Residential and workplace neighborhood environments and life satisfaction: Exploring chain-mediation effects of activity and place satisfaction

Enhancing people's life satisfaction is the ultimate goal of efforts to build happy cities. Urban planners thus aim to optimize the environment to improve life satisfaction. We use structural equation models to explore the relationship of life satisfaction with perceived environmental elements in residential and workplace neighborhoods mediated by domain satisfaction based on a sample comprising 1058 respondents in Shanghai in 2018. The results suggest that the residential environment contributes more to life satisfaction than the workplace environment does. In residential neighborhoods, perceived environmental quality and social capital are important to life satisfaction, while in workplace neighborhoods, perceived accessibility is the most critical element, followed by perceived environmental quality. Moreover, perceived environmental elements can influence life satisfaction by affecting commute satisfaction and residential neighborhood satisfaction and/or workplace neighborhood satisfaction. These findings suggest that optimizing the environment in both residential and workplace neighborhoods helps improve people's satisfaction with specific domains and overall life.