Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (2 page)

“A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can’t be both,” he announced.

He then threw out the city’s ambitious highway expansion plan and instead poured his budget into hundreds of miles of bike paths; a vast new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas; and a network of new libraries, schools, and day-care centers. He built the city’s first rapid transit system, using buses instead of trains. He hiked gas taxes and banned drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week. I’ll discuss the details later, but the thing to understand here is that this program redesigned the experience of city living for millions of people, and it was an utter rejection of the philosophies that have guided city builders around the world for more than half a century. It was the opposite of the city that North American laws, habits, the real estate industry, financing arrangements, and development ideologies have favored. In particular, it was the opposite of the vision that millions of middle-class people around the world have chased to suburbia.

In the third year of his term Peñalosa challenged Bogotans to participate in an experiment, a
día sin carro.
As of dawn on February 24, 2000, all private cars were banned from city streets for the day. More than eight hundred thousand vehicles sat still that Thursday. Buses were jam-packed and taxis hard to come by, but hundreds of thousands of people followed Peñalosa’s example and hit the streets under their own steam, walking, cycling, skating to work and school.

It was the first day in four years that nobody was killed in traffic. Hospital admissions fell by almost a third. The toxic haze over the city thinned. People still got to work, and schools reported normal attendance. Bogotans enjoyed the day so much that they voted to make it a yearly affair, and to ban all private cars during rush hour
every day
by 2015. People told pollsters that they were more optimistic about city life than they had been in years.

Peñalosa recounts this story with all the fervor of Martin Luther King on the Washington Mall, and with similar effect. I saw three thousand people at the World Urban Forum leap up from their chairs and cheer in response. UN statisticians brought their hands together despite themselves. Indian economists beamed and loosened their ties. Senegalese delegates shook and danced in their carnival-colored wraps. Mexican architects whistled. My heart beat faster, too. Peñalosa seemed to be affirming what so many urban thinkers are sure of, but very rarely have the guts or the audacity to say. The city is a means to a way of life. It can be a reflection of all our best selves. It can be whatever we want it to be.

It can change, and change dramatically.

The Movement

Is urban design really powerful enough to make or break happiness? The question deserves consideration because the happy city message is taking root around the world. Since Peñalosa’s three-year term in office—consecutive terms are illegal in Colombia—delegations from dozens of cities have landed in Bogotá to study its transformation. Peñalosa and his younger brother, Guillermo, the city’s former parks manager, were called to advise cities on every continent. While the elder proselytized from Shanghai to Jakarta to Lagos, the younger hit Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Toronto. While Guillermo whipped up hundreds of activists in Portland, Enrique was urging planners in Los Angeles to let traffic become so unbearable that drivers simply abandoned their cars. In 2006 Enrique Peñalosa was the talk of Manhattan after he announced to crowds of gridlock-obsessed New Yorkers they should ban vehicles entirely from Broadway. Three years later, the impossible vision began to come to life around Times Square. The happy city had gone global.

The Peñalosa brothers are far from alone in the happy city crusade. The movement has its roots in the antimodernist foment of the 1960s and has gradually drawn architects, neighborhood activists, public health experts, transportation engineers, network theorists, and politicians into a battle for the shape and soul of cities—a confrontation that is finally reaching critical mass. They have torn down freeways in Seoul and San Francisco and Milwaukee. They have experimented with the height, shape, and facades of buildings. They have turned the black top of suburban shopping malls into mini-villages. They have reconfigured entire towns to better suit children. They have torn down backyard fences and reclaimed neighborhood intersections. They are reorganizing the systems that hold cities together and rewriting the rules that dictate the shapes and functions of our buildings. Some of these people aren’t even aware that they are part of the same movement, but together they are aiming a wrecking ball at many of the places we have spent the last half century building.

Peñalosa insists that the unhappiest cities in the world, the ones perfectly calibrated to turn wealth into hardship, are not the seething metropolises of Africa or South America. “The most dynamic economies of the twentieth century produced the most miserable cities of all,” Peñalosa told me over the roar of traffic in Bogotá. “I’m talking about the U.S., of course—Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, cities totally dominated by private cars.”

For most Americans, the claim that prosperity and the cherished automobile propelled wealthy cities away from happiness is practically heresy. It is one thing for a Colombian politician to offer advice to the world’s poor, but it is quite another for him to suggest that the world’s most powerful nation should be taking design criticism born on the potholed byways of South America. If Peñalosa is right, then not only have generations of planners, engineers, politicians, and land developers been mistaken, but millions of us have taken a wrong turn on the road to the good life.

But then again, over the last few decades, prosperity and well-being in America have followed completely different trajectories.

The Happiness Paradox

If one was to judge by sheer wealth, the last half century should have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the United States and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan, and Great Britain. Riches were piled upon riches. By the turn of the century, Americans traveled more, ate more, bought more, used more space, and threw away more stuff than ever before. More people than ever got to live the dream of having their own detached home. The stock of cars—and bedrooms and toilets—far surpassed the number of humans who used them.
*
It was an age of unprecedented bounty and growth, at least until the great recession of 2008 stuck a needle into the balloon of optimism and easy credit.

And yet the boom decades of the late twentieth century were not accompanied by a boom in happiness. Surveys show that people’s assessment of their own well-being in the United States pretty much flatlined during that time. It was the same with citizens in Japan and the United Kingdom. Canada fared only slightly better. China, the new star of supercharged GDP growth, is providing yet more evidence of a paradox. Between 1999 and 2010, a decade in which average purchasing power in China grew more than threefold, people’s ratings of their own life satisfaction stalled, according to Gallup polls (although urbanized Chinese were happier than their rural cousins).

In the final decades of the last century, Americans increasingly complained of personal problems. By 2005 clinical depression was three to ten times as common as it was two generations ago. By 2010, one in ten Americans reported that they suffered from depression. Six to eight times as many college students experienced depression in 2007 as they did in 1938. Although this may be partly due to cultural factors—it’s now more acceptable to talk about depression—objective mental health statistics are not encouraging. High school and college students—the easiest group to survey—climbed higher and higher on what mental health researchers cheerily call the Paranoia, Hysteria, Hypochondriasis, and Depression scales. One in ten Americans is taking antidepressants.

Analysis from free-market think tanks such as the Cato Institute assures us that “high levels of economic freedom and high average incomes are among the strongest correlates of subjective well-being,” which is to say that being rich and free should make us happier. So why wasn’t the half-century surge in wealth accompanied by a surge in happiness? What was counteracting the effect of all that money?

Some psychologists point to the phenomenon dubbed the “hedonic treadmill”: the natural human tendency to shift our expectations along with our changing fortunes. The treadmill theory suggests that the richer you get, the more you compare yourself to other rich people and the faster the wheel of desire spins beneath your feet, so that you end up feeling as though you haven’t made any progress. Others blame the growing income gap, and the realization by millions of middle-class Americans that they were falling farther behind the richest members of society, especially during the last two decades. There is some explanatory truth in both of these theories, but economists have crunched the survey numbers and concluded that they only partially explain that widening gap between material and emotional wealth.

Consider this: The decades-long expansion in the American economy paralleled the migration of society from the country to cities, and from cities to the in-between world of sprawl. Since 1940, almost all urban growth has actually been
sub
urban. In the decade before the big bust of 2008, the economy was driven to a large extent by the boundless cul-de-sac-ing, tract housing, and big-box power centering of the landscape at the urban fringe. For a time, it was impossible to separate growth from suburbanization. They were the same thing. More people than ever got exactly what they thought they wanted. Everything we have come to believe about the good life would suggest that this suburban boom was good for happiness. Why didn’t it work? And why was faith in this model so quick to evaporate? The urban shake-up that began with the mortgage crisis in 2008 hit the newest, shiniest, most sprawling parts of the American city the hardest.

Peñalosa’s argument was that too many rich societies have used their wealth in ways that exacerbate urban problems rather than solve them. Could this help explain the happiness paradox?

It’s certainly a good time to consider the idea, now that tens of thousands of freshly paved cul-de-sacs across the United States have passed six springs without sprouting new homes. From the United States to Ireland to Spain, communities on the edge of suburban sprawl, that most American of forms, have yet to regain their pre-crash value. The future of cities is uncertain.

We have reached a rare moment in history where societies and markets appear to be teetering between the status quo and a radical change in the way we live and the way we design our lives in cities. For the first time in nine decades, census data in 2010/2011 showed that major American cities experienced more growth than their suburbs. It’s too early to tell if this is a complete turning of the tide of urban dispersal. Many forces are at play, from the lingering housing market slowdown and high unemployment to historically low population mobility. But other forces are systemic and powerful enough to permanently alter the course of urban history.

First is a reckoning on energy. It will probably never again be inexpensive to fill a gas tank. There is too little easy oil left in the ground, and there are too many people competing for it. The same goes for other nonrenewable forms of energy and raw materials. The sprawl city requires cheap energy, cheap land, and cheap materials, and the days of cheap are over. Another force is a truth acknowledged by every sober, informed observer: cities are contributing to the crisis of climate change. If we are going to avoid the cataclysmic effects of global warming, we must find more efficient ways to build and live. Of course it is not at all certain that a rush back to urban density will produce better lives than did suburban dispersal.

But the happy city theory presents an alluring possibility.

If a poor and broken city such as Bogotá can be reconfigured to produce more joy, then surely it’s possible to apply happy city principles to the wounds of wealthy places. And if more extravagant, private, polluting, and energy-hungry communities have failed to deliver on happiness, then the search for a happier city might well be expected to reveal a greener, more resilient city, a place that saves the world while saving our own lives. If there was a science behind it, presumably that science could also be used to show how all of us might renovate good feelings in our communities.

Of course, Peñalosa’s rhetoric is not science; it raises as many questions as it answers. Its inspirational qualities do not constitute proof of the city’s power to make or break happiness, any more than the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” is proof that all you really do need is love. To test the idea, you would have to decide what you meant by happiness, and you would need a way to measure it. You would have to understand how a road, a bus, a park, or a building might contribute to good feelings. You would have to tabulate the psychological effects of driving in traffic, or catching the eye of a stranger on the sidewalk, or pausing in a pocket park, or of feeling crowded or lonely, or of the simple feeling that the city you live in is a good or bad place. You would have to go beyond politics and philosophy to find a map of the ingredients of happiness, if it exists at all.

*   *   *

The cheers in that Vancouver ballroom echoed in my ears for the five years I spent charting the intersection of urban design and the so-called science of happiness. The quest led me to some of the world’s greatest and most miserable streets. It led me through the labyrinths of neuroscience and behavioral economics. I found clues in paving stones, on rail lines, and on roller coasters, in architecture, in the stories of strangers who shared their lives with me, and in my own urban experiments. I will share that search with you, and its hopeful message, in the rest of this book.

One memory from early in the journey has stuck with me, perhaps because it carries both the sweetness and the subjective slipperiness of the happiness we sometimes find in cities.