Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (26 page)

This latest wave of experiments in public space can be traced back to Bogotá, and the moment when a quirky idea found its champion in an accidental city bureaucrat. Guillermo Peñalosa began his public life in a supporting role. He campaigned twice on behalf of his older brother, Enrique, who lost his first two mayoral bids in 1991 and 1994. Both brothers saw design as a way to heal a society mired in inequity and civil war, but the younger Peñalosa was particularly obsessed with parks. After youthful wanderings in New York City’s Central Park, he found a philosophical role model in the park’s co-architect, Frederick Law Olmsted.

“In New York at that time, everyone hated everyone: the blacks and whites and Jews, the locals and the immigrants, they all hated each other,” Peñalosa said of the years in the mid-nineteenth century during which Central Park was born. “Olmsted believed that a good public space would help all these people break down the barriers by sharing space and getting to know each other.”
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He envisioned the same thing for Bogotá.

When his brother lost the 1994 election, Guillermo Peñalosa called the mayor-elect, Antanas Mockus, to convince him to at least try some of his ideas. Guillermo is a softer character than his older brother: less an evangelist and more of a negotiator, a persuader. To his surprise, Mockus hired him as his commissioner of parks, sports, and recreation and gave him free rein. Peñalosa was able to create two hundred new parks by using derelict land the city already owned. But this was only a small dent in the city’s public space deficit, and it was just too expensive to buy more land. Peñalosa saw an opportunity in a quirky program known as the Ciclovía, which had, for more than a decade, seen eight miles of busy roads barricaded and opened to cyclists, walkers, and joggers every Sunday. It wasn’t so much a car-free day as an ephemeral stretching of parkland. Even in a city where class lines were rigid and violence and fear were rampant, the program drew people from all of Bogotá’s social classes together in spaces that had been off-limits to everyone for decades. It embodied Olmsted’s philosophies, Peñalosa realized. “I thought that the Ciclovía could be Bogotá’s own Central Park!”

If the Ciclovía was going to succeed in nudging the rich and the poor together across the city, it needed a lot more room. Guillermo supersized it, eventually claiming an interconnected network of sixty-odd miles of the city’s major roads. It may have been the cheapest public space project ever. There was almost no capital investment at all, beyond the purchase of inexpensive traffic barriers. All it really required was political will.

In an age of car-oriented planning, this pavement grab was still a radical move, but eventually more than a million cyclists, skaters, and strollers began coming out to enjoy the space each week. It was more popular than the pope’s visit.

The Ciclovía method has now been taken up across Colombia and exported around the world, from Melbourne to Miami, temporarily transforming streets that nobody could have imagined walking along. The idea had its greatest test on three sunny Saturdays in the summer of 2008, when New York City’s Department of Transportation erected barriers so that people on foot, bikes, and Rollerblades could claim several major thoroughfares, including Park Avenue. Thousands of people filled the so-called Summer Streets. They gathered for yoga, street-side samba, and tai chi classes. Many just walked, apparently stunned to see their own feet touching the pavement in the middle of the avenue. Residents along Park Avenue strolled out and plunked down lawn chairs on the grass median, as though it were the park it hadn’t been for a hundred years.

Here was New York, with all its awesome vertical geometries, its thrills and social possibilities, now suddenly with space to stretch and breathe. Without the internal combustion roar you could yell at a friend a block away and he would turn and smile. It was, by almost all accounts, a marvelous experience.

Ciclovía

Every Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people come out to walk, ride, and dance on the street during Bogotá’s Ciclovía. The initiative has turned miles of pavement into temporary extensions of the city’s park system.
(Gil Peñalosa / 8-80 Cities)

It was also an exercise in immersive social marketing. Each Ciclovía or Summer Streets or car-free day offers proof that the city and its roads are fluid and malleable—they can change anytime people really want them to. After a Ciclovía, cities invariably begin to consider large-scale changes in the way that they organize public space and mobility. Participants begin to ask what streets are for, and they invariably seize upon the answer that Copenhageners found decades ago: streets are for whatever we decide they are for, and central cities need not accept the discomforts thrust on them by dispersal.

8. Mobilicities I

How Moving Feels, and Why It Does Not Feel Better

The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, the moon increaseth and decreaseth, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow, to their conservation no doubt, to teach us that we should ever be in action.

—Robert Burton,
The Anatomy of Melancholy

When we talk about cities, we usually end up talking about how various places look and perhaps how it feels to be there in those places. But to stop there misses half the story, because the way we experience most parts of cities is at velocity: we glide past on the way to somewhere else. City life is as much about moving
through
landscapes as it is about being
in
them.

This is a critical point; not only does the city shape the way we move, but our movements shape the city in return. Jan Gehl rightly pointed out that designing a road for one mode of movement—say, travel in private automobiles—causes the road to fill up with people using that mode, in this case, driving cars. But the relationship goes both ways. The more we choose to drive, the more the urban system gets reconfigured to accommodate drivers, in an endless feedback loop of journeys and changing landscapes.

So we can’t fully understand the effect that the city has on happiness without considering how it feels to move through it and how that feeling guides our behavior. But the psychology of mobility is a house of mirrors where what we want, what we do, and what makes us feel good are rarely the same choice.

I have met and interviewed dozens of commuters in cities around the world, people whose journeys are spectacularly varied in texture and difficulty. None of them embodies the complex psychology of the urban traveler as thoroughly as Robert Judge, a forty-eight-year-old husband and father who once wrote to a Canadian radio program explaining how much he enjoyed going grocery shopping on his bicycle. Judge’s confession would have been unremarkable if he did not happen to live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the average temperature in January hovers around 1 degree Fahrenheit. The city stays frozen and snowy for almost half the year. It is the last place you would imagine anyone wanting to depend on a bicycle.

I called Judge up to inquire about his sanity. He told me that he and his wife had decided to go car-free a couple of years back. He liked a challenge. He began by bolting a utility tub to a bike trailer so he could haul as much as a hundred pounds of groceries. He bought studded tires. He acquired expedition ski clothes, including a puff jacket with an arctic collar to protect his lips and windpipe from the chill. Then Judge hit the road.

“Biking in winter is kind of like walking on hot coals: people say you can’t do it. They say it’s impossible! But then you just go and do it,” he told me. “First you feel the cold in your mouth and nose. It’s twenty-five below and the wind is blowing. Your eyes fill up with tears for the first few blocks, but then they clear up, and you just keep going.”

Judge was especially proud of his trips to Superstore, a big-box grocery outlet about three and a half miles from his house in an inner suburb. He could make it there in about twenty minutes. With his studded tires, he could outmaneuver most cars on the icy road, but people would give him funny looks when they saw him pulling up at the edge of the big-box parking lot. Some people asked if he was homeless. Others offered him a ride. But Judge didn’t want their help. He even grew to appreciate the snowdrifts that blew across his route. He would steer his bicycle through fresh drifts just so people would see the tracks and know that the lone cyclist had been there and prevailed.

Judge’s pleasure in an experience that seems slower, more difficult, and considerably more uncomfortable than the alternative might seem bizarre. He explained it by way of a story: Sometimes, he said, he would pick up his three-year-old son from day care and put him on the backseat of his tandem bike and they would pedal home along the South Saskatchewan River. The snow would muffle the noise of the city. Dusk would paint the sky in colors so exquisite that Judge could not begin to find names for them. The snow would reflect those hues. It would glow like the sky, and Judge would breathe in the cold air and hear his son breathing behind him, and he would feel as though together they had become part of winter itself.

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Few people share Judge’s tolerance for discomfort, hard work, and inconvenience, but most of us are more like him than we might imagine. Our urban journeys can meet all kinds of psychological needs. “For many, the commute really is a kind of heroic quest,” Patricia Mokhtarian, a University of California, Davis, transportation engineer, said after I told her Judge’s story. She said many car commuters feel the same way. “Remember the
Odyssey
, where the heroes launch their ships and head off to face adventures and traumas before making their return? Well, the commute can be this heroic going out into the world, conquering the traffic, surviving, and coming home to the warm reception of family.”

People may complain about commuting, but after surveying hundreds of commuters in California, Mokhtarian discovered that the average person actually prefers to be forced to travel for part of every day. “We hear many people say, ‘Darn, my commute is not long enough!’” Of course, few people pine for a super-commute. The trip time most people
wish
they had is about sixteen minutes, one way.
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Still, Mokhtarian and other travel researchers insist that long or short, every commute is a ritual that can alter our very sense of who we are and what is our place in the world.

Driving Sideways

If you were to judge the hedonic utility of various modes of travel by how many people choose them each day, there would be absolutely no substitute for driving an automobile—at least not in North America. Nearly nine in ten American commuters drive to work every day. Three-quarters of Canadians and two-thirds of Brits do the same.

Drivers experience plenty of emotional dividends. When the road is clear, driving your own car embodies the psychological state known as mastery: drivers report feeling much more in charge of their lives than transit users or even their own passengers. Many commuters admitted to Mokhtarian that much of the pleasure of driving came simply from being seen in their fine cars. An upmarket vehicle is loaded with symbolic value that offers a powerful, if temporary, boost in status. The biochemical response is especially strong in young men. Researchers in Montreal found that when male college students spent a mere hour driving an expensive sports car—a $150,000 Porsche—they experienced a heady blast of testosterone, while driving an older, high-mileage Toyota Camry left them slightly drained. “The endocrinological response was substantial, irrespective of whether they had an audience or not,” explained study coauthor Gad Saad, associate professor of marketing at Concordia University. In other words, the experience of driving a hot car triggered a hormonal response even when there were no hot babes to impress. No wonder four in ten Americans actually claim to
love
their cars.

Despite these romantic feelings, half of commuters living in big cities and suburbs claim to dislike the heroic journey they must make every day—an unhappy group made up mostly of drivers. Part of the problem is that cars fail to deliver the experience of freedom and speed that we all know they are capable of bestowing in a world of open roads. The urban system neutralizes their power. Luxury and sports cars might still offer their drivers a status bump, but the car’s muscles cease to matter when it is surrounded by other cars.

Driving in traffic is harrowing for both brain and body. The blood of people who drive in cities is a high-test stew of stress hormones. The worse the traffic, the more your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, the fight-or-flight juices that, in the short term, get your heart pumping faster, dilate your air passages, and help sharpen your alertness, but in the long term can make you ill. It can take as much as an hour to recover the ability to concentrate after a long urban commute. Researchers for Hewlett-Packard convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travelers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters.
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