Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (56 page)

In 2008, for example
: Hawthorne, Christopher, “Atlantic on the Move,”
Los Angeles Times
, May 13, 2012,
www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/boulevards/la-ca-atlantic-boulevard-los-angeles-index,0,378106.htmlstory
(accessed October 22, 2012).

More than three hundred cities
: Borys, Hazel, and Emily Talen, “Form-Based Codes? You’re Not Alone,” PlaceShakers and NewsMakers,
www.placemakers.com/how-we-teach/codes-study
(accessed April 29, 2013).

13. Save Your City, Save Yourself

Jane Jacobs
: Jacobs, Jane,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(New York: Random House, 1961).

writing haiku
: Naparstek, Aaron,
Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage
(New York: Random House, 2003).

Jon Orcutt
: Gleaned from Naparstek, Streetsblog, and DOT bios and press releases.

Chan K’in Viejo
: “Chan K’in Viejo, 104; Led Mexican Tribe,”
New York Times
, January 2, 1997,
www.nytimes.com/1997/01/02/world/chan-k-in-viejo-104-led-mexican-tribe.html
(accessed July 1, 2009).

The Assyrians
: Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl,
Matrix of Man
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 161.

national Land Ordinance
: Moholy-Nagy,
Matrix of Man
, 193–95 and John Reps,
The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 214–17.

public parks and plazas
: Reps,
The Making of Urban America
, 222.

unprecedented heat wave
: Interviews with Jan Semenza; “Dying Alone: An Interview with Eric Klinenberg, Author of
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
,”
www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/443213in.html
(accessed January 27, 2011); Semenza, Jan C., et al., “Heat-Related Deaths During the July 1995 Heat Wave in Chicago,”
New England Journal of Medicine
, 1996: 84–90.

Epilogue: The Beginning

David Harvey
: Harvey, David, “The Right to the City.”
New Left Review
, September-October 2008,
http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city
(accessed November 1, 2012).

“fear of exposure”
: Sennett, Richard,
The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), xii.

Acknowledgments

This project began with an idea, found early life as a series of magazine and newspaper stories, and grew into a book through the kindness and assistance of dozens of people over the course of five years.

I am grateful to the many people who shared their ideas with me. First among them is Enrique Peñalosa, who sparked the journey. The fire was stoked by many passionate minds. Among the many whose ideas and research I have borrowed or expanded upon are: Eric Britton, John Helliwell, Chris Barrington-Leigh, Patrick Condon, Gordon Price, Trevor Boddy, Lon Laclaire, Silas Archambault, Carlosfelipe Pardo, Elizabeth Dunn, Matt Hern, Emily Talen, Galina Tachieva, Frances Bula, Peter Norton, Larry Beasley, Larry Frank, Paul Zak, Nicholas Humphrey, Gil Peñalosa, Ricardo Montezuma, Jarrett Walker, June Williamson, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Todd Litman and the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute, Geoff Manaugh, Alan Durning and the Sightline Institute, Armando Roa, Felipe Zuleta, Alexandra Bolinder-Gibson, Colin Ellard, and ZUS. Edward Bergman was a constant source of ideas and
New York Times
stories.

I am grateful for the kindness of friends, family, and strangers who shared their homes and their time with me along the way. Big thanks to Sarah Minter, Arturo García, Branco, Mauricio Espinosa, Lorenia Parada, Mariel Loaiza, and la familia Domínguez-Flores in Mexico City. Thanks to Jaime Correa in Bogotá, Katherine Ball and Alec Neal in Portland, Byron Fast and Michael Prokopow in Toronto, Olivier Georger in Paris, Sarah Pascoe and Janet Fernau in London, Adam Fink, Adam Karsten Pedersen, and Henrik Lyng in Copenhagen, Doris Müller and Petra Marqua in Vauban, Steve Filmanowitz and Ben Brown in Atlanta, Kevin Wolf and Linda Cloud in Davis, Guillermo Jaimes in Los Angeles, Chris Tenove in Berkeley, Nancy, Randy, and Kim Strausser in San Joaquin County, Elizabeth Borne, Edward Bergman, and Dan Planko in New York, and the wonderful team at the BMW Guggenheim Labs in New York City and Berlin.

Erick Villagómez and Dan Planko generously donated infographics. Galina Tachieva, Jan Gehl, Lars Gemzøe, Bryn Davidson, Mike Sizemore, and Ethan Kent donated images. Scotty Keck translated ideas into more beautiful diagrams. Jan Semenza and Carlosfelipe Pardo helped with image sourcing. Cole Robertson wrangled images, permissions, and facts. Spanish translation came from Karla Cuervo Parada, and German from Michael Leukert.

Early research was supported by assignments from Jerry Johnson and Carol Toller at
The Globe and Mail
, Arjun Basu and Ilana Weitzman at
enRoute
, Anne Rose at
Westworld
, James Little at
explore
, Geoff Manaugh at
dwell
, Gary Ross and John Burns at
Vancouver
magazine, Rick Boychuk at
Canadian Geographic
, Dave Beers at
The Tyee
, and Amy Macfarlane and Jeremy Keehn at
The Walrus
.

The
Happy City
project would never have amounted to more than a collage of magazine stories without the cunning and charm of my agent and friend, Anne McDermid, and her fantastic team. The project received generous early support from the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Any errors in these pages are my own. But the book would have been a shambling mess without the critical feedback of its early readers—Omar Domínguez and Michael Prokopow—and my editors in three offices: Tim Rostron at Doubleday, Helen Conford at Penguin, and Courtney Hodell, Mark Krotov, and Taylor Sperry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Special thanks to Mark for giving the manuscript an urbanist’s keen eye.) I am hugely grateful to Christine McLaren, whose hard work, reportage, and keen analysis infuse these pages. Christine came on board as a research assistant but left as a collaborator, dear friend, and fellow traveler on the road to the good city.

I am grateful for the cities that have nurtured me, especially Mexico, D.F., and East Vancouver. But if I have learned anything on this journey, it is that absolutely nothing contributes to happiness like our relationships with other people. I would not have survived intact without the love and support of my family, members of the Rose House, the Dommies, the Vancouver FCC, and my community of urban nerds and mountain pals, and, most of all, the heroically patient, loving, and forgiving Omar Domínguez. Thank you.

ALSO BY CHARLES MONTGOMERY

The Shark God: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Montgomery is an award-winning journalist and urban engagement specialist, and the author of
The Shark God
, which won the 2005 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction under its Canadian title,
The Last Heathen
. Find him at
www.charlesmontgomery.ca
and
www.thehappycity.com
.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2013 by Charles Montgomery

All rights reserved

First edition, 2013

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint a haiku from
Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage
by Aaron Naparstek, copyright © 2003 by Villard Books. Reprinted by permission of Aaron Naparstek.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Montgomery, Charles, 1968–

    
Happy city: transforming our lives through urban design / Charles Montgomery. — First edition.

         
pages     cm

    
Includes bibliographical references.

    
ISBN 978-0-374-16823-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4299-6953-6 (ebook)

   
1.  City planning—Psychological aspects.   2.  Urban beautification—Psychological aspects.   3.  City dwellers—Psychology.   4.  Environmental psychology.   I.  Title.

   
HT166 .M5865 2013

   
307.1'216—dc23

2013022587

www.fsgbooks.com

www.twitter.com/fsgbooks
•
www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

eISBN 9781429969536

*
Americans used to get by with one bathroom. Now half of households have two or more. In 1950 there was one car for every three Americans. By 2011 there were almost enough motor vehicles to put every man, woman, and drooling baby behind a wheel. In 2010 Americans racked up more than double the highway miles than in 1960. They flew ten times as far in airplanes. Their new homes offered more than three times as much square footage for each inhibitant. The wealth explosion was even reflected in landfills: in 2010 the average person produced nearly four and a half pounds of garbage every day—a 60 percent jump from 1960.

*
Even the Hedonists, despite their modern caricature as wine-sodden party animals, believed that the greatest pleasures were to be found in virtuous acts. Still, most thinkers at the time agreed that the fully virtuous life was so rare that if you achieved it, you were probably already a god.

*
The Roman sense of discipline and control was manifest in the orthogonal road grids laid down as garrison towns on three continents and as far north as Scotland. It may not have been linked to a philosophy of happiness per se, but the security provided by the Roman Empire undoubtedly led to prosperity and well-being across its territories for centuries.