Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
Charles Montgomery
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0374534888
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A globe-trotting, eye-opening exploration of how cities can―and do―make us happier people
Charles Montgomery's Happy City is revolutionizing the way we think about urban life.
After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and condo towers an improvement on the car dependence of the suburbs?
The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world's most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a "sexy" bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris's urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods.
Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience, and Montgomery's own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is ultimately as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world―and we can all help build it.
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expired from heat-related illness. Semenza and his team of eighty investigators, including his wife, Lisa Weasel, fanned out across the city, interviewing the families and friends of those who died. On one of their first days out, Semenza, Weasel, and a colleague attempted to learn about a middle-aged man who had died in his residential hotel room. They couldn’t locate the man’s family or any of his friends, so they approached the manager of the run-down apartment hotel where the man lived. The
that a long-gone streetcar line had shaped his new neighborhood. He knew only that the place felt good. It felt easy. There were people out on the main street all the time. He got to know some of them. I know how Schmidt felt, because he had landed in my own accidental neighborhood. Like every truly great community, Commercial Drive functions much like the places people in sprawl pay to visit on their vacations. It is not at all elegant, but because the architecture, the street, and life itself
emerging disaster in street psychology. As suburban retailers begin to colonize central cities, block after block of bric-a-brac and mom-and-pop-scale buildings and shops are being replaced by blank, cold spaces that effectively bleach street edges of conviviality. It is an unneccessary act of theft, and its consequences go beyond aesthetics, or even the massive reduction in the variety of goods and services that results when one giant retailer takes over a block. The big-boxing of a city block
people who were actually trying to solve the problems of cities in both the rich and developing world, he was forced to wipe the stardust from his eyes. “I realized that none of these technologies was going to solve the problems of cities, not in Europe, not in the U.S.A., nor anywhere else in the world,” Britton told me as I perused the now-faded report in his Paris apartment. “The future was not going to be defined by some kind of deus ex machina solution to all of our problems, but rather by
hangover, and found a bustling downtown without a car in sight—just throngs of white-haired senior citizens wheeling past on bicycles, their baskets loaded with shopping. I was greeted at Houten’s city hall by the mild-mannered traffic director, Herbert Tiemens, who insisted that we go for a ride. He led me down Houten’s main road, which was not actually a road but a winding path through what looked like a golf course or a soft-edged set from Teletubbies: all lawns and ponds and manicured shrubs.