Posted 2022-07-01

Book Notes by John December

For this book, the journalist Charles Montgomery interviewed the Mayor of Bogotá on a bicycle, walked the community-repainted streets of Portland, and hugged strangers on Main Street in Disneyland. He examined the historic precursors of cities in ancient Greece (p. 20), the social life of parking in contemporary cities (p. 170), the option of urbanism (p. 293), the Codes of New Urbanism (p. 280), and the small steps people have taken to transform their neighborhood (p. 321). On this wide-ranging journey, Charles Montgomery discovers what is often missing from city planning, engineering, and urban development: the humanity, connections, and joy that a city can offer--happiness itself.

While the author admits that happiness is difficult to define and measure, he shows examples from throughout the world illustrating this simple idea: You know happiness when you experience it. From the beaches of Paris replacing an expressway beside the Seine river (p. 256) to the car-free and people-filled streets of Bogotá and their Ciclovías, to the realigned Times Square (p. 225), to Copenhagen's pedestrianized Strøget (p. 153), and to the Piazza del Campo in Siena's proven people-attracting space (p. 148), the author examines scenes where people embrace, out of the sheer joy of it, the city and all its complexities.

The main points I take from this book are:

1. Happiness is a more powerful motivator for individual action than the top-down designs of city planners, the work of engineers, or the exhortations of armchair urban philosophers. People will follow their self-interest and bliss in any environment, and so it is a wise urban designer that works with demonstrated human behavior, psychology, and preferences when setting configurations of urban streets, spaces, buildings, and circulation patterns. Human happiness can be studied and characterized in terms of eudaimonia--positive feelings of self-acceptance, growth, environmental mastery, meaning, and autonomy as contributing to happiness (p. 36). Based on this bottom-up understanding of human nature and its operation in various urban environments, the author proposes a "basic recipe for urban happiness." This recipe calls for urban design first to meet basic needs for "food, shelter, and security." (p. 43). Next, the urban design should work with human behavior to promote health, freedom of choice, resilience, equity, bonds, cooperation, and--most importantly--the happiness of people (p. 43). The specifics of how to do this--both in terms of observation and design--is embedded in the stories of people and places the author covers in this book. The author also references other literature including Christopher Alexander, Jarrett Walker, William Whyte, Jan Gehl, Jane Jacobs, and others.

2. Dispersal of urban features is a strong force that has weakened cities by denying the value of proximity, diversity, and density (pp. 64-67). This dispersal has involved a systemic, wide-ranging dismantling of features in cities that produce wealth, equity, health, and livability. Through a program of auto-centric planning and a mania for spreading out and separating activities and destinations, dispersal has increased mobility costs and has reduced choices people have for housing, transportation, work, and social life. Dispersal is "a system of building, planning, and thinking" (p. 62). From Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of extreme dispersal in the Broadacre City (p. 28), to the nightmarish high towers and empty spaces of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, to the harsh "modernist perfection" of Brasilia (p. 93), and the stiff "garden" cities of Ebenezer Howard, human-scale joy was literally sucked out of cities in urban concepts. This is not to say that density is an end in itself. Instead, the author illustrates the ways that a balance of proximity and mix of uses at certain "sweet spots" (chapter 6, for example, the "streetcar city" (pp. 137-138)) appeal to human nature, attract people, and enliven environments.

3. Geometry--for want of a better word--is destiny for urban life. In this sense, geometry defines the way streets, roads, buildings, and spaces of the urban environment are designed, built, and changed over time. This geometry establishes the setting for people to interact, move about and live. It encompasses architecture, engineering, and planning and sets the layout, types, densities, dimensions, and masses of buildings, structures, land use, vehicle circulation, and thoroughfares. The author highlights how the geometry of cities can become inhumane through street facades (p. 162) or instill an automobile-centric template on cities. The shared street was lost early in the 20th century (p. 70; see also Norton (2008, 2021)). Zoning aggressively separated uses (p. 60; see also Gray (2022)). A system of autopoiesis develops in dispersed cities whereby their components replicate themselves, further expanding dispersion (p. 75). And, as Marohn describes in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and Strong Towns, the elevation of engineering to a technologically-deterministic directive leads to inhumane city design. The appeal Montgomery makes in this book is for the geometry of cities to be driven by the people-oriented happiness. This is the thesis of this book--"we need to understand the psychology by which all of us comprehend the urban world and make decisions about our place in it." (p. 77).

4. People matter, and their experiences and actions build, bottom-up, the happiness quotient of urbanism. In the end, the powerful way that people can affect their environment is this: "We build it by living it." (p. 321). The paradox the author examines--that happiness can be low in particularly wealthy circumstances (pp. 10-13)--is part of what this book examines. Another important aspect is that the complexity and size of groups of people are characterized by heteroscedasticity, or a significant variation in human characteristics and responses over time. This means that "'there is no single answer to any problem in the city... The solution comes from a multiplicity of answers'" (p. 198). Thus, mobility should not be organized around one way of moving but multiple options. Happiness, for example, can thus be studied in terms of mobility. Happiness rises in joy for bicyclists over car drivers (p. 182). People get very specific and identifiable cues for "do not walk" and "walk" messages based on the geometry of an urban environment (p. 190). Transit riders can feel recognized with the busways in the center of a street versus its edges--a "geometry of equity" (p. 231).

Montgomery's "Happy City" is not a call for suburbanizing cities, enacting massive open space as a panacea, or an oversimplification of the history, potential, or promise of cities. Instead, in this book, the author calls for a full embrace of the complexity, diversity, and emotional connections that have held the fascination of humans who, for millennia, have chosen to live in cities.

Related Links

• HappyCities.com book support Web site
• Author Web site
• Goodreads page for Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

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