Can we measure citizen’s well-being? — by Anneli Simm
By | 2025
In the evolving landscape of cities, traditional metrics like GDP are no longer sufficient to capture the full spectrum of urban success. Measuring economic output alone fails to reflect how people feel in their cities — whether they are safe, healthy, and connected to their environment.
To explore this shift in focus, we speak with Anneli Simm, Business Development Manager at the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities — an international research and development centre at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), founded in 2019 by TalTech, Aalto University (Finland), Forum Virium Helsinki, and the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications. With her, we delve into how tools like the Well-being Score are transforming urban planning in Estonia, Finland, and beyond.
#UrbanBriefs | 2025 x E05
Well-being as a
Metric of Urban Success
— by Anneli Simm —
Why is it relevant for cities to measure well-being?
Traditionally we measure success of the city or country by financial terms like the GDP of the specific city, but however, it does not give you a full understanding how people feel in the city. Even though that the GDP may be significant, you still may have high noise levels or low green areas or safety security issues.
The Well-being Score: an innovative tool to make our cities more livable
The Well-being Score was developed as part of the Smart City Challenge, a pilot project initiated by the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities in collaboration with academic researchers and the Estonian city of Narva. Well-being Score is a groundbreaking tool designed for cities as an objective measure to see how urban environments impact the mental and physical well-being of citizens.
What does measuring well-being mean in practice?
It’s physiological, psychological, and spatial.
So with the physiological measurements, you use sensors attached to the body, and the sensors measure how your brain or heart reacts to certain environments.
With the psychological measurement, you use surveys, where people answer questions regarding whether they feel relaxed, whether they have a spatial interaction with this specific location.
And then you have spatial characteristics, which take into account what the noise level is, whether there is enough green area, and whether there are sidewalks or whatever is in the spatial environment.
How can we build long-term well-being in cities?
Well, obviously, first of all, we have to have that strategy and you have to involve the citizens itself in order to focus on the well-being. Citizen engagement is a very, very critical factor.
And I also believe that, I mean, once the strategy is there, you build a road map, you involve critical content parties, including citizens, NGOs, municipality levels, government levels.
It’s important that in one city you may have different districts where the issues are different. So it can’t be just one holistic road map for the entire city, but it has to take into account the specifics of each area or region or district of the city.
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Interview and edition by Sergio García i Rodríguez,
Head of Communication at Anteverti & CitiesToBe Executive Editor, and Martina Jané i Curtu, Comms specialist at Anteverti.
Video by Cristóbal Sarría Chitty and Alexis Rivas
About the authors
Anneli Simm is an advocate for urban innovation and citizen well-being, with a career spanning both the public and private sectors. She currently serves as Business Development Manager at the FinEstCentre for Smart Cities — an international research and development centre at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), founded in 2019 by TalTech, Aalto University (Finland), Forum Virium Helsinki, and the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications.
At the FinEst Centre, she leads the development of the Well-being Score, an innovative measurement framework that uses physiological, psychological, and spatial data to assess how urban environments affect citizens’ mental and physical health. The tool is currently being piloted in the Estonian city of Narva and is part of a broader effort to integrate citizen-centric approaches into smart city design and governance.
In addition to her work in urban innovation, Anneli Simm is Head of Investor Relations at Tallink Grupp, the leading provider of high-quality mini-cruise and passenger transport services in the northern Baltic Sea region.
