Happy City

Few books will spur me to write just out of the blue, but a recent read, Happy City, by Charles Montgomery, provided me with insights into how we view the city that altered my own preconceived notions of city living.

In his book, Charles Montgomery looks at the relationship between urban design and human psychology and discovers something astonishing: the elements we as Americans believe to make us happy in an urban environment and the elements that actually do are completely different! Whoa! How have generations of Americans been getting something as simple as their own happiness so wrong? I mean, most people have visited the doctor's office and successfully answered the Wong-Baker pain chart question fairly successfully. Why can't we do the same for our happiness in the built environment?

A simple enough chart. Now, replace "pain" with "happiness in built environment" and it becomes much more difficult to answer.

Perhaps, Montgomery suggests, it is the shallowness of the images of happiness we have been sold on for so long. Everyone is familiar with the idea of the American Dream: the separated family home with front lawn, white picket fence, and 2.5 kids (sold separately). This dream, while appealing in its guarantee of safe, secure family living is as thin as the stucco facades applied to shops at Disneyland. It is an image completely separated from the realities of the systems of transportation, economy, and environment that allow it to exist. Anyone who has sat in traffic for hours during their daily commute, or has to drive several miles just to pick up some milk knows what I'm talking about. The idea that larger distances between our homes equates to independence could not be further from the truth. Our decisions about how we live affect others no matter how far apart our houses are-in the systems they impact, such as the taxes to maintain roads, the quality of air we breathe, and, now, our use of universal healthcare. 

Disneyland's Main Street. The two-story facades give the perfect human scale but the second story is completely fake. 

Now, you try telling the average American to give up their house in the suburbs for a dense American city. Probably not gonna happen. Not today, not tomorrow. And who can blame them? As humans, Montgomery points out, we have a natural inclination to retreat from strangers and seek space that is truly "ours." Our social anxiety is hard-wired into our very being. However, what we don't recognize is that we also instinctively need interaction with other people to be happy. That guy who creepily tries to buy you a wheat grass shot at your juice bar, while seemingly annoying and uncalled for, is actually contributing to your happiness simply through social interaction. So, what we believe to make us happy and what actually does are separate entities. 

In short, we don't and cannot live completely in a vacuum as much as we may think we want to. We rely on other human beings for help, support, and basic happiness. Our ideas about ownership-of land, of space, of knowledge, of tools, just to name a few-must change. Just as the internet has changed the way we share ideas, music, markets, and constant updates about our cute cat's lives, so too must we look for ways to share resources in the physical world. This will allow for many of us to live in the physical environments of our choosing without straining the systems that sustain them. Through these shared systems, our empathy might be able to reach the high levels required to tackle some of the global-scale problems we are facing, such as climate change, dwindling natural resources, and the enlarging gap between the rich and poor. 

To close, a quote from Aristotle's Politics, "He who is unable to live in society or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god."