Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (6 page)

“Aristotle offered us the image of a cow in the field, contentedly chewing its cud. He was absolutely clear that this is not what
eudaimonia
is about! It’s about getting up every day and working very hard toward goals that make your life meaningful, sometimes in ways that are not at all conducive to short-term contentment,” Ryff told me. “In fact, it may not be about contentment at all. It’s about the realization of talent and potential, and the feeling that you are able to make the most of your abilities in life.”

Ryff came to this conclusion after conducting a unique experiment to test her point. First she created a checklist that included measures of well-being from the most respected psychologists of the last century. Her all-star
eudaimonia
checklist is worth listing. It includes:

• Self-acceptance, or how well you know and regard yourself

• Environmental mastery—your ability to navigate and thrive in the world

• Positive relations with others

• Personal growth throughout life

• Sense of meaning and purpose

• Feelings of autonomy and independence

That list might seem as if it were ripped from a daytime talk show, but Ryff found physiological evidence for its power. She surveyed a group of women between sixty and ninety years old who rated themselves on each element of psychological well-being, then checked those results against their health. Women with high scores for Ryff’s markers of psychological well-being were much healthier than those with low scores. They had better resistance to arthritis and diabetes. They had less cortisol in their saliva, which meant not only that they were less stressed out, but that they were at lower risk for cardiovascular and other diseases. They slept longer and more deeply.

Psychologists have long connected feelings of happiness to good health. But Ryff’s study demonstrated the synergistic power of living a meaningful, challenging, and connected life—exactly the kind that the Greeks championed and built in Athens. A bit of heroic struggle can be good for you.

Ryff calls this ideal state “challenged thriving.” It’s one reason why some people chase their dreams amid the grit, noise, chaos, and expense of big cities such as New York, when they could have enjoyed a bigger home, more leisure time, and shorter work hours back home in Akron. It’s why, after a few days of soaking up the saltwater vistas and mild air at her place on Orcas Island in Washington State, Ryff itches to return to the challenges of her laboratory on the snow-blown campus of the University of Wisconsin.

The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness. The good city should be measured not only by its distractions and amenities but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work, and meaning.

What Matters Most

Of all of these, the most important psychological effect of the city is the way in which it moderates our relationships with other people. This last concern is so powerful and so central to personal and societal well-being that researchers who study it become positively evangelical. Economist John Helliwell is a case in point. The University of British Columbia professor emeritus has distinguished himself in decades of research on quantitative macroeconomics, monetary policy, and international trade. But since his late-career conversion to happiness economics, Helliwell prefers to introduce himself as Aristotle’s research assistant, and he tends to begin his lectures with a sing-along version of the children’s song “The More We Get Together, the Happier We’ll Be.” He has evidence to back that song up; and cities, countries, and the United Nations are listening.

Helliwell and his team have run several iterations of the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll through their statistical grinders and have found that when it comes to life satisfaction, relationships with other people beat income, hands down. For example, these polls asked people if they had a friend or relative to count on when needed. Just going from being friendless to having one friend or family member to confide in had the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income.

Economists love to turn relationships into numbers. Helliwell produced this: if 10 percent more people thought they had someone to count on in life, it would have a greater effect on national life satisfaction than giving everyone a 50 percent raise. But it is not only our close relationships that count. Our trust in neighbors, police, governments, and even total strangers has a huge influence on happiness—again, much more than income does.

Imagine that you dropped your wallet somewhere on your street. What are the chances you would get it back if a neighbor found it? A stranger? A police officer? Your answer to that simple question is a proxy for a whole list of metrics related to the quality of your relationship with family, friends, neighbors, and the society around you.

In fact, ask enough people the wallet question, and you can predict the happiness of cities. Helliwell had it inserted into various Canadian surveys, and he found that cities where people believed they’d get their wallets back always scored highest for life satisfaction. It was the same with neighborhoods within those cities. Trust was the key, and it mattered far more than income: three of Canada’s biggest, richest cities—Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver—were among the least trusting and also among the least happy. St. John’s, a rocky outpost and the capital of perennially poor Newfoundland, was near the top of trust and happiness lists. Meanwhile, citizens of the country where people trust their neighbors, strangers, and even their government the most—the Danes—consistently come out on or near the top of happiness polls. A similar lesson appears over and over again in psychology, behavioral economics, and public health. Happiness is a house with many rooms, but at its core is a hearth around which we gather with family, friends, the community, and sometimes even strangers to find the best part of ourselves.

As it happens, we are hardwired to trust one another, in spite of our natural wariness of strangers. Economics once put this down to sheer self-interest: the more we trust one another, the more we can maximize utility by, say, cutting more ambitious deals to trade goods or services. But Paul Zak, an economist working out of a lab at Southern California’s Claremont Graduate University, found much deeper, physiological processes at work when he took a neuroscientist’s approach to trust. A man even cheerier than John Helliwell, Zak set up various games in which anonymous participants would trade money back and forth with strangers. Traditional economics tells us that each player will do what it takes to walk away with as much money as possible. That’s how the economic man of their theories should behave. But it is not how Zak’s volunteers treated one another. Zak found that most of them were generous with one another, even when it would not lend to financial reward. They were choosing altruism over profit. Intrigued, he took samples of their blood. Remarkably, Zak found that the blood of players who engaged in cooperative, trusting exchanges was awash with the molecule oxytocin.

Oxytocin is most commonly known as the hormone that washes through women when they give birth and breast-feed. Released by the pituitary gland in the hypothalamus region of the brain, it is a neurotransmitter whose first task is to tell receptors in the pleasure centers of the brain that it’s time to feel what we typically describe as “warm and fuzzy.” Its happy message travels down into the chest along the vagus nerve, where it can slow the heart to a more languid pace. It produces a feeling of heightened calm that can last a few seconds or as long as twenty minutes. As long as you have it, you are more likely to trust other people. You are more likely to cooperate and pay forward favors of generosity and kindness. The oxytocin studies point to a dynamic, generative quality in societal trust. The molecule is both an incentive and a reward for altruism. Not only does it feel good to experience positive social signs from others—smiles, handshakes, opened doors, bargains kept, and cooperative merging in traffic—but it feels good to reinforce those feelings of trust among both friends and strangers. It works best of all when we do it face-to-face: in the kitchen, over a fence, on the sidewalk, in the agora. Distance and geometry matter, as we will see.

The Tug-of-War

It’s important here to acknowledge the implications of this physiological aspect of trust. Ever since Charles Darwin pondered the self-sacrifice committed by certain honeybees (who die in the attempt to remove their barbed stingers from the skin of an intruder), evolutionary biologists have marveled at evidence of what most of us might call altruism in particular species.
*
Animals that live in groups are more successful when they cooperate with one another. The consensus seems to be that such cooperation is more than just a habit. The urge is woven into the genetic code of species from bees, wasps, and termites all the way to apes and, yes, humans, the most social animals on the planet. The oxytocin effect is physiological proof. Of course this is what philosophers and spiritual leaders have been saying all along. For all the weight that proponents of classical economics place on selfishness, Adam Smith himself grasped the duality of human need. In his other great treatise,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, Smith argued that human conscience comes from social relationships, and that the natural empathy produced by being among other people is an essential part of well-being and should guide our actions. The father of economics was more Athenian than his modern followers admit.

Although humans are certainly not as helpless in the face of instincts as honeybees, each of us benefits when some of us subsume private goals for the sake of the community, and everyone benefits when
everyone
cooperates. As the oxytocin studies illustrate, our brains reward us for working well together. At the same time, the drive by each of us to promote our own interests creates a dynamism and wealth that can overflow through the city. We all embody the tension between selfishness and altruism.

This ambiguity is written into the fabric of cities. The Greeks strove for individual achievement and protected their families in walled homes while championing the polis in the agora. Rome rose as its wealth was poured into the common good of aqueducts and roads, then declined as it was hoarded in private villas and palaces. Paris’s most glorious public gardens were built for the enjoyment of a ruling elite but now provide hedonic delights for all. The high modernists of the last century used architecture like an ethical bulldozer, pushing communities toward a symbolic, forced, and not-always-convivial closeness. The late great urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that the streets of 1960s Greenwich Village were made friendly and safe specifically because they were shared by many people. On the other end of the spectrum, millions of Americans have pursued a private version of happiness to detached structures far from any hint of what the Greeks would have called an agora.

The balance shifts back and forth with philosophy, politics, and technology. It exists in the relationship between private and public resources and landscapes. It lives in the ways we use conspicuous architectures to set ourselves apart. It exists in the height of walls, the distances between our homes, and even the means and velocities of our travels.

The pursuit of urban happiness demands that we acknowledge the real needs embodied in this tension and find a way to balance their contradictions.

But we should never forget this fact: even though the modern cosmopolitan city makes it easier than ever for individuals to retreat from neighbors and strangers, the greatest of human satisfactions lies in working and playing cooperatively with other people. No matter how much we cherish privacy and solitude, strong, positive relationships are the foundation of happiness. The city is ultimately a shared project, like Aristotle’s polis, a place where we can fashion a common good that we simply cannot build alone.

This sense of a shared future matters now more than ever. Evidence is mounting that the global ecosystems that support human life are in danger. This crisis calls for the kinds of sacrifice we make only when our sense of trust and shared fate is cranked way up. As the economist Jeremy Rifkin has suggested, the circle of empathy must be widened beyond the household, beyond communities and even nations, so that we care enough about other species, ecosystems, and the planet itself to save them from destruction. A temporary happiness, or one built on a debt of misery deferred to future generations, is as false as the cheery sensation inside Robert Nozick’s experience machine.

It is not certain that we can all make the leap to universal empathy, but what is clear is this: as a social project, the city challenges us not just to live together but to thrive together, by understanding that our fate is a shared one.

Happy City: A Job Description

Just as each of us will choose our own path toward the good life, we will probably never agree on a single definition of happiness. It can’t be summed up by the number of things we produce or buy, nor by any magical felicific calculus. But the firing synapses of our brains, the chemistry of our blood, and the statistical heft of our collected choices and opinions do offer a map that approximates the wisdom of philosophers. These things confirm that most people, in most places, have the same basic needs and most of the same desires. They tell us truths we already know in our gut, but which we have too rarely acknowledged. They suggest that there is wisdom in the mountain kingdom of Bhutan’s adoption of gross national happiness as a measure of progress rather than gross national product, and in the decision by policy makers around the world, including the governments of Great Britain, France, and Thailand and cities such as Seattle, to pay attention to new measures of well-being that include not just how much citizens earn, but how we feel. The truths of happiness science should also lead us to accept that Enrique Peñalosa and his fellow travelers are right: cities must be regarded as more than engines of wealth; they must be viewed as systems that should be shaped to improve human well-being.