nevertheless

illustrates how QOL entails a set of values on the part of its beholder, be this the

researcher or the lay person, about how to live that makes any positivistic study of QOL

rather difficult. Consequently, discussions of QOL tend to engender a cultural relativism

that, for policy makers, can really only be reconciled through a utilitarian orientation

toward the greatest good for the greatest number (Scanlon 1993: 195).

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 Rather than run away from the conceptual instabilities associated with QOL, let’s

accept those and explore this idea ethnographically as a lay discourse, a multivalent and

often contradictory idea that (as with so many other scholarly concepts) bears only

passing resemblances to its uses in academia. What are the discursive parameters of this

lay concept? QOL articulates for its beholders the subjective dimensions of “the good

life,” as diverse, ephemeral, or transitory as these may be. At least implicitly, the idea

evaluates its current attainment and compares this to others QOLs achieved in other

settings and periods. QOL thus has an aspirational quality, regardless of whether the

beholder pursues this aspiration or not. Furthermore, across its many and sometimes

contradictory lay uses QOL embodies four conceptual tensions. As in scholarly

discussions, QOL connotes both an objective condition (i.e., a material level of welfare

provision) and a subjective belief (an evaluation that draws on observations and

expectations of well-being). QOL can be attributed to both a collective—a society, a

region, a group—and distinct individuals. Relatedly, QOL refers to a societal

accomplishment (the collective development of technology and economy), e.g., but it can

also highlight the uneven distribution of those benefits (the lifestyle enjoyed by exclusive

groups and localities). Finally, QOL connotes both a universal indicator to compare

different groups, often to assert one group’s superiority, and a culturally relative idea that

can only be properly understood in a group’s meaning system.

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 “Places as contexts for QOL”

Moving from this semantic discussion, I now take up the question of place and

QOL as raised in recent debates on these topics. Having urged us to hold off on scholarly

definitions, I want to conduct a sociology of knowledge upon this heated discussion

among public intellectuals and examine it as ethnographic discourse. Below, I

demonstrate how their arguments resonate with and shed light on common-sense

understandings of place’s role in facilitating QOL. While my sources narrow the debate

around a handful of emblematic examples and does not do justice to the rich empirical

detail could illuminate this subject, for the purposes of this paper I think these sources

usefully sketch the discursive contours of popular thinking about the relationship of QOL

and place. In the subsequent section, I call attention to the particular social contexts that

make these common-sense understandings typical and meaningful to the members of our

contemporary society.

The creative city argument

QOL has long been deployed as an idea guiding the understanding, experience,

and preservation of place. To name some obvious precedents: From Jane Jacobs, the

planning principles and moral advocacy of urban vitality have informed the design and

preservation of various urban amenities and features—pedestrian-based downtowns, safe

and popular parks, and thoroughly local business districts, for instance—that can enhance

the city’s economic viability and spontaneous forces of regeneration and social

integration. From the Community Indicators movements, citizens have enumerated

5
particular trends that mark the health and sustainability of communities and natural

environments, from parent participation in schools to open space preservation. New

Urbanist planners and concerned mothers alike have proposed heartfelt critiques and

alternative designs to the suburban landscapes that compel automobile travel and

discourage the unmonitored play of children on streets and sidewalks. Whether QOL is

explicitly invoked in these writings and traditions (no, in the case of Jacobs’ manifesto

The Death and Life of Great American Cities), their concerns can be easily associated

with the idea (cf. the “community” domain of Cummins 1996). Perhaps less obviously,

these precedents illustrate an environmentally determinist orientation toward QOL of

planners and urban activists; through the design and preservation of features and

amenities that enhance a place’s utility, attractiveness, and benefits for people, QOL can

be built into physical environments and inhere to this distinct, non-cognitive sphere of

social action.

But it is with the new-economy focus on economic competitiveness that these

precedents have taken on a new urgency and, along the way, coalesced into a new

discourse of place and QOL. A fair number of planners, policy-makers and scholars have

driven this focus, but for many it is epitomized by the recent writings of regional

development professor Richard Florida. In The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) and

again in Cities and the Creative Class (2005), he attributes a new economic importance

to cities in sustaining and organizing the “creative economy.” In Florida’s perspective,

the creative economy gravitates around thick labor markets, not corporate relocations

negotiated behind the closed doors of city halls or chambers and commerce.

Consequently, the locational preferences and geographic migrations of individuals are

6
now crucial to regional competitiveness. To make sense of these, Florida looks to the

“creative ethos” that motivates, indeed defines, the workers and entrepreneurs of this

economy. Symbolized by the artist’s need to produce and the scientist’s quest to

discover, the creative ethos is a state of creative and individual becoming that members

of the creative class cherish and seek out across the spheres of workplace, leisure,

community, and location. Transformed into in-demand skills, it can generate big

incomes, but this extrinsic reward is a happy accident for the creative worker who

(according to Florida) gives priority to her muse. Florida explains that the creative class

congregates in “creative cities,” be these urban centers or remote college-towns, because

those places have features and amenities that support the creative ethos. These features

and amenity offer “quality of place” along three dimensions:

• What’s there: the combination of the built environment; a proper setting for

pursuit of creative lives.

• Who’s there: the diverse kinds of people, interacting and providing cues that

anyone can plug into and make a life in that community.

• What’s going on: the vibrancy of street life, café culture, arts, music and

people engaging in outdoor activities—altogether a lot of active, exciting,

creative endeavors (Florida 2002: 232; emphasis in original).

Florida fleshes these ideas out into specific characteristics of creative cities. For instance

gay-friendly cities and ethnic diversity (excluding non-white diversity; Florida 2002:

263) symbolize the tolerance to difference so valued by the creative class—as symbols of

7
openness and lifestyle hospitality, if not communities or neighborhoods they will actually

engage with (Florida 2002: 256). Late-night street life, eclectic merchants, and other

elements of urban authenticity “recharge” creative workers with opportunities for

inspiration or simply after-work release (Florida 2002: 185).

As Florida himself acknowledges, this quality of place draws on many of the

generators of economic diversity and social integration found in the “great American

cities” Jane Jacobs championed. Yet, significantly, Florida’s concern is not the vital city

itself, but its attractiveness to the creative class. Furthermore, he understands this

attraction as an individual process repeated ad infinium: creative workers recognize that

the city supports their lifestyle pursuits. Florida’s focus groups tell him as much:

“lifestyle frequently trumps employment when they’re choosing where to live” (Florida

2002: 224). This marks an important shift in the attribution of QOL. Jane Jacobs (1961:

372; emphasis in original) may have admonished urban advocates that the complex

dynamics of urban vitality, which operate above the level of visual order perceived by

planners and urbanites, impose “a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with

cities: A city cannot be a work of art.” Yet although Florida appreciates this higher-level

complexity, its value is the aesthetic pull it exerts upon people, particularly the creative

class. QOL may be built into the environments of creative cities for the benefit of all, but

for those watching the score in the economic competitiveness game, it is individuals

whose creative and lifestyle pursuits—is there any distinction?—who give (economic)

value to quality of place.

Although Richard Florida’s thesis has garnered much controversy, as we will see,

wide swaths of the urban policy and planning world have accepted at least several of its

8
premises. Many agree that the creative economy—a broad category encompassing high-

technology, arts and entertainment, health, and innovative business services—comprises

one of the most competitive sectors in post-industrial America. Florida’s theory is

congruent with broader arguments in economic geography about the geographical

organization of labor markets in specialized sectors, and of the role of places’ “creative

milieux” in socializing and reproducing skilled labor in these sectors (e.g., Kenney 2000;

Castells 1996: 65). Place, in dimensions both tangible and ephemeral, has long been

recognized as a key orienting principle in these cutting-edge sectors; for example, in 1989

we heard that knowledge workers “are very sophisticated consumers of place” (Knight

1989: 237). Furthermore, many agree that in the post-industrial city, entertainment and

consumption have become key economic development strategies (see the articles in Clark

2004a). Observes Robert Fishman (2005: xiii), “the older urban cores have, after the

near-death experience of the urban crisis, seen a surprising resurrection, not least among

the young and hip, whose tastes rule the future.” Increasingly, urban policy and planning

converge on the thesis drawn from Florida’s theory and made explicit by Terry Nichols

Clark (2004b) that quality-of-life amenities, from open natural spaces to bookstores and

Starbucks, drive urban growth. Although quality of place may benefit many, a common

wisdom emerges that it is the tastes of the creative class who matter most.

The great mosaic of QOL

So much attention has the urban amenity thesis generated that a backlash among

scholars and public intellectuals was perhaps inevitable. Most of it targets Florida’s

various arguments in The Rise of the Creative Class, the critical response to which has

9
been so voluminous as to warrant substantive and political classification of its own.

Rather than take up that task here, below I touch on this response to underscore the

broader counterperspective that emphasizes a diverse cultural geography of QOL.

Tellingly, a good number of proponents of this perspective do not use the term QOL at

all, although their reasons are largely rhetorical; Florida and his ilk have used this term in

such a restrictive fashion as to debase the term into a cultural buzzword of a liberal elite.

Although I do not share the political motivations of some of Florida’s critics, in keeping

with my ethnographic concerns I think QOL can be rehabilitated with the broader insight

that it is certainly not the sole province of the creative class.

Many readers, including those sympathetic to Florida’s argument, balk at his

celebration of a narrow set of tastes in work, play, and identity, especially if these are

now promoted as the qualities that cities must cultivate. As one critic observed, Florida’s

book is essentially “an engaging account of the lifestyle preferences of yuppies”

(Marcuse 2003: 41). Yet perhaps this is too broad a characterization, even granting the

generational shift from the 1980s yuppie. A dot-com CEO once told me, “I work with a

lot of high-tech people who think quality of life is a Mountain Dew and a window to the

outside world” (quoted in Nevarez 2003: 58), and his remark underscores the selectivity

of Florida’s perspective on the contemporary, knowledge-based workplace. Florida

discounts the good number (25-38 percent of information technology workers by his

count) of creative workers who view “old economy” compensation as a key job factor.

His insistence that most creative workers value the challenge, lack of repetition, and other

innate rewards of creative work overlooks how these can coincide with rather stressful,

burnout-inducing workplaces (Sharone 2004). Florida’s selectivity has, furthermore, a

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geographic correlate. Tellingly, he identifies compact, urbane San Francisco as an

emblematic creative city while ignoring the sprawling, traffic-choked Silicon Valley

region, with its monotonous landscape of corporate offices, shopping centers and condos

that sprawls up to and economically subsumes the older city. (With its great number of

Starbucks, perhaps the Silicon Valley counter-example at least supports Clark’s findings.)

Many of Florida’s critics are also skeptical of the creative class’s embrace of

tolerance and diversity as more than background landscape. Joel Kotkin (2006: B1)

laments, “Cities once boasted of their thriving middle-class neighborhoods, churches,

warehouses, factories and high-rise office towers. Today they set their value by their

inventory of jazz clubs, gay bars, art museums, luxury hotels and condos.” While

perhaps overly caustic, Kotkin’s comment calls attention to the problems of homogeneity

and gentrification in the creative city—problems Florida notoriously neglects in The Rise

of the Creative Class. As childless professionals and hip creatives move in, gentrification

sets in, schools empty out, other middle-class residents move out, and non-creative old-

timers hang on by their wits in service-sector jobs.

Then there is troublesome fact that cities aren’t even the hotspots of the economy

anymore, if they ever were in the booming new economy. Only a handful of large cities

have been revitalized by creative economies; far more still are experiencing

deindustrialization, population loss, and deteriorating urban cores. More importantly, all

the economic action—population growth, job growth, middle-class concentration—

occurs outside the city in the “nerdistan” suburbs and greenfield exurbs (Berube 2003;

Berube and Forman 2003). Good schools, perennially the Achilles heel of cities, remain

the primary centrifugal force pushing the middle classes out, including many former

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creative types who reach child-bearing age; to a lesser extent, so are affordable housing,

space to accommodate the 1-2 cars, and shopping convenience. Significantly, it is also

the outer metropolitan region that has inherited the socioeconomic diversity that once

characterized the city. It is when one leaves the central city that one can encounter both

farmer’s markets and Wal-Marts, bike paths and hunting grounds, antique districts and

mega-churches. The professional strivers, the newly minted middle-class, the country-

music listening white working classes, the active retirees and not-so-active seniors, first-

generation immigrants: all claim their own areas in the older suburbs and exurban

greenfields beyond the historic city (Frey 2003). Out here, albeit in self-selected and de

facto segregated settlments, is the pluralism that the city once promised—indeed, for

cultural conservatives like critic David Brooks (2004), the pluralism that America still

promises.

If I may be selective in my own reading of Florida’s critics, Brooks’ perspective

is especially instructive; although he is far less committed to saving the city than fellow

Florida-bashers like Kotkin, he perhaps inadvertently reveals and extends a QOL

framework that Florida also holds. To begin, he avoids use of the term QOL because of

its association with the “bobo” or bourgeois bohemians, the cultural class that bears more

than a passing resemblance to the creative class:

Today, American once again has a dominant class that defines the parameters of

respectable opinion and taste—a class that determines conventional wisdom, that

promulgates a code of good manners, that establishes a pecking order to give

shape to society, that excludes those who violate its codes, that transmits its moral

12
 and etiquette codes down to its children, that imposes social discipline on the rest

of society so as to improve the “quality of life,” to use the contemporary phrase

(Brooks 2000: 46).

With this passage, Brooks reduces the QOL rationales behind regional policies for “smart

growth” planning and gun control (to name just two examples) to the domination of a

cultural interest group.

To see how Brooks really understands QOL, we must look elsewhere. In On

Paradise Drive, he writes, “as we take our drive through America, we will see that people

congregate into communities not so much on the basis of class but on the basis of what

ideal state they aspire to, and each ideal state creates its own cultural climate zone”

(Brooks 2004: 18; emphasis mine). This passage highlights three larger points worth

consideration. First, these “ideal states,” I contend, are rhetorical substitutes for QOL, as

they highlight the aspirational dimensions of QOL in its individualized orientation—an

orientation that Florida shares. Second, Brooks points to an alternate theory of how place

supports QOL. While people’s conceptions of QOL (i.e., the “ideal state they aspire to”)

differ, places also differ in their hospitality to diverse QOL pursuits—the “cultural

climate zones” they offer people. Thus, “single-family homes, churches, satellite dishes,

and malls” (Kotkin 2003:34) are not exclusive to QOL but merely support a different

kind. Third, Brooks banishes the environmental determinism behind QOL-related

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policies. America’s great mosaic of QOL stems solely from the social efforts of (in

Brooks’ case) cultural affinity groups.1

QOL as contexts for place

Distrustful as I am of the “revenge of the red states” agenda behind some of

Richard Florida’s critics, I think their larger point is valid: QOL belongs to everyone,

taking different forms in different settings. Indeed, we only have to pay close attention to

how people really use this term to recognize that places support diverse QOL pursuits in

a variety of ways.

FIGURE 2: MONTGOMERY GENTRY LYRICS

Yet this apparent live-and-let-live ethos is not merely an intellectual resolution to our

debate. It is also an orientation that reflects the same forces that make “QOL” a

compelling idea albeit an ethnographic complexity. To understand this, we must inquire

into the structural contexts that precede and make meaningful these QOL-enhancing

places.

1
Perhaps relatedly, Brooks recently encouraged cultural geography to young people
seeking to “understand the forces that will be shaping history for decades to come”;
Brooks 2005).

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Structures of individualization

To begin, we must foreground the centrality of the market in framing the debate

about place and quality of life. Radical critiques of Florida (summarized in Peck 1995)

have already laid the groundwork here by asserting that the creative class he describes

ushers in the naturalization of a neoliberal ethos in the social contract. Instead of

collective bargaining, the creative class instead values work’s intrinsic rewards; instead

of industrial policy, the creative class happily shoulders the burden of retraining and job-

hopping that, when pursued in off-hours classes and coffeehouse klatches, can even be

fun.2 As it should be clear by now, neither do Florida’s critics from the right offer

alternatives to the individual reductionism of this labor market framework. Indeed, how

could those square with celebrations of hard-working red-state folks?

Yet cultural analysis does not go far enough. We must further see how the market

structures the social experience of place and quality of life. In this regard, it is quite

remarkable that the critical insights of urban political economy have so little shaped the

debate on place and quality of life; perhaps this is because planners and economic

development advocates have dominated this conversation so far. Nevertheless, this much

urban sociologists know about the contemporary contexts in which place appears to us.

Today, the development and promotion of places, from neighborhood to city to region

2
Of course, this culture of neoliberalism finds another receptive audience in urban
policy-makers, who long ago surrendered (unwillingly, in many cases) their demands of
entitlement to federal aid in exchange to the compulsion of urban entrepreneurialism and
entertainment districts. Peck (2005: 761; emphasis in original) is particularly perceptive
in reading into critics’ anxieties over Florida’s influence in urban policy: “The reality is
that city leaders from San Diego to Baltimore, from Toronto to Albuquerque, are
embracing creativity strategies not as alternatives to extant market-, consumption-, and
property-led development strategies, but as feel-good complements to them. Creativity
plans do not disrupt these established approaches to urban entrepreneurialism and
consumption-oriented place promotion, they extend them.”

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and state, is thoroughly shaped by developers and growth coalitions who compete with

their counterparts representing other places to attract corporate locations and,

increasingly, household spending (in the form of home ownership, retail, and tourism).

At the level of advertising and marketing, this competition bombards place-consumers

with information that to a great degree is comparative and distinguishing, implicitly if not

explicitly; the value of potential locations to buy a new home or spend a vacation is

explained and understood in contrast to other locations, groups, and ways of life that

place-consumers know by reputation if not experience (cf. Gottdiener 1995: chap. 7).

Thus, place-consumers assess the desirability of potential locations through preferences

shaped by the boredom of work and home (Urry 1990), regional associations of place

identities and status groups (Duncan and Duncan 2003), and the pervasive American fear

of the urban (Beauregard 2002; Jackson 1987).

To this supply-side structure, we must also see how the market makes possible the

demand-side capacity of people to consume places. As the rich have long known, wealth

frees people from the geographical frictions that keep them bound to places. For many

reasons, the middle classes now enjoy this freedom (in Brooks’ account, they are

essentially peripatetic). Perhaps more importantly, in a society of private capital

investment, decentralized government, and little-to-no public support for childcare or

other household maintenance, geographical search provides a crucial means by which

individuals and families maximize life-chances and pursue QOL.3 The value of

3
When businesses locate where they want, individuals who want optimal labor market
rewards follow them (the converse is only a recent phenomenon for creative workers and
does not negate this general mobility). When municipal boundaries fragment school
districts and public utilities, households exploit geographic differences in the quality of
services through housing markets. When families exclusively shoulder the costs of

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geographic search grows commensurate with economic expansion and, in our society, the

accompanying social stratification; as economic winners take all (or more of it),

neighborhoods and cities polarize, extending the span as well as the stakes of the search.

These are features of the institutional disintegration (“flexibility,” it is more often called)

of collective institutions like Fordist corporations and the welfare state that Ulrich Beck

have theorized as individualization. “The individual himself or herself becomes the

reproduction unit of the social in the lifeworld,” Beck (1990: 90; emphasis in original)

writes. With little institutional safety-net to protect them in any place (i.e., across all

places), individuals’ locational choices matter more than ever in the resources and

opportunities they obtain to enhance life choices.

Biographical characteristics frame much of this individualized pursuit of QOL.

For instance, life-stage becomes an important basis for constructing our QOL aspirations

and choosing suitable locations: e.g., the 20-something playgrounds of hip urban

neighborhoods, the family-friendly environments of the suburbs, the golf courses and

community centers of “active senior” developments. These examples also overlap the

organizing basis of lifestyle. Although the “lifestyle enclaves” that that replace the

holistic community of olders cities and towns are not new topics in sociology (cf. Bellah

et al. 1985: 71), there seems to be consensus that lifestyle-based migrations are becoming

more frequent, covering longer distances, and reflecting an increasingly essential

contemporary experience. Certainly many in the past have leapt before they looked with

little hope of anything but lifestyle affirmation, but we must not lose sight of the larger

childcare, parents must balance incomes with childcare costs, and depending on their
child-rearing aspirations two-parent families may opt to keep one parent (usually
mothers) out of the workforce.

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structures that economically valorize these otherwise random individual decisions.

Human capital agglomerations only become rewarded when economic shifts and

corporate concerns bestow value to these lifestyle-organized labor pools, be these

bohemians producing urban cool for the culture industries (Lloyd 2005) or Mormon stay-

at-home mothers providing a home-bound labor pool of customer-service operators (see

Friedman 2005: 37).

Just as importantly, vast populations, from the underclass of rustbelt cities to the

rural poor, are largely stuck in place and wait for their revalorization as human capital.

Until then, their aspirations remain tied to community sentiments and local networks of

informal support, two forms of gemeinschaft that wealth gives independence from. This

socioeconomic spectrum of immobility and rootlessness frames the mental geographies

and migrational capacities of individuals, setting limits or opening vistas that in turn

shapes their QOL aspirations.4

Discursive constraints

Do these structural contexts alone explain how QOL frames our relationship to

place? Are there ways in which the idea itself exerts a discursive force on how we

encounter and experience place? My comments here pertain to the most common

rhetorical uses in contemporary American society, not the full semantic range of this idea

in scholarly exchange and different cultural settings. However, in conjunction with the

structural contexts described above, the discursive frames I outline below suggest how

4
In very different ways, the framing of QOL around immobility is illustrated by patriotic
country music and gangsta rap, two cultural forms that give meaning to and, indeed,
validate the constraint of community.

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our understanding and deployment of QOL do not draw from this broader possible range

of meanings but instead reinforce a limited framework through which we engage place.

To begin, it is striking how the contemporary frame of QOL resonates with and

reinforces the rational individualism of homo economicus, the idealized actor of

economic theory. Granted, QOL necessarily entertains more values than merely raising

standards of living (i.e., “making a lot of money”). Yet if the geographic migrants

recounted by both Florida and Brooks share anything, it is their rational scan of

geographic settings. For people who “value family,” the sprawling suburbs of Costcos

and affordable (if homogenous) real estate is a rational choice of location, just as people

who “pursue creativity” through music scenes and bodily expression will most likely

thrive in urban neighborhoods of coffee shops and cramped apartments. Rational

pursuits lead to rational migrations of population across geography; the demographers

might draw back from such overstatement, but the ideal looms in contemporary

associations of QOL and place.

Then there is the rampant consumerism that inevitably influences our aspirations

and pursuits of QOL. It is perhaps troubling, but hardly surprising, that almost every

description of QOL discussed in this paper can rest upon both the empirical data and the

paradigmatic premises of the market research industry, which sorts the population into

demographic clusters, social groups and lifestage groups.5 By upholding choice as a

preeminent value while explaining how lifestyle choices vary across the lifecourse,

market research can even recast stages of “anti-consumerism”—for example, austerity

5
From the Claritas group comes the highly researched insights that in exurban areas,
some younger populations “fashion fast-paced lifestyles centered on sports, cars, and
dating,” while some older groups “lead low-key, home-centered lifestyles, with social
lives revolving around activities at veterans clubs and fraternal organizations.”

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(e.g., DIY subcultures) or sacrifice of leisure (in exchange for suburban schools in

“culturally sterile settings”)—as quantifiable consumer pursuits (cf. Bauman 1998).

Yet it is also clear that QOL strains against the mindset of the market. It sustains

a rhetoric far richer in meaning than the means-rational, desocializing orientation that the

neoliberal social contract imagines. Perhaps this tension is what makes the discourse of

QOL thrive in our contemporary moment. More meaningfully, and therefore effectively,

than corporate brands or themed spaces, QOL provides a discourse to enchant our

disenchanted world through the means of consumption (cf. Ritzer 2005). Yet through

place, QOL organizes a coherent interpretation of social and spatial features that align

with individual aspirations. Indeed, as more individuals congregate to pursue common

aspirations and lifestyles, QOL can theme space more “authentically” and thus more

effectively than any corporate developer.

Is it the aestheticizing gaze of QOL that makes the otherwise harsh rationalization

of neoliberal individualism and spatial restructuring go down easier, so to speak? It is

tempting to find evidence of this in the aesthetic roles that planning agencies, architects,

and even community activists play in the production and politics of contemporary place.

Presumably in service of a utilitarian ethic of the greatest good for the greatest number (if

not a more progressive concern for social justice), these actors also re-conceive and re-

work the physical environment to enhance the individual user’s pursuits, be they

convenience, spectacle, or the appreciation of sublimity. In this regard, creative-city

advocates who crack open dusty copies of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great

American Cities at Richard Florida’s suggestion are as guilty of this aestheticized

emphasis (thereby stripping Jacobs’ planning manifesto of its moral claims) as the

20
engineers who design suburban water features or office park amenities. Arguably, the

slow-growth movements so widespread in the suburbs and exurbs reinforce a

parochialism that furthers the environment-to-enhance-my-QOL dimensions of planning

discourse.6

Conclusion

In 1970, the Girard Bank, a leader in the Philadelphia business community that

was staring down the barrel of the then-called “urban crisis,” commissioned the historical

novelist (and occasional sociology lecturer) James Michener to articulate the challenges

facing the region and the nation. He came up with The Quality of Life (Michener 1970),

an 85-page essay containing cogent, well-reasoned discussions of the issues most worth

tackling in an era overwhelmed by upheaval and protest. His title underscored the stakes

of the problems Michener outlined; although he worried little for America’s economic

prosperity and military security, he feared their unthinking maintenance could only

cheapen the quality of life Americans enjoyed and ultimately poison the decency and

civility that characterized the best ideals of the nation. Among all the issues he

addressed, such as race relations, the environment, education, and youth, Michener

devoted his first chapter to “Saving the City.”

6
A contradiction of the slow growth movement lies in its geographic and organizational
atomization, in tandem with the American “home rule” tradition of decentralizing
planning authority. As Alex Krieger (2005: 49) observes, “a ‘Not in My Back Yard’
attitude pushes development away from areas resisting growth, increasing rather than
containing sprawl…. Once settled, these newcomers will guard against subsequent
encroachers.”

21
 I offer this anecdote not to bring up the urban crisis of the 1960s but to highlight

how unlikely, even odd, the connection of its resolution to “quality of life” should strike

the contemporary viewer. By linking the latter idea to a set of proposals that surely

would require sacrifice of tax revenues and suburban convenience, Michener urged

citizens of the Philadelphia region to acknowledge their connections and mutual

dependency upon one another for the broader good.7 Yet in the name of “quality of life,”

American policy and citizens have largely done just the opposite in regards to place:

pursuing individual utilities, shirking collective obligations, finding common grounds in

lifestyle affinities. As many urbanists have argued, the suburbs and now exurbs are

hospitable settings for such individualized pursuits. Yet this point, as well-taken (if

controversial) as it may be, ignores how the historic draw of the metropolitan periphery

was also, perhaps more so, framed around explicitly social sentiments and relations:

white flight and the fear of racial others, other-directed status distinctions (cf. Riesman

1961), and long-standing cultural currents about the superiority of the country to the city.

Undeniably, many of these sentiments are ugly and retrograde today (and were probably

so back then); far from suggesting the common good, they only speak to public disunity

and hierarchy. Yet these sentiments highlight the transparency of interconnection and

interdependence that today’s QOL aspirations obscure in the suburbs and, yes, the hip,

gentrified cities so popular with the creative class. By abdicating a vocabulary of the

7
Michener’s solutions to the urban crisis today sound quaint for their good intentions,
and tragic for their half-hearted, piecemeal acceptance by policy-makers: enhancing
metropolitan government, halting the shrinking of city coffers by municipal
fragmentation and retail exodus, inviting business investment while maintaining urban
wages, creating a urban transit system that does more than facilitate suburban commutes,
tackling crime, maintaining cultural amenities, and reversing the population shift.

22
social, the language of QOL individualizes the political; QOL aestheticizes the political.8

This happens even before QOL finds its “hospitable” setting in a given place.

Perhaps these shifts are understandable in the American contexts, even preferable

to the dystopian planning and civil antagonism that ushered in the urban crisis.

Nevertheless, without understanding how the structural and discursive forces that make

QOL meaningful in the way it is today also frame the contemporary experience to place,

sociologists might only stand back and wonder why market researchers can describe what

drives community formation and geographical more confidently than our profession.9

Lest we join in the crackpot realism about how cities “enhance” QOL, or how diverse

locations “support” diverse QOLs, we might step back and re-inquire into the structural

and discursive contexts of QOL that precede place altogether.

8
At least in regards to place; by no means does this analysis exhaust the meanings of
quality of life. In other QOL domains—say, the medical profession’s shifts toward
embracing a conception of well-being that is not defined by an unconditional focus on the
extension of life—we can find examples of QOL discourses that promote a common
good in the new moral calculus they articulate.
9
For a statement of how the field of market research field approaches QOL, see Sirgy et
al. (1982).

23
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26
Figure 1: Domains and indices of QOL (from Cummins 1996)

[See http://faculty.vassar.edu/lenevare/2006/soci283/QOLdomains.doc]

27
Figure 2: “You Do Your Thing,” by Montgomery Gentry (2004)

Put me on a mountain way back in the backwoods

Put me on a lake with a big’n on the line
Put me round a campfire cookin’ somethin’ I just cleaned
You do your thing, I'll do mine

I ain’t tradin’ in my family's safety

Just to save on a little gas
And I'll pray to god any place, any time
And you can bet I’ll pick up the phone if Uncle Sam calls me up
You do your thing, I'll do mine

(chorus)
Hey I'll worry bout me
You just worry about you
And I'll believe what I believe
And you can believe what you believe to

I ain’t gonna spare the rod

Cause that ain’t what my daddy did
And I sure know the difference between wrong and right
You know to me it’s all just common sense
A broken rule, a consequence
You do your thing, I'll do mine

(chorus)

I’m gonna keep on workin’

Make my money the old fashioned way
I don’t want a piece of someone else’s pie
If I don’t get my fill on life, I ain’t gonna blame no one but me
You do your thing, I'll do mine

You ain’t gonna be my judge

Cause my judge will judge us all one day
You do your thing, I'll do mine

28