Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (57 page)

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Horace wrote:

Happy the man who, free from cares,

like men of old still works

his father’s fields with his own oxen,

encumbered by no debt.

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Bentham made his own infamous foray into architecture, providing a chilling warning about the limits of weaving social goals into design. The Panopticon was a jail in which a circle of stacked cells faced inward toward a central guard tower. The windows of that tower would be shaded, so prisoners would have to assume they were always being watched. This sense of godlike omnipresence, he argued, would not only save money on prison guards but would also reform inmates’ morals. He hoped the design could be adopted for hospitals, sanitariums, and even schools. In a letter to a friend, he imagined a school where “all play, all chattering—in short, all distraction of every kind—is effectually banished by the central and covered situation of the master, seconded by partitions or screens between the scholars.” Bentham reasoned that under the gaze of their master and isolated from their friends, children would begin to internalize the gaze of their master, thus relieving them of the tension between their passion for play and their fear of punishment. Architecture, guided by science, would determine both the thought and behavior of its occupants.

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Robert Pemberton, a wealthy pupil of Jeremy Bentham’s, was convinced that the sharp-angled geometries of buildings and streets of old cities led to vice and mental illness. He proposed building a Happy Colony in New Zealand, which would consist of a twenty-thousand-acre settlement of concentric agricultural circles around a core of colleges, workshops, and plazas decorated with gigantic celestial maps. By adopting the circular patterns he observed in the cosmos, Pemberton was sure the design would lead to the “perfection and happiness” of its colonists. His vision went unrealized.

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Other studies have shown that people who say they are happy are more likely to be rated as happy by friends, more likely to respond to requests for help, less likely to be absent from work, less likely to get into arguments, and less likely to sign up for psychological counseling. They live longer and get high scores on mental health assessments.

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Some surveys ask people to mark where they think they stand on a ladder representing a progression from the worst possible life to the best possible life. Other surveys stick with: “In general, how happy would you say that you are—very happy, fairly happy, or not very happy.”

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If you were to ask one or two people about their happiness and their life, you might not learn so much. People are bound to make mistakes when answering subjective questions. They might be influenced by weather, last night’s football game, or the jerk who cut them off on the way home from work. But when surveys test thousands of people, the sheer numbers crowd out the errors that creep into individual self-reports. With big enough sample numbers, the surveys point at the economic and social conditions that go along with societal happiness.

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In the United States, subjective well-being plummeted during the 2008 recession. But it returned to prerecession levels by 2010, long before the economy recovered, according to the Gallup Organization.

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In a groundbreaking 2009 study, economists mined more than a million survey responses to create the first life-satisfaction ranking for U.S. states. They compared their results with an earlier study that ranked quality of life using such objective data as weather, wind speed, length of coastline, national parks, hazardous-waste sites, commuting times, violent crime, air quality, local taxes, local spending on education and highways, and cost of living.

The life satisfaction and quality-of-life rankings matched up. (This seems only logical, but it was a big deal for the happiness economists. It offered some of the first empirical evidence that people’s rankings of their own life satisfaction match up with real-world conditions usually associated with quality of life. When thousands of people are miserable, they tend to have good reasons for it.) But the study also suggested that Americans might be getting their real estate decisions wrong on a massive scale. After all, New York and California, states with some of the highest real estate prices—suggesting that people really, really want to live there—were flopping around at the bottom of the American happiness barrel, at dead last and forty-sixth, respectively.

“Bargains in life are usually found outside the spotlight,” noted Professor Andrew Oswald, coauthor of the study. “It seems that exactly the same is true of the best places to live.”

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Why, Darwin wondered in
On the Origin of Species
, would a honeybee sacrifice its own life for the sake of the hive? The answer, he proposed, was that the sting might be useful to the community as a whole. If the altruistic bee did not survive, it would at least in its own death help ensure the survival of its relatives. Biologists continue to argue about whether cooperation is driven by a family-level genetic imperative or a broader model which holds that communities do better when individuals sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the wider group—or both. The debate was recently renewed by the biologist E. O. Wilson, who argued in favor of group selection over kin selection—essentially saying that evolutionary forces act not just on the level of individuals, but at the level of social groups.

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At the time, there was a higher percentage of bank-owned homes in Weston Ranch than in any other neighborhood in the country.

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By 2011, nearly three-quarters of the homes in the 18th Congressional District, which includes Stockton, were “underwater,” or worth less than their mortgages. Indeed, across the country, “metropolitan areas with the weakest core neighborhoods had the highest levels of foreclosures.”

A 2012 report by the Demand Institute predicts that, even though housing prices will continue to recover for the next few years, prices will be weighed down by the weakest segment of the market: sparsely populated outer communities with low walkability and access to amenities.

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When the
Toronto Star
newspaper decided to test trustworthiness by scattering wallets around Toronto, citizens proved that they were much more trustworthy than anyone imagined: while Torontonians told national surveyors that strangers would return lost wallets only about a quarter of the time, the
Star
experiment saw more than 80 percent of wallets returned. This is remarkable, considering that the return of a wallet requires more than just honesty or the absence of corruption. The wallet finder must go out of her way to perform an act of kindness for a complete stranger. This confirms what social scientists learn over and over again: our fellow citizens are more likely to return wallets, more likely to help strangers, and much less likely to rob, cheat, mug, or kill us or each other than most of us think.

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This involves adding or removing independent variables from the statistical recipe to see how they affect an outcome. It’s a bit like figuring out the secret recipe for a soup you tasted at a restaurant. Back in your own kitchen, you try various combinations of spices until you finally replicate that taste.

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The 2011 study by Erika Sandow found that long commutes create conflict on the home front: when one member of a couple takes on a longer commute, his spouse ends up taking on more responsibilities at home and is more likely to take part-time or lower-paying employment. Even in enlightened Sweden, the partner making the sacrifice is usually the woman.

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Living in dispersal correlates with a shocking retreat from public life, according to extensive analysis of the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey of nearly thirty thousand people begun in 2000. It is hard to pinpoint the origin of this retreat. It may be because people in the dispersed city have invested so heavily in private comfort that they feel insulated from the problems of the rest of the world. It may be that sprawl has attracted people who are naturally less interested in engaging with the world, socially or politically. These are both possible, but evidence suggests that the spatial landscape matters. Sociologists point out that the suburbs have done an efficient job of sorting people into communities where they will be surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic status. Meanwhile, the architectures of sprawl inhibit political activity that requires face-to-face interaction. It is not that sprawl makes political activity impossible, but by privatizing gathering space and dispersing human activity, sprawl makes political gathering less likely. Where would you go for a demonstration? Malls and power centers reserve the right to remove unruly patrons, even in the seemingly public concourses and parking areas between stores. Dispersal itself deflates the frisson that comes with meetings between strangers. As sociologist David Brain argued, by omitting strangers from our lives, sprawl leaches away our capacity for dealing with radically different perspectives.

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Surveys show that social trust fares better in some suburbs than it does in central cities. But this is partly a product of self-sorting: given the decades-long association between new suburbs and the good life, and the disinvestment in inner cities, America’s newest suburbs were almost invariably populated by prosperous homeowners with kids—just the kind of people who stay put and produce the conditions likely to produce strong local connections.

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For example, Charles Hayes, president of the Chicago Motor Club, told friends that the solution was to persuade city people that “the streets are made for vehicles to run upon.”

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In 1922, the Packard Motor Car Company built a giant tombstone in Detroit: “Erected to the Memory of Mr. J. Walker: He Stepped from the Curb Without Looking.” The next year, the Automobile Club of Southern California paid for police to erect signs prohibiting jaywalking. When M. O. Eldridge, an American Automobile Club executive, was chosen as Washington’s traffic director in 1925, he ordered police to arrest and charge anyone caught walking across a street beyond the bounds of a crosswalk. Dozens were rounded up. The court agreed to set the offenders free only if they agreed to join a “Careful Walker’s Club.”

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Chapin eventually joined Herbert Hoover’s cabinet as secretary of commerce.

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The extent to which central cities were transformed by Motordom has its monument in Manhattan’s Park Avenue. Most New Yorkers have no idea that the avenue, now a highway-like thoroughfare with a narrow garden median, got its name in the 1850s because a long section of the avenue actually
was
a park, complete with wide lawns and a six-block brick pedestrian promenade.

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The average price of a detached home in Vancouver is now more than $1 million.

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A basic translation of evolutionary happiness function: Happiness = your success minus your expectations = your perceived social status. (Courtesy Luis Rayo, from Rayo, Luis, and Gary Becker, “Evolutionary Efficiency and Happiness,”
Journal of Political Economy,
2007: 302–37.)

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Meanwhile, the misery brought on by a long commute seemed to have a viral effect on the driver’s family: the more time a respondent’s partner spent commuting, the less happy the respondent tended to be. Call it the delayed road rage effect.

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Surveys in the U.K. show that Londoners are among the least happy people in the entire United Kingdom, despite the city’s being the richest region in the U.K.

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In another experiment, Kirk observed the culture effect come to life in the brains of all his volunteers. All it took was feeding them a bit of context. He and his colleagues asked volunteers to rate the aesthetics of dozens of pieces of art. Simply telling them that a particular image was from the collection of an art gallery—as opposed to a random image database—caused them to like the image more. Once again, that contextual information lit up different parts of their brains, which biased their preferences.

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The original city sketches and master plan, by Lucio Costa, were commissioned and then elaborated by Niemeyer.

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This is one reason why people rate their chance of being murdered much higher than the likelihood that they will die of stomach cancer, even though the latter is four times as likely.

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Between 1960 and 2004 the percentage of Americans who were overweight rose from under half to two-thirds of the population.

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Car accidents are the leading cause of death for people under thirty-five years old. Around the world, more people are killed by cars than by wars—more than four hundred thousand every year. The World Health Organization estimates that beyond the bloodshed, the cost of auto crashes in injuries, medical care, and property damage exceeds $518 billion worldwide.

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For years, engineers recommended clearing such distractions as bushes and trees from road edges. The danger seemed obvious. But Eric Dumbaugh, an assistant professor of transportation at Texas A&M University, found that lines of trees along roads were actually associated with
fewer
crashes because the complexity they added caused people to slow down. Widening shoulders actually increased mid-block crashes.