Happy Cities
Designing Urban Space for Human Flourishing
Ray Atkinson D a v i d Fi s k e Will Roberts
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Contents
Origins of Happiness Eudaimonia Utility Production Science
Quantification of Happiness Economics
Design The Slow Bicycle Movement Case Study: Houten, NL Biophilia Case Study: World’s first climate-change adapted neighborhood Encounter and Disorder Equity
Creating the Happy City: A Systemic Approach Bibliography
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- The Happy City -
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Do cities make us happy? We know that more than half the world’s population now lives in cities, and that by 2050, that number will be closer to eighty percent. We also know that if you talk with each and every one of those city dwellers, they would likely tell you they want to lead a happy life. So, do cities make us happy? At a time of increasing climate change, widening inequality gaps, and large scale public health crises, just to name a few of the apocalyptic perils facing humanity at this point in history, this seems a rather silly question to be asking. Yet, through our research, we found that the happy city may actually be the same place as the low-carbon city; the green city; the healthy and equitable city; and that it provides a lot more smiles, to boot. So, what is the happy city, and how can we attain this seemingly utopian urbanism? The answer to that question is a long one, and while the following will in no way be a comprehensive roadmap to the happy city, we hope it proves to be an intriguing guidepost along the way.
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Origins There has, in fact, been a movement towards the happy city for sometime, and it’s been picking up speed. Building our cities to be happier places could become a mainstay of the field of urban planning and design in the not too distant future. Yet, to understand what makes a happy city, we must first understand what happiness is. Considering civilizations and individuals have defined it differently since the beginning of recorded history, this is no easy task. For the purpose of this study, we won’t go quite that far back, though we’ll come close.
Eudaimonia The philosophers of Ancient Greece wrestled with the concept of eudaimonia, which is best understood not simply as happiness, but as a state of human flourishing. Socrates prioritized meaning, or purpose of life in his conception of the term. Many other philosophers, from the Stoics, to Plato, to Epicurus, argued for their different versions of eudaimonia, but everyone pretty much agreed that the basic tenets of good fortune, health, friends, power, and material wealth all contributed to this highest state of being. Yet, existing for these individual pleasures was not enough for Aristotle, and he argued that humans could not achieve true happiness without virtuously engaging in the civic activities of the city-state (Roberts, 2010). This intertwining of personal well-being and civic duty was paramount to the Ancient Greek ideal of happiness, and it translated into the physical nature of the city. At the heart of Athens was the agora, a space said to provide enough room for the gathering of more than twenty thousand people. Here citizens could have their say on civic policy, and it was here that the debate surrounding eudaimonia was waged. The agora was a truly public space where citizens openly engaged in the exchange of ideas and commercial goods Although it is hard to say whether the philosophies of the Greeks produced the agora’s architecture, or visa versa, it is interesting to note how the ideas of eudaimonia were seemingly interwoven with the built environment of the city. The role of happiness and its effect on city design is a trend seen throughout history, and as philosophies shift, so does urban form.
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Utility of Happiness During the Age of Enlightenment happiness was on the lips of prominent politicians and social reformers everywhere. The Founding Fathers of the United States included the unalienable right to pursue happiness in the Declaration of Independence, and the idea of government promotion of happiness for all was becoming widespread. Yet this happiness was not the same as the Greek’s eudaimonia. Instead it followed the classic Enlightenment approach to social issues, and applied a scientific methodology. In England, Jeremy Bentham developed his “greatest happiness principle”, or utilitarianism, which stated that happiness was simply the sum of pleasure minus pain. This calculation, which he dubbed the felicific, or hedonic calculus, implied that simple mathematics could derive the best of policy and personal action. Though Bentham never calibrated his happy calculus accurately enough to create what he hoped to be an all-encompassing code of law, his ideals of scientifically measuring and socially constructing happiness became a pillar of society moving forward. Governments, economists, and yes, city planners, took up the role of nurturing and stimulating happiness through public policy and physical design. Around the turn of the 20 century, cities were seen as dismal, dirty, and outright unhappy places. Daniel Burnham’s City Beautiful asserted that beauty itself could change society for the better. Le Corbusier’s city claimed to prescribe happiness through pristine, machine-like urban design. Ebenezer Howard claimed that leaving the city altogether for his Garden City would provide the greatest happiness for all, and with the increased ubiquity of the automobile, especially in America, this form of urban dispersal was becoming more and more plausible. Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled his Broadacre City, a place where people would drive their own cars to reach and satisfy all their needs. Urban reformers everywhere became wrapped up in the idea that by separating and compartmentalizing space, spreading it further and further apart, everyone would be better for it; everyone would be happier. They all claimed to have found the correct hedonic formula for creating true happiness, and in the process they encouraged millions to begin feeling it could be found at the end of a highway. th
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Production of Happiness Most would agree these monumental urbanists didn’t design their ideal cities with the intention of sucking happiness from people’s lives. Truly, their respective visions aimed to progress society towards a higher state of wellbeing. Yet, many people would claim the resulting sprawl of the 20 century is, on many levels, an unhappy place. So why, then, have we progressed towards this image of dispersed happiness? The way we actually measure progress has played a large part. th
When Bentham failed to form a true measure of subjective happiness, economists began to search for other ways to measure it, and they turned to something they could actually quantify. Money, and the way we spend it, turned out to be much easier to measure than pleasure or pain. For centuries, economists have claimed that you can judge what makes a person happy by observing how they spend their wealth. And by that logic, the rise of urban sprawl was an example of human happiness on the rise. Charles Montgomery, author of Happy City, writes in his book that,
“As people moved from the inner cities to detached homes in increasingly distant sprawl, they bought furniture and appliances to fill those homes, and cars to move between increasingly disconnected destinations. The market economist’s case for suburban sprawl goes like this: if you can judge what makes people happy by observing how they spend their money, then the fact that so many people have purchased detached homes in urban sprawl is proof that it leads to happiness.” Ironically, Adam Smith, the man credited with the invention of classical economics, warned in his magnum opus Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, that wealth alone would not bring happiness. Simon Kuznets, the creator of gross domestic product (GDP), a measurement tool used to track overall production in a nation, even alerted US Congress that, “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income. If the GDP is up, why is America down?” Yet, since this report in 1934, GDP has become the most widely used measurement of societal progress. One might ask why? The fact is, it’s easy for governments to measure progress through production, and there has been a fundamental lack of better means to measure happiness. Yet, that has changed over the past two or three decades as psychologists, sociologists, and neuroscientists have conducted scores of experiments and collected massive amounts of research on what actually makes humans happy.
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Science of Happiness A monumental breakthrough in happiness science occurred in the 1990s when Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist, conducted a survey on happiness. He discovered that cortisol, the hormone most associated with stress and anxiety, was more prevalent in people’s blood when they ranked themselves as unhappy. Though this seems natural, it sent a strong message: people stating they are happy or not can provide an accurate depiction of their well-being. It showed there are precise ways to measure someone’s happiness other than how they spend their money. This study sparked a rush of economists and psychologists working to craft surveys to see how people felt, and to try and gauge what changed their feelings. Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor of psychology, spearheaded this movement. He aimed to do away with the classical mathematical form of measuring human satisfaction, and he conducted experiments to discover what gave people happiness in their lives. Harkening back to the days of Jeremy Bentham, Kahneman called his science “hedonic psychology”, and through a large body of research, he began to narrow down what actually caused people to be happy (Kahneman, 1999). He interviewed people, and recorded detailed accounts of their days, asking them to point out what made them happy, and what didn’t. In going through this process, people were able to identify what specifically brought them pleasure and pain. This notion of hedonic psychology spread even further, and researchers across the globe began compiling data on happiness. Overtime people began to differentiate between factors that brought people transitory merriment, and things that brought life fulfillment. Studies were conducted asking people how they feel about their entire lives. It turns out many of the things people reported making them happiest were not of any monetary worth. Much of this research confirmed the Easterlin Paradox, a term coined by USC professor and economist Richard Easterlin. In 1974, he claimed that though higher incomes do correlate with happiness, long term, increased income doesn’t correlate with increased happiness. Kahneman furthered this research and found that though people with more money generally reported higher levels of well-being, this trend stagnated around the $75,000 annual income threshold. So what is it, other than money, that people need for happiness? Additional studies have shown people need to feel a higher purpose in life, a sort of connection to the world around them in order to find increased happiness. Much of the research has confirmed Abraham Maslow’s 1943 theory known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. His pyramid displays physiological needs, like food and water, at the base, and progresses to safety, love and belonging, esteem, and at the pinnacle of human psychology, self-actualization. Another psychologist, Carol Ryff from University of Wisconsin, developed a checklist for happiness that she claims is akin to the eudaimonia of antiquity. It is largely based on the idea that happiness is about the realization of talent and potential. She states self-acceptance, and an ability to navigate and thrive in the world as vital to well-being; positive relationships with others, as well as feelings of autonomy and independence are equally important. (Ryff, 2006) Given this large body of knowledge, what does it mean for our cities? Now that we know, better than ever, what people need to be happy, how can city planners and politicians leverage this science of happiness to better our built environment. That is the task paramount to creating the happy city, and people have already begun to do just that.
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Quantification of Happiness Economics of Happiness An economist from the University of British Columbia, John Helliwell, took data from the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll, both longstanding surveys that gather information on geographic value systems and notions of life satisfaction, and found that personal relationships were, hands down, the most important contributing factor to happiness, the world over (Helliwell, 2006). And cities, if nothing else, are the tools that moderate our relationships. Cities, now for over half the world’s population, are the theaters in which we act out our dramas. They are the places we gather to quench our various needs. They are the environments in which we seek out loving relationships and strive to achieve selfactualization. Yet, many of us now live in urban environments that make these things increasingly difficult to attain. Measuring progress through production and income have led to our cities being built on the assumption that everyone wants to own their own piece of happiness. Suburban dispersal embodies this assumption. Yet the science of happiness would lead us to believe that these assumptions are wrong. It tells us that a few fundamental things bring us the most happiness. We need contact with people. We need nature. And we need to feel that we can pursue self-actualization. The field of economics is realizing the old model of GDP driven growth does not bring us these things, and it has started to incorporate the growing body of knowledge around subjective happiness into its economic models. Happiness economics is a burgeoning field, and people like Daniel Kahneman, who is the only non-economist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, as well as Helliwell, have spearheaded the movement. In knowing most governing bodies require a method of quantification to pass policy and initiate projects, happiness economists are merging the research of psychologists and sociologists with the more classical form of economics. It has allowed national, state, and local governments to craft models of measuring progress of the things that matter most to societal well-being, and it has given city planners and urban designers a means of creating the happy city.
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When Simon Kuznets proclaimed, “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what”, he was harkening to a need for measurement of progress beyond GDP. If we shouldn’t depend on GDP for measuring happiness, what should we use? In 1972, the King of Bhutan developed what would become the most comprehensive index for measuring happiness in the world: Gross National Happiness (GNH). This is partly due to how Bhutan views economic prosperity. Unlike most countries, Bhutan seems to value happiness more than physical money. Bhutan follows the Buddhist conceptualization of happiness that is much more attuned to the holistic eudaimonia than the more material views of happiness seen in the Western world. Though for decades GNH remained more of an ideology for progress than a true measurement tool, in 2005 Western economist Med Jones helped Bhutan establish the Centre for Bhutan Studies. Utilizing the tools of happiness economics, Jones saw an opportunity to merge the more objective, yet incomplete, Western socioeconomic development framework and the holistic, yet subjective, eastern philosophy of GNH. GNH is a multidimensional measure that is linked through a set of policy and program screening tools allowing for practical applications. While many have tried to create indexes that have practical applications, no other index in the world has resulted in the level of practicability that GNH has. In practice, it has caused some abnormal policy applications. One example of this can be seen in how difficult it is to visit Bhutan as a tourist. Since Bhutan’s sacred culture could be disrupted by the influx of tourists, Bhutan tries to prevent tourists from visiting. Most countries see tourists as bringing economic prosperity to their country so Bhutan’s stance is unusual. However, Bhutan has implemented a happiness index that appears to be creating a happy country. The creation of the GNH index prompted governing bodies around the world to implement similar measurement techniques. Thailand released a Green and Happiness index in 2007, and France implemented a happiness initiative similar to GNH in 2008. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development launched its Better Life Index in 2011, and the US Gallup poll incorporated happiness measurement into its surveys in 2009. This movement has prompted a number of states to implement happiness indexes throughout the US. While the United States has not adopted any national ‘happiness’ index, mostly due to the political aversion to the word, individual states have been using well-being and quality of life measurements for measuring happiness. Even though it isn’t as comprehensive as GNH, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) is a composite index that mimics GDP but accounts for many of the aspects compiled in happiness economics. It incorporates the benefits provided by non-market activity and for the social and environmental costs that may result from economic growth. Maryland was the first state to adopt GPI and has been using GPI to understand how their policies impact people’s happiness. However, unlike Bhutan’s GNH, Maryland isn’t yet using GPI in the official grading process to determine whether or not to implement a policy. This means GPI is more of an experiment for the time being. In addition, GPI has no officially standardized methodology so others states that have been experimenting with GPI have been creating a different methodology for their state. As a result, a nationally recognized GPI is unlikely to be produced from the state level usage of GPI. These measurement tools have forced policy makers and city planners to think of innovative ways of designing their cities in order to move towards a progress of happiness.
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“Above walk. Every d of well-bein illness. I hav thoughts, burdensom
Søren Aab
Design The Slow Bicycle Movement The genesis of a well-designed happy city should be centered around developing a transportation network that exists on a human scale. As people move about the urban environment at speeds greater than 15 mph (greater than a bicycle), we begin to lose sensory attachment to place. As society oriented itself to being dominated by the automobile, we began a process that withdrew us from the detail and feel of the city. The scale of urban elements (signs, signals, buildings, advertisements, and noise) exploded because from a car window we can now only process the most blatant of characteristics. The city became tired and uninteresting. Aside from intimacy of place, we also isolated ourselves from one another. Stimulating a feeling of community and critical mass requires participation and awareness of neighbors. By commuting alone in private cars we sacrifice the opportunity to engage with others and have random encounters or sensory overloads that make urban life worth living.
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all, do not lose your desire to day I walk myself into a state ng and walk away from every ve walked myself into my best , and I know of no thought so me that one cannot walk away from it.”
bye Kierkegaard Danish Philosopher 1813-1855
How do these concepts directly relate to happiness? Well, we know that exercise releases a protein called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) and endorphins that help us feel, “at ease… and eventually happy” after exercising (Widrich, 2014). People may also just feel more positive from their altruistic actions of reducing pollution and traffic congestion. Academic studies are starting to back up these biking-to-happiness claims. In 2014, researchers at Clemson and the University of Pennsylvania used data from the American Time Use Survey, collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to conclude that people who walk and bike are more likely to enjoy their trip than drivers (Murphy, 2015).
“Happiness is very widely studied in economics and psychology, but the study of happiness has come late to the field of transportation, urban planning and cities.” - Eric Morris
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This may be a reason why bicycles have outsold automobiles in the United States for the past several years (Cruz, 2013). With all these benefits, why do so few Americans bike? One reason is culture. Even though researchers found bicycling to be the happiest mode, researchers recognize that bicyclists in the United States are an enthusiastic group that deeply care about bicycling. This means that researchers likely will not receive the same high level of happiness if they put a “randomly selected individual on a bicycle� (Morris and Guerra, 2014). How can planners support a culture change in the United States where a randomly selected individual will feel happiest when riding a bicycle? The perception of who rides a bicycle, especially for transportation, in the United States needs to change. While many Americans grow up being taught how to ride a bicycle, they stop biking and start driving an automobile when they need transportation so bicycling is not seen as a mode of transportation. Instead, bicycling is seen as a recreational activity or for racing. While this may seem great, how often do people bike for recreation or races and how many non-cyclists see this? Very few non-cyclists see cyclists because cyclists are rarely on the road with motorists. Of the cyclists that are on the road with motorists, many of them are not riding at a pace that a randomly selected individual would likely be able to maintain without training. This discourages most non-cyclists from even trying to ride a bicycle. To make matters worse, most biking groups are for racing cyclists so potential cyclists do not feel welcome to join. Thankfully, there is an international movement that started in Denmark called The Slow Bicycle Movement. This movement promotes slow biking through showing people why biking should be all about the journey, not the destination. By enjoying the journey, cyclists can slow down enough to enjoy the environment that they are biking through instead of being in a rush to reach their destination. Through slowing down, cyclists can also engage in a conversation with another cyclist. Since humans enjoy social interaction, this creates happiness.
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Slow-Bike Case Study: Location: Houten, Netherlands Changing the bicycling culture alone cannot make people happy. Infrastructure changes are needed, as well. In the Netherlands, the city of Houten provides a case study for how cities and even suburban areas can make bicycling safe enough for people to feel happy when bicycling. What makes Houten unique from most other bikeable cities is that it was created from scratch. While many bicycle friendly cities have been retrofitted to accommodate cyclists, Houten was planned from the start to prioritize cyclists over motorists. This means the transportation system was planned for making biking trips fast and convenient while making automobile trips slow and inconvenient. As the below map shows, Houten accomplished this through planning an internal bike path system that provides fast access for cyclists throughout the city.
Since motorists cannot use this bike path system, Houten has designed a neighborhood road system that directs motorists towards the outer ring road. As the below map shows, motorists are routed from their neighborhood road (green) onto a connector road (brown) that directs them to the outer ring road (yellow). Motorists must drive all the way around Houten until they reach another connector road that directs them to their destination.
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Translating Houten’s Success in the United States
When American planners first look at Houten, they often think that it isn’t possible to translate Houten’s success in the United States. Through using a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, we are able to to demonstrate how it is possible to retrofit suburban cul-de-sac neighborhoods to create an environment where people feel safe enough to bike. Currently, a majority of people living in the below cul-de-sac neighborhoods travel to the nearby elementary and middle schools (blue triangles) by automobile. Through building neighborhood bike connections (red lines), it could become faster to travel by bike than automobile. These neighborhood bike connections would utilize the low speed and low traffic cul-de-sac neighborhoods so people would feel safe enough to bike to school. Motorists would still utilize the surrounding congested arterial roads so would be encouraged to bike for short trips to school.
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Biophilia Designing urban environments that celebrate the natural world and provide respite from the pressures and pollutants of a dreary urban setting is a critical component of designing for a happy city. Urban planners, landscape architects, public health professionals, psychologists, ecologists, architects and more are all coming together to build science and principles that integrate nature into the modern urban dweller’s life. This section will discuss the planner’s role in actualizing the concept of Biophilia, through urban design. Biophilia translates directly as, “love of life or living systems”. It is popularly defined by the Harvard University ecologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson as, “... the innate tendency [in human beings] to focus on life and lifelike process. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hopes rise on its currents” (Wilson, 1984). This hypothesis was originally conceived to help explain some phenomena observed in human thinking. For example, it is thought that humans have an affinity for flowers because we evolved to associate flowers with food and water. Deep ecology and ecofeminism can be interpreted as philosophic relatives to biophilia. These ideologies advocate for a restructuring of human life in accordance with natural systems. They contend that other sentient beings and the environment are inherent goods and must be valued and planned as such. Biophilia has recently been extrapolated to the city scale by the urban sustainability researcher Timothy Beatley in his 2010 book, Biophilic Cities. In it, he argues that city planners “... have special opportunities and unique obligations to advance biophilic city design, utilizing a variety of strategies and tools, applied on a number of geographical and governmental scales.” Biophilic design isn’t merely the piecemeal insertion of parks and greenways but rather a reconceptualization of how humans interact with the urban fabric. Beatley defines and elaborates on a few emotional and psychological elements of this integration. The first being, ‘important ties to place’; which is the idea that a city should revere its endemic environment and encourage stewardship, contact, and knowledge about its unique natural setting. ‘Connections and connectedness’ is the conception that through nurturing the environment, humans will be more inclined to care for each other. ‘A need for wonder and awe in our lives’ is a notion that reminds us that the wonders of the natural world have the capacity to stimulate and rejuvenate the human mind in an exceptional and distinctive manner. The final emotional characteristic Beatley describes is that ‘meaningful lives require nature’. He discusses how a visceral encounter with systems larger than and outside human comprehension can provide fascination and cultivate powerful personal connections to the more grand aspects of life.
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This passage from Beatley explains the mounting evidence of the more hardline health benefits of nature. “Evidence of the emotional and psychological benefits of nature is mounting and impressive (research shows its ability to reduce stress, to aid recovery from illness, to enhance cognitive skills and academic performance, to aid in moderating the effects of ADHD, autism and other child illnesses). Recent research suggests even that we are more generous in the presence of nature; all these values are in addition to the immense economic value of the ecological services provided by natural systems.” The nature deficit disorder (NDD) hypothesis, coined by Richard Louv in his 2008 book, Last Child in the Woods, supports and builds upon these claims. Louv attributes NDD to a variety of cultural and technological factors that are keeping kids indoors. Happy city design can help quell some of these factors, or at least reduce their negative effects. Increasingly, designers from all scales are transforming workplaces, living spaces, and hospital recovery areas with native sustainable elements. This impetus could be stemming from cultural shifts, threats from climate change, growing ecological and social awareness etc. Aside from design preferences, developers and architects are discovering the functional and market incentives of biophilic design. Some of these bottom line benefits are “trees, green rooftops, wetlands for managing stormwater, for mediating air and water pollutants, for addressing urban heat island effects, and so on” (Beatley, 2015). Urban planners and designers can coordinate with professionals in other fields to learn how to extrapolate concepts of biophilia onto the city scale. Developing comprehensive networks of natural areas can help bring positive health, environmental, social, and psychological well-being to the city. People need the wild.
“And if we never have a flood or cloudburst again, it’s still value for money because we got a more beautiful neighborhood.”
“If the ra 21
ain comes, it will be a spectacle rather than a problem”
Biophilia Case Study: World’s first climate-change adapted neighborhood Location: St. Kjeld, Copenhagen, Denmark The St. Kjeld neighborhood in Copenhagen is the world’s first to design adaptation strategies for climate-change. Rather than investing billions to install new sewers, pumps, or sea walls, St. Kjeld is tearing up concrete city squares and designing bucolic parks in the shape of bowls to catch rainwater during storms. By using nature-based structures, the design team found a way to use biophilia to embrace change, not try to correct for it. During the dry season the parks act as public spaces for neighborhood interaction and the added green elements will help cool the air.
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“man is man’s greatest joy” Hávamál, a more than 1,000-yearold Icelandic Eddic poem Encounter and Disorder A diversity of people, ideas, cultures, habits, passions, etc. are all part of the urban experience. As globalization increases, our borders continue to wither. The concept of encounter equates to the desegregation and celebration of human multiplicity and participation. Disorder is a method that propels encounter. Fostering encounter and human interaction is consistently found to be a crucial element of planning for a happy city. John Helliwell’s work with the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll tell us that relationships with other people is overwhelmingly more important to life satisfaction than income. Furthermore, he found that the difference between those who didn’t have any friends or family to confide in compared to having just one person they trust was the equivalent of tripling their income. Charles Montgomery writes, “Our trust in neighbors, police, governments, and even total strangers has a huge influence on happiness - again, much more than income does” (Montgomery, 2013). Iris Marion Young (1990, pp. 238-41) defines and explores the four virtues of urban life as; social differentiation without exclusion, variety, eroticism, and publicity. Each of these virtues carry an innate disorder and target the marrow of encounter in urban life. Social differentiation refers to open and intermingling groups of people and neighborhoods. Variety is another way of calling for mixeduse development that entices people to the street to observe and interact with each other. Eroticism refers to the “pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, the strange, the surprising” (1990, p. 239). Publicity is the observation of individuals unlike oneself and the understanding that those folks, with their different backgrounds and forms of life, are members of the same community. Ruth Fincher and Kurt Iveson discuss the conceptual framework of encounter in their 2008 book, Planning and Diversity in the City - Redistribution, Recognition, and Encounter. Fundamental to planning for encounter are the concepts of the stranger and conviviality. The stranger being the central character that is wandering about the urban sphere and conviviality is the setting of that urban sphere; the design that either inhibits or encourages the stranger to encounter another
“Mix the city and assemble the people rather than dispersing them.”
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stranger. Conviviality should not be mistaken for simple geniality nor long-term relationships. It is a complex arrangement of power, diversity, spatial, and temporal characteristics. Conviviality can take place in locations that Peattie calls ‘third spaces’ - which are, “out-of-home and outside-work sites that ‘get you through the day’”, like coffee shops, bars, stores, etc. Conviviality can also be found in Ash Amin’s notion of ‘micro-publics’ - “purposeful and organized group activities”. A lot of the really heavy theory revolving around encounter is contradictory and merely conjecture. Definitive rules about how to design for encounter cannot be found. Foundational principles combined with local context will provide a good starting place. Planners cannot zone for disorder or encounter. They can ensure flexibility in zoning regulations and event permitting to allow for festivals social mixing. The promotion of mixed-use development with lively streets and human level vendors and businesses is crucial. Planners need to view the urban environment as a social ecosystem, whereby the whole is greater than the sum of all of its parts. It is a complex, chaotic, living system.
“The city gets awfully boring if it’s all super-expensive, super-high-quality everything. We need a bit of that urbanism which is about diversity, about leaving the unknown … if it’s not there we need to find mechanisms for it to flourish – the cheap amongst the expensive.”
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Equity This last section of design will focus on equity and how to plan and design spaces that champion egalitarianism in the face of increasing global income disparity. Rather than discussing concepts and principles, this section will delve into an example. Equitable planning is an inherently local practice and this story will take us south to Bogotá, Columbia. Charles Montgomery’s 2013 book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design describes Bogotá, Columbia, around the end of the 20th century as, “a truly horrible place to live— one of the very worst on earth; seared by a decades old civil war and sporadic terrorism in the form of grenades and firebombs; and hobbled by traffic, pollution, poverty and dysfunction” (pg. 5-6). Enter, Enrique Peñalosa. Peñalosa became mayor of Bogotá in 1997 on a campaign of transportation reform with the slogan “For the Bogota that we dream of ”. At the time, Peñalosa saw the major problems in Bogotá as being a city planned for private automobiles and the privatization of public spaces and resources. Similar to the suburbanization and compartmentalization of the city in the US. Only one in five families owned a car in Bogotá and this prompted Peñalosa to fight for the human-powered proletariat. He says, “A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can’t do both”. A landmark move was the creation of the TransMilenio bus rapid transit (BRT) system. His views on transit can be inferred from the following quote, “an advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it’s where even the rich use public transportation”. He also built hundreds of miles of bike paths, all the while leaving many auto-oriented roads in disrepair. This was a political and social statement that sent a message of democracy through city design. The government began placing the majority of its citizens (who in this case are largely not be able to afford cars) ahead of the wealthy minority through incorporating a democratic means of mobility. Peñalosa also built a new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas and built a network of new libraries, schools, and daycare centers. His actions of designing for people not cars continued through the spawning of programs aimed at disincentivizing cars through gas taxes and banning drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week. At the same time he made bicycling more safe and enjoyable through events such as Car Free Day and Sunday Ciclovia, an event where around 70 miles of downtown streets are made car free, making room for pedestrians, cyclists, and a host of public fitness classes. Sunday Ciclovia takes place every sunday and holiday from 7 am - 2 pm. Peñalosa presents an example of how a strong political leader can actualize a democratic vision to increase happiness, not just for the elite, but for the masses.
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Creating the Happy City: A Systemic Approach So, back to the question at the beginning of this report. Do cities make us happy? We think they can. The growing body of research and innovative design techniques we’ve outlined show a path towards a happier urban form. Yet, it won’t be an easy path. GDP is not likely to be relieved by GNH anytime soon, and incorporating happy urban design will not happen overnight. It will be a long, slow process if our urban environments are to become the happy cities we envision for the future. Yet, we believe it is clear our society should, indeed, work towards this future. Not only will the happy city make people happier, but in designing cities with biophilic principles, we will make our cities more environmentally sustainable and climate resilient. In pushing for slow bicycle design, and democratic mobility, we will be making our cities safer and more equitable. Planning for encounter and disorder, however abstract and difficult it may be, will move our cities back towards vibrant, socially connected spaces akin to the agora of ancient Greece. But how do we create this happy city? We do not claim to have the answer to that question, though we will end this report with some ideas. Creating the happy city means recreating our systems of city planning. An entire paradigm shift. The first necessary element is to incorporate a value system that holds happiness as paramount to true societal progress. The example of Enrique Peñalosa showed a charismatic leader that stood on a platform of happiness for all. He understood that increased income was not a reality for most Bogotanos, so instead he put a “greatest happiness principle” at the heart of his political value system. It had a substantial impact on the happiness of his city, though overtime, this value system has begun to erode. Without proper policy and legislation in place, Bogota has not progressed much beyond the framework laid out by Peñalosa. This is the next phase of our systematic approach to the happy city. From values must come rules and laws that support them. Strong leadership is not enough if the ideas of a happy city are to outlive a singular politician or social reformer. Working towards a policy framework that incorporates many of the measurement techniques outlined above is a necessary component. An example of successfully implementing values into law can be found in the U.S. state of Oregon. Oregon’s land use legislation was founded on the values of protecting the environment and valuable farmland and forests. In creating a binding regulatory body in the Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD), Oregon has become known as a progressive, environmentally conscious culture. It has reshaped how local governments develop their cities and towns, and it has even forced private industry to comply and innovate within the bounds of the law. Creating similar frameworks based on the ideals of happiness economics and people-first urban design can have a similar effect. Lastly, and perhaps most important to the city planner or urban designer, we can actively push towards a happier design of our cities. While planners don’t create laws, they can implement zoning regulations and other planning strategies that encourage or mandate happy design principles. We can work with real estate developers and architects to ensure our cities have plenty of green, open public spaces to encourage encounter. We can push for transportation networks that allow for democratic mobility, and move us away from the automobile oriented city that has prevailed for the better part of a century. In the most challenging case of all, our suburbs, we can work with homeowners and municipalities to try and integrate and retrofit our most disconnected spaces. Though the happy city is not yet a reality, there are means of making it one. We hope our analysis has shown it is a reality worth working towards. Through the fields of planning and design, and with the help of psychologists, economists, sociologists and more, we can define new roles in establishing urban systems that more adequately provide opportunity for humans to flourish and be happy.
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Bogota Bargent, James. “Enrique Peñalosa - Colombia News | Colombia Reports.”Colombia News. Colombia Reports, 24 Oct. 2011. Web. 15 Mar. 2015. <http://colombiareports.co/enriquepenalosa/>. Hidalgo, Dario. “How Ciclovías Contribute to Mobility and Quality of Life in Latin America and in Cities Worldwide | TheCityFix.” TheCityFix How Ciclovas Contribute to Mobility and Quality of Life in Latin America and in Cities Worldwide Comments. The City Fix, 22 Oct. 2014. Web. 18 Mar. 2015. <http://thecityfix.com/blog/ciclovias-mobility-quality-life-latin-america-citiesworldwide-dario-hidalgo/>. 30