Urban scaling of well-being for cities in the Netherlands, the urban centre versus the functional urban area

With a growing share of the global population living in urban areas, it is increasingly important to understand how these environments affect human well-being.Previous studies have uncovered systematic relationships between city size and urban characteristics, such as the number of patents and total road length. So far these studies mainly defined cities as socio-economic networks, delineating both urban centres and their commute zones.In this paper we study the relationship between indicators of well-being and city size, and we demonstrate that studying well-being requires a different city definition.We conducted scaling analyses on twelve well-being indicators from the Dutch Health Monitor for cities in the Netherlands and applied four different city definitions.Our results show that more urban centre-oriented city definitions yield stronger scaling relationships and improve interpretability.Among the city definitions tested, we identified that the degree of urbanisation method applied to a local population raster provided the most suitable city definition in this study, due to both data quality and reproducibility.We further find that larger cities are associated with significantly higher proportions of residents who struggle to make ends meet, smoke, are at risk of anxiety or depression and report feeling lonely. In contrast, the shares of individuals that are engaged in volunteering and that provide unpaid care systematically decreased with increasing city size.