Happy City by Charles Montgomery features encouraging stories about places improved by individuals. The first and best story of Happy City is about the Mayor of Bogota who altered the Columbian capitals’ sense of possibility through no-car days. Happy City sprints from Athens through tales of modern places revealing urban design as “happiness projects.” It doubles as critique on modern life—how we drive to meet every need, spend lives in grinding careers disconnected by long commutes distant from stale bedroom communities posing as neighborhoods. We accept a lot of unhappy lives and places without any vision for how they could serve us better.
Montgomery asks, what if our built environment focused on making human beings happy?
The latest brain science provides intriguing tools to that purpose; for example, mapping social movements on a city block exposing how a built environment affects individuals or charting how experiencing place effects brain chemistry. Happy City blames a host of social ills on poor city planning. As much as I agree that city planning matters a lot, some of the causal relationships leap too far. Our preference to build and populate suburbs, which Montgomery calls “dispersed places” has created a lack of density-of-interactions with other people which has “fundamentally reordered social and family life.” Those who promoted suburban life thought it was closer to the countryside, healthier, and safer for people than the cramped, dirty (and ethnically diverse) cities they left behind. Such advantages were often oversold, and many cultural side-effects were ill-considered, but the squalor of cities has lately been rebalanced by massive re-investment in once vacated urban centers. So too have the stale monotony of many “suburban places” and “towns” seen heavy re-investment in walkability, public spaces and quality of life amenities. Many cities have sought to attract visitors and lure their own citizens to participate, linger and spend money there that some of Happy City’s critique seems dated.
Montgomery could be perceived as especially judgmental as an enlightened urban Canadian living in Vancouver B.C. from where many of his “happy” city examples emerge. Though many municipalities now compete for various distinctions of place it is not beyond reason that decision-making leaders could still use the “self-help” book which Happy City strives to be.
According to Happy City, “If you accept the key message from happiness science, which is that absolutely nothing matters more than our relationships with other people, it is a story worth exploring” because (it) has also made us quite unhappy. Montgomery cites data showing that suburban America is exceedingly unhappy. The real question is what is that “it” causing us to be unhappy? For Montgomery, the bottom line is structures that separate us from interacting. This has significant implications for the sense of community (civic health), but also it turns out, on personal health.
Happy City comes at a time that American culture appears poised to finally confront severe mental health issues. Many local governments are actively confronting “unhappiness,” in the form of addiction, obesity and suicidal tendencies. Communities are addressing those in a piecemeal fashion, through public health, not often also contemplating urban design as a factor. Urban planners from Hausman in Paris to Olmstead in New York and their brethren knew better. Montgomery zooms out to the role of the built environment on our health—not just public health such as clean water or air, but personal health. He challenges, “the boom decades of the late twentieth century were not accompanied by a boom in happiness.” In other words, our wealth and what it has enabled us to accomplish together has not much improved our lives or our places, and thus not improved our happiness. This truth should give us pause.
Montgomery for the most part, pitches that we would be much happier living in dense, walkable, highly amenitized cities. Though this angle has merit, I would add that there is much more to this happiness problem than land use, for instance, social justice. Had we as a country been reinvesting in the public realm and public infrastructure for the past 50 years at the same rate as we did from the New Deal through the 1960s, and had we been distributing gains more equally since the 1970s when the middle class was at peak strength, and had we not embraced an all-out philosophical war on the public realm in favor of the cult of wealth since the Reagan era, then places both dense (cities) and dispersed (suburbs and rural) might better serve our collective happiness today. The divestment from community to the wealthiest individuals has been devastating and has continued today in a false choice between socialism and capitalism. In our hard turn toward all kinds of identity politics we have left behind the common identity politics that bound us. Happy City, in its focus on “happiness” experienced by person, in a way exacerbates this. Today, designing for happiness has largely been reserved as a hobby for the wealthy of the Architectural Digest set, and corporations at their peak wanting to attract the best-and-brightest with dramatic office buildings, while we simultaneously shame public officials about fiscal discipline for what used to be considered broad, vigorously sound investment in projects for the public good… and general happiness. That angle would have made Happy Cities a more interesting book.
I was raised in Portland, Oregon and saw dramatic public projects transform the city into a much happier place, starting greening over a vast highway to create waterfront park that allowed for Saturday Market and a reconnection with the Willamette River. I have seen planning make a place happier. I bought this book as part of my continuing self-education in land use and city planning, and came to appreciate his interdisciplinary approach with the science of happiness (cortisol) juxtaposed with a critique of economics (Bentham’s theory of utility distilled by Adam Smith into money because money can be measured while utility or happiness could not). Happiness is still not easily measured, so part of the fluffiness of Happy City may be that the very idea of constructing a society based on the pursuit of happiness (though written boldly into the Declaration of Independence) sounds more than vaguely Brave New Worldly, or loosely Parisian to many in America today. It is so much easier to count money than happiness.
My concern with Happy City is that we are obsessed with individual happiness these days. Should it be the unit of measure? It was not always so. Although we have often been restlessly utilitarian in America, we also have a strong utopian streak. We are also so quick to a national self-promotion that we fail to see our society very clearly. Those of us who think of America as an exceedingly happy place need only reflect on Henry Miller who once famously noted that the bums in Paris were happier than the rich in New York (who no matter how rich, would never be satisfied). That was about an abundance of beautiful, humane public spaces and art having precedent over commercialism.
Happy City wasn’t written to earn a Ph. D in urban planning, ethics or political science. It appeals through the interdisciplinary lenses of economics, history, neuro science, engineering, psychology, public health and an emerging blend of citizen engaged self-help. Our culture needs some collective “self-help.” In this way, Happy City is a pop-psychological re-writing of The Death and Life of Great American Cities that may be more digestible today. It is possible that this angle on land use may begat a cross disciplinary genre reawakening interest in urban planning and land use among a people who are increasingly self-absorbed and short term in their outlook. One can hope we can look up from our smart phones long enough to contemplate where humans have built happiness into where they live.
