Urban Planning

GDP is still the go-to metric to measure human “progress”, even though it measures it about as well as a toaster measures my Wi-Fi signal strength at home. That's why, in our research, we threw 53 wellbeing frameworks into a river basin to see who could do better. Spoiler: None of it survived the social, ecological, and political whirlpools. Manfred Max-Neef’s Human Scale Development Approach, basically the wise old hippie of wellbeing frameworks, came closest, but it still struggles to quantify the squishy stuff. Our solution: A mashup of spreadsheets and soul-searching.

TL;DR

by PhD Candidate Lukas Höller, TU Delft

10/21/20261 min read

stack of jigsaw puzzle pieces
stack of jigsaw puzzle pieces

GDP is still the go-to metric to measure human “progress”, even though it measures it about as well as a toaster measures my Wi-Fi signal strength at home. That's why, in our research, we threw 53 wellbeing frameworks into a river basin to see who could do better. Spoiler: None of it survived the social, ecological, and political whirlpools. Manfred Max-Neef’s Human Scale Development Approach, basically the wise old hippie of wellbeing frameworks, came closest, but it still struggles to quantify the squishy stuff. Our solution: A mashup of spreadsheets and soul-searching.

To the article!