Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (58 page)

*
These highways helped scatter 90 percent of Atlanta’s growing population out of the urban core.

*
The travel time in Atlanta grew faster in the 1990s than in any other American city. The average person’s time spent in Atlanta traffic rose from six hours a year to thirty-four hours between 1990 and 2000 alone.

^†
A survey of just a few of the national scientific institutions that support the IPCC’s findings on climate change: Academia Brasileira de Ciências, the Royal Society of Canada, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Académie des Sciences, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the Indian National Science Academy, Accademia dei Lincei, the Science Council of Japan, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, and the National Academy of Sciences (from “Joint science academies’ statement: Global response to climate change,” Washington, DC: The National Academies, 2005), as well as the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the governments of all G8 nations.

*
The cognitive linguist George Lakoff has described how our understanding of the world assumes a physical form in our brains in the form of neural circuitry he calls frames. These frames can be configured by experiences, long-held moral views, and even advertising, if we hear a message often enough. They define what
feels
true for us, and we use them to understand any new information that comes our way. “If the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames stay and the facts are ignored,” writes Lakoff. So when someone utters the phrase “climate change,” if the information contradicts the listener’s long-held views, his brain is more likely to access skeptical thoughts and emotions than those that spur action.

*
In fact, Vancouver’s engineers are actively slowing cars down. They install dozens of new pedestrian signals, crosswalks, and traffic lights every year.

*
Another paradox of density: even though it now takes longer than it ever has to drive across town, Vancouver residents are enjoying easier commutes. Average round-trip commute times in other Canadian cities grew by up to fourteen minutes between 1992 and 2005, but the Vancouver average stayed the same. The city wasn’t defying the laws of physics: the numbers were yanked down by all the people who migrated closer to work in the vertical city. Two-thirds of all trips in Vancouver’s downtown are now made on foot, by bike, or via public transit. The inhabitants started selling their cars, reversing a continental trend long before the great recession. In 2005, the average family in Vancouver owned 1.25 cars, compared with 1.7 in suburban Surrey. (Even after the economic meltdown, the average American family owned 1.9 vehicles.)

*
One study in Alameda, California, found that retirees who do “environmental” work were half as likely as non-volunteers to show depressive symptoms after twenty years, while people who did other forms of volunteering only had their risk lowered by 10 percent.

*
What you look at from your window influences your perception of crowding, too. Even in the suburbs, having windows that face open space rather than other people’s windows makes people more likely to feel as though they have enough room, regardless of the square footage they occupy. Your view is not merely a conduit to nature. It is a social device.

*
Thoits found that women’s “obligatory” roles as spouses, parents, or employees tended to demand lots of time and energy and were more likely to translate into what she called “role strain.” That wasn’t the case with light, voluntary roles in life, which were unambiguously associated with well-being. The more social roles people have in life, the stronger they become in both mind and body.

^†
The number of people living alone in America rose from 17 percent in 1970 to 27 percent in 2007 (compared with 22.5 percent married couples with children), and the average household size declined from 3.1 people in 1970 to 2.6.

*
“Normally we presume that the subjective experience of isolation (loneliness) must be at one end of a continuum at the other end of which is excessive social interaction. We can now see that this presumption is misleading. When a person is in a situation where he or she is unable to regulate who, when or where they will meet others, he or she is likely to experience both isolation and over-stimulation,” summed up David Halpern. “In the absence of semi-private spaces which allow for informal interaction without commitment, each social interaction becomes an all or nothing experience.”

*
The feeling is familiar in the area. People who answered post-occupancy surveys in False Creek North, a Vancouverist neighborhood just across the street from the 501, complained that their fellow condo dwellers were socially skittish. “People don’t want to get too close,” one resident told a post-occupancy surveyor. “I think they’re frightened that if they get too close and then realize that they don’t like the person, they’re in an impossible situation.”

*
Part of the problem is that Vancouver’s vertical neighborhoods tend to be home to its most transient residents: foreign students, young people, and renters who do not stay long enough to forge deep ties. Tens of thousands of foreign English-language students rent apartments in the downtown’s West End, staying for mere months at a time. In 2012, nearly half the people in Vancouver’s towers had lived there less than five years.

*
The human density now required to support transit frequencies of ten minutes or less is estimated at around twelve people per acre. But the average suburban lot over the past two decades in places such as Maryland averages from .5 to 1.2 acres.

*
Even downtown, Vancouver has convinced people of vastly different status to live close together. New developments are required to devote 20 percent of their land to affordable housing, a practice known as inclusionary zoning. In False Creek North, residents of upscale towers told surveyors that subsidized housing was the “best thing to happen” to their area because it drew families to the neighborhood, giving it a greater sense of community.

*
The Campo’s location, shape, and design did reflect the evolution of Siena. It began life as a meadow at the intersection of various trade routes and was used as a market hundreds of years before the nine families who dominated the city in the twelfth century paved it with brick and inlaid it with nine rays of travertine to symbolize their rule. Ever since, it has served as the stage for the Sienese clans’ cooperation and rivalries—exhibited most famously by the Palio, the annual spectacle in which horses from each clan race one another around the edges of the piazza.

*
The first summer after the Strøget was pedestrianized, 145 people were passing through some eleven-yard-wide sections every minute. The street was handling many more times the traffic than it could handle when cars had ruled, but at this pedestrian volume, the Strøget was pretty much full again.

*
When TV service was introduced to otherwise healthy communities in Canada in the 1980s, it had an almost immediate corrosive effect on civic participation. Watching TV correlates with higher material aspirations, more anxiety, lower financial satisfaction, lower trust in others, and less frequent social activity.

*
This concern with touch has led inventors at the Berlin University of the Arts to create mobile phone prototypes that simulate interpersonal sensations. One phone imitates hand-holding by transmitting a sender’s squeeze to a tension band around a receiver’s hand. Another re-creates a sender’s on-phone kiss by pushing a wet sponge against a membrane on the receiver’s phone casing. The creepy discomfort experienced even by the inventors of these devices suggests that there are limits to the intimacy-producing potential of technology.

On the other hand, programmers are responding to this reality with applications designed to move online encounters off-line. Some use the GPS in our mobile devices to connect us with nearby strangers—a technique pioneered by the location-based gay online dating app, Grindr. Other apps, such as HeyNeighbor, enable people to ask people in their area for favors or offer help. Some push the limits of altruism: CLOO, for instance, enables you to register your private bathroom so strangers in need can “rent” it in an emergency.

*
Observing shoppers at a mall, University of North Carolina researchers found that twice as many people stepping off a rising escalator donated to a Salvation Army fund-raiser than did people stepping off a descending escalator. They also found that people who had just watched film clips of views from an airplane window were much more cooperative in computer games than people who had watched clips showing scenes from a car window. The same relationship between altitude and altruism appeared in several experiments. The researchers suggest that being high up, or the mere act of ascending, reminds us of lofty ways of thinking and behaving.

*
Disney and his designers all came from the film industry, and they designed their Main Street to work like a scene in a movie, with props so compelling that every visitor feels as though she has become a part of the scene. They wanted visitors specifically to forget the dehumanizing sprawl that was even then creeping out from Los Angeles. “In the cities we’re threatened … We don’t talk to people, we don’t believe everything we hear, we don’t look people in the eye … We don’t trust people. We find ourselves alone. If we keep pulling these blinds down and cutting ourselves off, we die a little bit,” explained John Hench, Disney’s top lieutenant and leader of the group Disney dubbed his Imagineers back in 1978. “Walt wanted to reassure people … There’s some nostalgia involved, of course, but nostalgia for what? There was never a main street like this one. But it reminds you of some things about yourself that you’ve forgotten about.”

*
Studies of seniors living in Montreal found that elderly people who lived on blocks that had front porches and stoops actually had stronger legs and hands than those living on more barren blocks. Meanwhile, those who could actually walk to shops and services were more likely to volunteer, visit other people, and stay active.

*
In his 2009 World Championship hundred-meter sprint, Usain Bolt’s average ground speed was 23.35 miles per hour.

*
In fact, field experiments have shown that in noisy environments, people are systematically less likely to help a stranger pick up a dropped stack of books or to give someone change for a phone call.

*
Olmsted did impose his philosophy of social equity on the park. The Mall, the forty-foot promenade carved into the landscape from Sixty-sixth to Seventy-second streets and lined with shade trees, was built specifically to encourage all kinds of people to stroll together in a landscape of formal gregariousness.

*
Like the people in her studies, Mokhtarian likes the ritual transition between home and work. In fact, rather than living near her office in the cozy hamlet of Davis, she chose to live in the nearby town of Woodland, a conscious choice that forced her to drive to work each day. Commute time? Sixteen minutes, door-to-door.

*
Commuters’ hearts raced at 145 beats per minute, well over double the normal rate. They experienced a surge in cortisol. And, in what was apparently a coping strategy, their brains underwent a bizarre temporary transformation that psychologist David Lewis dubbed “commuter amnesia.” Their brains simply shut out stimulus from the outer world, and they forgot about most of the trip as soon as it was over.

^†
When Gallup and Healthways polled Americans, they found that the longer people’s commute, the more likely they were to report chronic pain, high cholesterol, and general unhappiness. (People with commutes over ninety minutes have it the worst. They are the most likely to be anxious, tired, and fat. And they are much less likely than people with short journeys to say they enjoy life.)

*
To put our history of mobility into perspective, try to picture time since the day the first hominid stood tall as a walk across New York’s Central Park, all fifty-one blocks from Harlem to Midtown Manhattan. We’d be hunter-gatherers from end to end for thousands of steps, right until the moment we could spot the doorman of the Plaza Hotel on Fifty-ninth Street. The age of farming would almost add up to the sprint across Fifty-ninth. We’d enter the age of cities on the sidewalk right in front of the hotel. The years during which we’ve let automobiles do the work for us would take up less than the depth of one red carpet–clad step at the hotel’s front door.

*
The average walking step is 2.5 feet. So the average student walked around 4.5 miles each day, much more than the typical American.

*
The bus service in Clayton County carried two million riders in 2009 before it was shut down.

^†
That’s seventy-two minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.

*
People who live in neighborhoods with latticework-like streets actually drive 26 percent fewer miles than people in the cul-de-sac forest.