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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; its 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 societya development I
wholeheartedly endorseI hope we can inject a bit of critical sociological imagination
into the idea of quality of life.
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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 medicines 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 QOLs rhetorical use by environmentalists, urban planners, and
patients rights advocates: QOL highlights the one-dimensionality of technocratic
approaches to the enhancement of human existence versus the individuals 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, its 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 ideas 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 ofvalues 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, lets
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 collectivea society, a
region, a groupand 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 groups superiority, and a culturally relative idea that
can only be properly understood in a groups 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 places 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 ofurbanvitality have informed the design and
preservation of various urban amenities and featurespedestrian-based downtowns, safe
and popular parks, and thoroughly local business districts, for instancethat can enhance
the citys economic viability and spontaneous forces of regeneration and social
integration. From the Community Indicators movements, citizens have enumerated
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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 places 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 Floridas 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
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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 artists need to produce and the scientists 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:
Whats there: the combination of the built environment; a proper setting forpursuit of creative lives.
Whos there: the diverse kinds of people, interacting and providing cues thatanyone can plug into and make a life in that community.
Whats going on: the vibrancy of street life, caf culture, arts, music andpeople engaging in outdoor activitiesaltogether 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 classas symbols of
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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, Floridas 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 theirlifestyle pursuits. Floridas focus groups tell him as much:
lifestyle frequently trumps employment when theyre 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 pursuitsis there any distinction?who give (economic)
value to quality of place.
Although Richard Floridas 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
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premises. Many agree that the creative economya broad category encompassing high-
technology, arts and entertainment, health, and innovative business servicescomprises
one of the most competitive sectors in post-industrial America. Floridas 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 Floridas 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 Floridas
various arguments in The Rise of the Creative Class, the critical response to which has
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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 Floridas 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 Floridas 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, Floridas
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 Floridas 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). Floridas 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 Clarks findings.)
Many of Floridas critics are also skeptical of the creative classs 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, Kotkins comment calls attention to the problems of homogeneity
and gentrification in the creative cityproblems 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 arent 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 actionpopulation 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
farmers 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 promisedindeed, for
cultural conservatives like critic David Brooks (2004), the pluralism that America still
promises.
If I may be selective in my own reading of Floridas 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 tastea 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
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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 orientationan
orientation that Florida shares. Second, Brooks points to an alternate theory of how place
supports QOL. While peoples conceptions of QOL (i.e., the ideal state they aspire to)
differ, places also differ in their hospitality to diverse QOL pursuitsthe 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. Americas 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 Floridas 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.
1Perhaps 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 works 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 Floridas 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 ofentitlement to federal aid in exchange to the compulsion of urban entrepreneurialism and
entertainment districts. Peck (2005: 761; emphasis in original) is particularly perceptivein reading into critics anxieties over Floridas influence in urban policy: The reality is
that city leaders from San Diego to Baltimore, from Toronto to Albuquerque, areembracing creativity strategies not as alternatives to extant market-, consumption-, and
property-led development strategies, but as feel-good complements to them. Creativityplans do not disrupt these established approaches to urban entrepreneurialism and
consumption-oriented place promotion, they extendthem.
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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 contrastto 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
3When 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 schooldistricts 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 theirchild-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
4In 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 ofhomo 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-consumerismfor example, austerity
5From the Claritas group comes the highly researched insights that in exurban areas,
some younger populations fashion fast-paced lifestyles centered on sports, cars, anddating, 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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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 Americas 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.
6A contradiction of the slow growth movement lies in its geographic and organizational
atomization, in tandem with the American home rule tradition of decentralizingplanning authority. As Alex Krieger (2005: 49) observes, a Not in My Back Yard
attitude pushes development away from areas resisting growth, increasing rather thancontaining sprawl. Once settled, these newcomers will guard against subsequent
encroachers.
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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 donejust 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 todays QOL aspirations obscure in the suburbs and, yes, the hip,
gentrified cities so popular with the creative class. By abdicating a vocabulary of the
7Micheners solutions to the urban crisis today sound quaint for their good intentions,
and tragic for their half-hearted, piecemeal acceptance by policy-makers: enhancingmetropolitan government, halting the shrinking of city coffers by municipal
fragmentation and retail exodus, inviting business investment while maintaining urbanwages, creating a urban transit system that does more than facilitate suburban commutes,
tackling crime, maintaining cultural amenities, and reversing the population shift.
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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 ofquality of life. In other QOL domainssay, the medical professions shifts toward
embracing a conception of well-being that is not defined by an unconditional focus on theextension of lifewe 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).
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Michener, James A. 1970. The Quality of Life. Philadelphia: Girard Bank.
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Figure 1: Domains and indices of QOL (from Cummins 1996)
[See http://faculty.vassar.edu/lenevare/2006/soci283/QOLdomains.doc]
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Figure 2: You Do Your Thing, by Montgomery Gentry (2004)
Put me on a mountain way back in the backwoodsPut me on a lake with a bign on the line
Put me round a campfire cookin somethin I just cleaned
You do your thing, I'll do mine
I aint tradin in my family's safety
Just to save on a little gasAnd I'll pray to god any place, any time
And you can bet Ill pick up the phone if Uncle Sam calls me upYou do your thing, I'll do mine
(chorus)
Hey I'll worry bout meYou just worry about you
And I'll believe what I believeAnd you can believe what you believe to
I aint gonna spare the rod
Cause that aint what my daddy didAnd I sure know the difference between wrong and right
You know to me its all just common senseA broken rule, a consequence
You do your thing, I'll do mine
(chorus)
Im gonna keep on workinMake my money the old fashioned way
I dont want a piece of someone elses pieIf I dont get my fill on life, I aint gonna blame no one but me
You do your thing, I'll do mine
You aint gonna be my judgeCause my judge will judge us all one day
You do your thing, I'll do mine