Charles Montgomery

"A journalist travels the world and investigates current socioeconomic theories of happiness to discover why most modern cities are designed to make us miserable, what we can do to change this, and why we have more to learn from poor cities than from prosperous ones"--

Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

Happy City

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota. He acknowledged they'll never be rich as Americans but they can still build a great city without that. 

Mitul Shah

One of the requirements for happiness is equality. Maybe not equality of income, but equality of quality of life and, more than that, an environment where people don't feel inferior, where people don't feel excluded.

JP Juinio

We tweet our gossip or argue on Facebook walls. We peruse and interview prospective love interests online. We have gotten so good at privatizing our comforts, our leisure time, and our communication that urban life gets scoured of time with people who are not already colleagues, family, or close friends. Tellingly, the word community is increasingly used to refer to groups of people who use the same media or who happen to like a certain product, regardless of whether its members have actually met. 

"We found that if you make more road space, you get more cars. If you make more bilke lanes, you get more bikes. If you make more space for people, you get more people and of course then you get public life”

"They were much more interested in watching people doing things than watching flowers or fashion," he noted. His conclusion seems obvious, and yet it was revolutionary at the time: "What is most attractive, what attracts people to stop and linger and look, will invariably be other people. Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities."

 What we need are places that help us moderate our interactions with strangers without having to retreat entirely. 

We tolerate other people when we know we can escape them

Crowding is a problem of perception, and it is a problem of design that can be addressed 

Nature is not merely good for us. It brings out the good in us. 

The confusing thing about tomorrow is that it will be different from today

When making decisions about risk, we create simple rules derived from experience. 

Timeo Williams

Much of the modern world we live in is intersectional in nature. This book focuses on one important metric, that'd I'd argue is most important. Are we happy? Are the cities where we live making us happier or more depressed? Is the ability to commute 60 minutes to work everyday worth having a home in the middle of nowhere.

Montgomery does an awesome job detailing some great solutions to these problems in the cities of Vancouver, B.C & Bogota, Columbia. For those interested in learning about how to make citizenry/life at a systems level more enjoyable, check out this book.

I started reading this book while travelling through Mexico City and Bogota, knowing how significantly different urban design plays a role those cities compared to my hometown. With that, going through my day-to-day life and thinking about ideas discussed in this book has been delightful. Being from Toronto, I find myself constantly talking about it and pointing out how we have so many opportunities to improve our livelihoods. It's a little sad to see how we've failed to design a "happy city", yet I'm excited for the future with the new leadership advocating for change. 

Having experienced Bogota's TransMilenio, NYC's bike lanes and Vancouver's lane way housing – there's no denying the critical role that our cities play in defining our wellbeing, fostering a sense of community and impacting the environment. This book does a great job at going in depth and is highly thought provoking.

I'd recommend any American or Canadian to give it a read.

I started reading this book while travelling through Mexico City and Bogota, knowing how significantly different urban design plays a role those cities compared to my hometown. With that, going through my day-to-day life and thinking about ideas discussed in this book has been delightful. Being from Toronto, I find myself constantly talking about it and pointing out how we have so many opportunities to improve our livelihoods. It's a little sad to see how we've failed to design a "happy city", yet I'm excited for the future with the new leadership advocating for change. 

Having experienced Bogota's TransMilenio, NYC's bike lanes and Vancouver's lane way housing – there's no denying the critical role that our cities play in defining our wellbeing, fostering a sense of community and impacting the environment. This book does a great job at going in depth and is highly thought provoking.

I'd recommend any American or Canadian to give it a read.

Amy Maddess

I loved this! It has been on my TBR since my first year of Uni (2012) where I took a class called Communication, Health, and Environment with a very passionate, and very French, professor. He made me think a lot about urban design, city planning, light pollution, and the importance of how we feel in the city that we are in. This book was what I was expecting and more, the only downside is that I waited seven years to pick it up!

Grant Blakeman

Princess Doe 

James Wattie

Josh Kuiros

After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks and tower dwelling an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?

Award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world’s most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a “sexy” lipstick-red bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris’s urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have transformed their lives by hacking the design of their streets and neighbourhoods.

Rich with history and new insights from psychology, neuroscience and Montgomery’s own urban experiments, Happy City is an essential tool for understanding and improving our own communities. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting our cities for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city, the green city and the low-carbon city are the same place, and we can all help build it.

Finalist: Shaughnessy Bishop-Cohen Prize for Political Writing
Finalist: Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
Winner: Robert Bruss Real Estate Book Awards
Longlist: Charles Taylor Prize for Non-fiction

Alan

"Happy City is not only readable but stimulating. It raises issues most of us have avoided for too long. Do we live in neighbourhoods that make us happy? That is not a silly question. Montgomery encourages us to ask it without embarrassment, and to think intelligently about the answer." --The New York Times More of us than ever are moving to inner cities, mixed-use suburbs, and densely constructed towns. Our surroundings have certainly changed--but is city living cheering us up, or are we as gloomy on our walks to the subway as we were on our long predawn commutes? And if that's the case, how can we turn things around? In breezy, vivid prose, Montgomery reports from such exciting and dysfunctional places as Bogotá, once a dangerous, car-obsessed city, now a bike-loving model of civic excellence; California's San Joaquin Valley in the apocalyptic aftermath of the housing crisis; and a suburb of Vancouver, where a power company gathers energy from sewage to provide its citizens with heat and hot water. Full of cutting-edge insights from behavioral economists and leading urban thinkers, Happy City offers a completely new way to examine city life, showing us how small innovations can radically improve our experiences. Practical, genial, and fiercely open-minded, Montgomery has written a brilliant book about what today's cities are getting right--and how tomorrow's cities can do even better.

Happy City Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

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