Exploring Citizens’ Perceptions of Urban Well-Being Through a Card-Based Game

Urban well-being (UWB) is increasingly recognized as a complex, multidimensional construct influenced by sociocultural and geographic contexts. Yet, existing approaches to assessing local perceptions of UWB often depend on standardized indicators, limiting sensitivity to context-specific priorities. This paper presents the Urban Well-Being Deck (UWBdeck), a participatory, card-based method designed to explore citizens’ situated perception of UWB. We conducted eight workshops across multiple cities, engaging 140 participants and collecting 256 participant-generated proposals. A thematic analysis of collected data revealed 22 distinct themes of UWB, highlighting both cross-city variation and underrepresented dimensions in existing indexes. This work contributes a participatory method for context-sensitive user research and offers empirical insights that advance ongoing discussion on subjective and objective dimensions of UWB.