Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (37 page)

Sadly, Bogotá’s fortunes have since declined. The TransMilenio system is plagued by desperate crowding as its private operators fail to add more capacity—yet more proof that robust public transit needs sustained public investment. Optimism has withered. Neither Peñalosa nor Mockus has occupied the mayor’s chair again. The urbanist momentum has been seized by other Colombian cities, such as Medellín.

But Bogotá’s transformative years still offer an enduring lesson for rich cities. By spending resources and designing cities in a way that values everyone’s experience, life can get easier and more pleasant for everyone. We can make cities that are more generous and less cruel. We can make cities that help us all get stronger, more resilient, more connected, more active, and more free. We just have to decide who our cities are for. And we have to believe that they can change.

11. Everything Is Connected to Everything Else

The rigid, isolated object … is of no use whatsoever. It must be inserted into the context of living social relations.

—Walter Benjamin, 1934

In 2010 Copenhagen and its neighbor municipalities held an international competition to design a new power plant in Amagerforbrænding, an industrial pocket northeast of the city’s old battlements. There was nothing remarkable about the competition. New power plants are being built all the time. They are generally ugly, utilitarian structures that most cities like to keep out of both sight and mind. But the winning proposal set the international design world aflutter. It came from the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the firm whose eponymous principal had verticalized suburbia on the outskirts of Copenhagen with Mountain Dwellings. The mop-topped thirty-seven-year-old had spent his career blending modernist ambitions and aesthetics with an almost fantastical sense of playfulness. Ingels had already convinced Denmark to pluck the iconic Little Mermaid statue from Copenhagen’s shoreline so he could set her inside a whorl he designed for the country’s pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. He had codesigned a swimming pool to sit in the inner harbor so that citizens could do laps in the clean waters. And he had tried to sate Copenhageners’ desire to bike absolutely everywhere by creating an apartment building whose figure-eight shape allowed residents to cycle a gentle promenade all the way up to their tenth-floor apartments.

Much of Ingels’s previous work had broken down the separation of uses that so often characterizes architecture and urban planning. The power plant would take this theme further. As per the brief, the facility would create heat and electricity by burning the city’s garbage. But rather than letting the new waste-to-energy facility stand alone, Ingels proposed wrapping the giant structure in an exoskeleton whose winding roof would serve as an artificial ski slope the size of seven football fields (333,700 square feet). Suddenly the city’s industrial district would be transformed into a shining fun zone, and Copenhageners would not have to travel to Sweden to have a mountain adventure.

“The new plant is an example of what we at BIG call ‘hedonistic sustainability’—the idea that sustainability is not a burden, but that a sustainable city in fact can improve our quality of life,” Ingels boasted at the time.

The building would also perform an educative function. Skiers would ascend to the mountain’s 330-foot peak in elevators that would face inward, so they would see exactly what happened to their city’s waste. And since even a waste-to-energy plant releases some carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the plant’s smokestack would be fitted with a giant piston that would blow a smoke ring into the sky each time it produced an extra ton of CO
₂
, providing a whimsical reminder of the product of Copenhageners’ consumptive habits.

Early on in this book I posed a conundrum: If guilt and shame and fear do not lead us to action, how can we hope to solve the urgent ecological challenges of our time? Ingels offers a utopian response in the monumental form of his smoke-ring-blowing ski hill: with creative design, the sustainable life can actually be more pleasurable.

Ingels’s functional mashups—the working harbor as lap pool, the apartment roof as bicycle promenade, the energy plant as source of both green power and playtime—point toward a deep truth about cities. As much as we have tried to separate the functions of the city into discrete units spread out across the landscape, everything remains inherently connected to everything else. The ways we move, the things we buy, the pleasures we take, the trash we produce, the carbon we blow into the atmosphere, and the economy itself are intertwined and interdependent. If you follow these threads far enough, they lead to a point of intersection where the projects of urban prosperity, sustainability, and happiness really do converge—not in a single object or building, but in the complex weave of energy, mobility, economics, and geometric systems that define city life.

Hedonistic Sustainability

Bjarke Ingels’s waste-to-energy-plant concept combines green energy production with a ski hill for mountain-deprived Copenhageners.
(BIG & Glessner)

We have all heard the skeptics who warn that serious action to fight climate change and energy scarcity will lead us into decades of hardship and sacrifice. When it comes to cities, they are absolutely wrong. In fact, sustainability and the good life can be by-products of the very same interventions. Alex Boston, the Golder planner who advises dozens of cities on climate and energy, doesn’t even ask civic leaders about their greenhouse gas reduction aspirations when they first start talking. “We ask, ‘What are your core community priorities?’” says Boston. “People don’t talk about climate change. They say they want economic development, livability, mobility, housing affordability, taxes, all stuff that relates to happiness.” These are just the concerns that have caused us to delay action on climate change. But Boston insists that by focusing on the relationship between energy, efficiency, and the things that make life better, cities can succeed where scary data, scientists, logic, and conscience have failed. The happy city plan is an energy plan. It is a climate plan. It is a belt-tightening plan for cash-strapped cities. It is also an economic plan, a jobs plan, and a corrective for weak systems. It is a plan for resilience.

The Green Surprise

Consider the by-product of the happy city project in Bogotá. Enrique Peñalosa told me that he did not feel the urgency of the global environmental crisis when he was elected mayor. His urban transformation was not motivated by a concern for spotted owls or melting glaciers or soon-to-be-flooded residents of villages on some distant coral atoll. Still, a funny thing happened near the end of his term. After making Bogotá easier, cleaner, more beautiful, and more fair, the mayor and his city started winning accolades from environmental organizations.

In 2000 Peñalosa and Eric Britton were called to Sweden to accept the Stockholm Challenge Award for the Environment, for pulling 850,000 vehicles off the street during the world’s biggest car-free day. Then the TransMilenio bus system was lauded for producing massive reductions in Bogotá’s carbon dioxide emissions.
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It was the first transport system to be accredited under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism—meaning that Bogotá could actually sell carbon credits to polluters in rich countries. For its public space transformations under Mayors Peñalosa, Antanas Mockus, and their successor, Luis Garzón, the city won the Golden Lion prize from the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. For its bicycle routes, its new parks, its Ciclovía, its upside-down roads, and that hugely popular car-free day, Bogotá was held up as a shining example of green urbanism.

Not one of its programs was directed at the crisis of climate change, but the city offered tangible proof of the connection between urban design, experience, and the carbon energy system. It suggested that the green city, the low-carbon city, and the happy city might be exactly the same destination.

Other cities have also realized that boosting quality of life and reducing their environmental footprints are complementary goals and should be part of the same plan. You can experience one without realizing you are accomplishing the other. Take London’s congestion charge, which has been touted as a powerful greenhouse-gas-reduction strategy.
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But this was not its purpose. The charge was a response to a host of issues that Londoners felt were much more pressing than future climate change. There was so much traffic that people couldn’t get to work. It was killing Londoners’ quality of life and costing the city in productivity. People were incredibly frustrated about spending so much time on the road. The charge eased pressure on the roads, allowed the city room to construct more public space through the West End, and made the city more convivial and safe. The climate benefits were a bonus, gradually emphasized as climate change grew in the public consciousness.

In Paris, climate and hedonic benefits are being explicitly rolled out as part of the same program. If you have visited Paris during August over the last decade, you will likely have been drawn to the Left Bank of the Seine, where every summer the city has been burying the Pompidou Expressway under a swath of golden sand dotted with beer gardens, boccie ball courts, and potted palm trees, all the way from the Louvre to the cast iron arches of the Pont de Sully. Paris Plages has seen pavement all through central Paris wrested away from cars and converted into sandboxes, plazas, and dance floors. The beachification is widely understood to be a scheme for easing the misery of people stuck in Paris during its humid summer months, but it is an official part of the plan to shrink the city’s environmental footprint and cut its greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles by 60 percent by 2020. It works specifically because it makes driving in the city more difficult. The beaches are now being made permanent. By the time you read this, the Pompidou Expressway will have been narrowed, and a mile-and-a-half car-free zone will have replaced the road space on the Left Bank. Hedonic sustainability will have been built right into the fabric of the city. Drivers must either wait in traffic or shift to the city’s networked system of shared transport.

Mexico City has caught the happiness bug, too. The city’s last mayor, Marcelo Ebrard (who famously prescribed free Viagra for the city’s senior citizens so they might reap the salubrious effects of sexual intercourse more regularly), built a giant ice rink and igloos on the city’s central plaza so that poor Mexicans could enjoy a white Christmas without jetting to Whistler as the elite did. He built replicas of Paris Plages and launched a homegrown version of Bogotá’s Ciclovía, shutting down miles of downtown roads on Sundays so that citizens could treat their streets like parks. He copied Bogotá’s mobility system, laying down a network of metrolike rapid buses that have even lured the public-transit-phobic business class out of their cars. He called in Gil Peñalosa and Jan Gehl to create a plan to wrestle 186 miles of road space away from drivers and hand it over to cyclists. As part of the city’s Plan Verde, the measures not only shrink the city’s carbon footprint and make commuting easier (these days in the Mexican capital, just about any cyclist can move faster than cars, which have slowed to an average of about 7.5 miles per hour), but most important, they are intended to give a new sense of security to citizens who have for years been afraid of their streets. Despite the attention given to the country’s bloody drug war, more Mexicans die on the roads every year than as a result of narco-violence.
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Martha Delgado, the city’s environmental secretary until 2012, told me, “A city that lives under the hostility and insecurity of car traffic can change only if its citizens retake ownership of its public spaces.”

The Freeway Is Not a Freeway

Every summer for the last decade, the Pompidou Expressway in Paris has been converted to Paris Plages. Now pedestrian zones are being made permanent, part of a plan that addresses both climate and livability issues.
(Charles Montgomery)