Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (3 page)

It occurred on the afternoon that I chased Enrique Peñalosa through the streets of Bogotá. Just as he had insisted on that first ride, our cycle across what was once one of the most infamous of cities was a breeze. The streets were virtually empty of cars. Nearly a million of them had stayed home that morning. Yes, it was
el día sin carro
, the car-free experiment that had grown into a yearly ritual.

At first the streets felt slightly eerie, like landscapes from a postapocalyptic
Twilight Zone
episode. All the rumble and roar of the city quieted. Gradually we expanded into the space left by the cars. I let go of my fear. It was as though an immense tension had been lifted from Bogotá, as though the city could finally shake out its exhaustion and breathe. The sky was a piercing blue. The air was clear.

Peñalosa, who was running for reelection, needed to be seen out on his bicycle that day. He stumped compulsively, hollering that same
“Cómo le va”
at anyone who appeared to recognize him. But this did not explain his haste or his quickening pace as we traversed the north end of the city toward the Andean foothills. He stopped answering his phone. He stopped answering my questions. He ignored the whimpers of the photographer who crashed his bicycle on the curb ahead of him. He gripped his handlebars with both hands, stood up, and muscled into his pedals. It was all I could do to keep up with him, block after block, until we arrived at a compound ringed by a high iron fence. Peñalosa dismounted, breathing hard.

Boys in crisp white shirts and matching uniforms poured through a gate. One of them, a bright-eyed ten-year-old, pushed a miniature version of Peñalosa’s own bicycle through the crowd. Peñalosa reached out, and suddenly I understood his haste. The guy had been rushing to pick up his son from school, as other parents were doing that very moment all up and down the time zone. Millions of minivans, motorbikes, hatchbacks, and buses were congregating outside schools from Toronto to Tampa at this very moment—the same ritual, the same drumming of steering wheels, the same stop and go, the same corralling and ferrying of children. Only here, in the heart of one of the meanest, poorest cities in the hemisphere, father and son would roll away from the school gate for a carefree ride across the metropolis. This was an unthinkable act in most modern cities. It was also a demonstration of Peñalosa’s urban revolution, a terrific photo op for the happy city.

The Mayor of Happy

Enrique Peñalosa in Bogotá, 2007
(Andrés Felipe Jara Moreno, Fundación por el País Que Queremos)

“Look,” he yelled to me, waving his cell phone toward the bicycles that flooded around us. “Can you imagine if we designed the entire city for children?”

We followed a wide avenue that had indeed filled with children, as well as suited businessmen, young ladies in short skirts, apron-clad ice-cream men pushing refrigerated tricycles, and vendors selling sweet arepas from pushcart ovens. They did seem happy. And Peñalosa’s son was safe—not because of those bodyguards, but because he could travel freely, even veer that bike wildly off course without fear of being struck by a speeding automobile. As the sun fell and the Andes caught fire, we arced our way along the wide-open avenues, then west along a highway built just for bicycles. The kid raced ahead. Peñalosa let go of his impulse to campaign. He followed his son, laughing, and the bodyguards huffed and pedaled hard to catch up, and Juan, the photographer, wobbled behind on his bent rims.

At that point I wasn’t sure about Peñalosa’s ideology. Who was to say that one way of moving was better than another? How could anyone know enough about the needs of the human soul to prescribe the ideal city for happiness?

But for a moment I forgot my questions. I let my handlebars go, raised my arms in the air in the cooling breeze, and remembered my own childhood of country roads, afterschool wanderings, lazy rides, and pure freedom. I felt fine. The city was mine.

2. The City Has Always Been a Happiness Project

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one … We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.

—Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its Discontents

Whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.

—Aristotle,
Rhetoric

If you wandered into the city-state of Athens a little over twenty-four hundred years ago, you would invariably find your way to the agora, a broad plaza filled with market stalls and lined by the Athenian governing council’s meeting chambers, law courts, marbled temples, altars to gods, and statues of heroes. It was a glorious place, simultaneously stately and messy with commerce. If you pushed your way through the crowds of shoppers and vendors, you might have encountered a bearded gentleman holding philosophical court on the veranda of one of the great halls at the agora’s edge. This is where Socrates regularly pummeled his fellow citizens with questions that challenged them to see the world anew. “Do not all men desire happiness? Or is this just a ridiculous question?” Socrates famously asked one interlocutor. Receiving the answer most of us would give, he continued, “Well then, since all of us desire happiness, how can we be happy? That is the next question.”

If we are going to figure out if cities can be reconfigured to boost happiness, we actually need to start one question earlier: What, exactly, do we mean by happiness? This was a question of public preoccupation in Athens, and it has occupied the minds of philosophers, gurus, shysters, and, yes, city builders ever since. Even though most of us believe that happiness exists and that it is worth pursuing, its dimensions and character seem always just out of reach. Is happiness simply contentment or the opposite of misery? Even straightforward definitions feel subjective: A monk might measure it differently than a banker or a nurse or an architect would. Some people find no greater bliss than in flirting on the Champs-Élysées. Others find it grilling hot dogs in the privacy of a secluded backyard.

One thing is certain: we all translate our own ideas of happiness into form. It happens when you landscape your garden or choose where to live. It happens when you buy a car. It happens when a CEO contemplates the form of a new skyscraper headquarters or when a master architect lays out a grand scheme for social housing. It happens when planners, politicians, and community boards wrestle over roads, zoning laws, and monuments. It is impossible to separate the life and design of a city from the attempt to understand happiness, to experience it, and to build it for society. The search shapes cities, and cities shape the search in return.

This was especially true in Athens. From the middle of the fifth century
A.D.
, the Greeks gave the idea of human happiness a privileged place among goals. Although only a small fraction of the Athenian population actually enjoyed the rights of citizenship, those who did experienced enough wealth, leisure time, and freedom to spend a lot of time arguing about the good life. It was wrapped around a concept they called
eudaimonia
, which can be translated literally as “to be inhabited or accompanied by a good
daimon
, or guiding spirit,” though it’s best understood as a state of human flourishing. Each philosopher argued for a slightly different version of it, but after a few decades of debate Aristotle summed up the emerging view thus: everyone pretty much agreed that good fortune, health, friends, power, and material wealth all contributed to that blessed state of
eudaimonia.
But these private assets were not quite enough, not even in a city-state where citizens could experience all of life’s hedonistic possibilities. Existing for pleasure alone was a vulgar state befitting animals, he argued. A man could achieve pure happiness only by reaching the height of his potential, and that meant not just thinking virtuously but behaving virtuously too.

Meanwhile, civic and personal well-being were intimately linked.
*
The polis, the city-state, was a shared project that Athenians cared for with almost religious fervor. The city was more than a machine for delivering everyday needs; it was a concept that bound together Athenian culture, politics, mores, and history. Its citizens were like hands on the deck of a ship, Aristotle noted, with a common duty to propel it forward. In fact, he argued that the polis was the only vehicle through which a man could really achieve
eudaimonia.
Anyone who did not concern himself with public life was himself less than whole.

The relationship between these ideas and the design of the city in which they grew was striking. The Athenians sought the patronage of their gods—they maintained a neighborhood of stone palaces for Athena and other members of the Greek pantheon on the flat hilltop of the Acropolis—but the Athenian sense of personal agency and civic spirit was reflected in architectures closer to the earth. Just beneath the Acropolis, any citizen—that is, a free male born in the city—could have his say on civic policy at the speakers’ platform that was cut into the side of the Pnyx Hill. There was enough room for a gathering of twenty thousand citizens in this natural amphitheater, a staggering embodiment of the new principle of equal speech. The
eudaimonia
debate raged at the academies of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, but it always returned to the agora, whose openness at the heart of the city-state was not a demonstration of executive power, as it is in so many modern plazas, but an invitation to participate in the life of the polis.

The Agora

The Greek philosophy of the good life was built right into the heart of Athens. Surrounded by temples, monuments, law courts, and government meeting chambers, the agora was a truly public place where commercial goods and ideas were traded freely.
(Robert Laddish, All Rights Reserved,
www.laddish.net
)

It is hard to say whether these open architectures nudged Athenians toward a more civic philosophy or whether it was philosophy itself that produced architecture. But together they seemed to demand that virtuous citizens infuse public gathering places with potent, even dangerous vitality. Of course, even in classical Athens, there were limits. Socrates challenged his agora audiences’ thinking about the role of the gods so relentlessly that he was sentenced to death for corrupting Athenian youth. The tension between free speech, shared space, and civic stability has continued to inform urban design ever since.

Shape-Shifting

As philosophies about happiness shift, so does urban form. The Romans, like the Athenians, were so deeply attached to their city that Rome itself was a spiritual project. Civic pride drove heroic feats of engineering and architecture—from aqueducts, highways, sewers, and massive ports to muscular temples and basilicas—which helped Rome grow into the world’s first megacity, with a peak population of more than one million.
*
As Rome grew fat on the fruits of its vast empire, its citizens adopted a new god of happiness. In 44
B.C.
Julius Caesar approved construction of a temple to Felicitas, the god of pleasure, fortune, and fertility, not far from the Curia Hostilia, the meeting place of the Senate.

But when it came to city building, the Roman elite increasingly focused on creating monuments to their own glory. The Campus Martius, Rome’s public district, became a cluttered treasure box of spectacular imperial structures, almost all of them turned inward, with scant means to move between them. In contrast to the roads linking Rome to its empire, streets in the Campus Martius were pathetically underdesigned, narrow, and scarce. The two public avenues, the Via Sacra and the Via Nova, were barely sixteen feet wide. Emperor after emperor squeezed his own ever-larger forum into the district, but most failed to orient these structures into an overall city plan. The architectural ambition—and expense—became more and more outrageous. After conquering the Transylvanian region of Dacia around
A.D.
106, the Emperor Trajan had to auction off fifty thousand Dacian prisoners in order to pay for a 115-foot marble column wrapped in a spiral frieze portraying his battles.