Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (46 page)

It was one reason why Semenza and Weasel were so enthralled with the Sellwood piazza. Seeing a concrete opportunity to battle urban loneliness, they convinced their neighbors in nearby Sunnyside to build their own. Being a compulsive empiricist, Semenza wanted solid data on its effects.

First they called City Repair, the nonprofit that Lakeman and his friends had created after building Share-It-Square. With their help, the Sunnyside neighbors got organized. In 2001, after nine months of potlucks, workshops, and block parties, dozens of neighbors came together to paint a giant sunflower mural across the intersection of Southeast Thirty-third Avenue and Yamhill Street. Later they built a sculpted wall from cob—a mix of earth and straw. They also built an iron-framed gazebo on one corner. When it came time to raise that gazebo’s heavy roof frame, one of Semenza’s neighbors offered to lift it with his crane.

“No way!” said Semenza. “We’re lifting it by hand. All of us, together.” After his encounters with isolation and death in Chicago, he would use any excuse to get people together. It took dozens of them, but the neighbors did lift that roof. Then they threw a party to celebrate their success.

All the while, Semenza was studying the effect the intersection repair was having on mental health. He had enlisted a team of his public health students to survey hundreds of neighbors before and after the Sunnyside project, as well as two other repair projects, and they compared them with people in other neighborhoods.

The data was stunning. It suggested that the interventions transformed not just the physical but the psychological landscape. After intersection repairs, fewer people reported experiencing depression than before. They slept better. They claimed that life seemed easier and more fun. They found that their neighbors got friendlier. They rated their own health as better than before—which is no small matter, since how we feel about our health can matter more to psychological well-being than how our doctors feel about our health. In short, people who lived near intersection repairs got happier and healthier even as well-being flatlined in untouched neighborhoods nearby. The repairs also coincided with a drop in burglaries, assaults, and vehicle thefts within a one-block radius—an improvement that simply did not occur in nearby neighborhoods.

New Space, New Life

City Repair demonstrates the truth of the message that Lakeman brought back from the Lacandon village: that the meeting place, the agora, and the village square are not trivial. They are not civic decoration or merely recreational. The life of a community is incomplete without them, just as the life of the individual is weaker and sicker without face-to-face encounters with other people.
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But the color and shape of the neo-piazzas are only half the story. In both Sellwood and Sunnyside, the act of working together to battle city bureaucrats, and then to design and build piazzas, gave neighbors a new sense of their collective power. They learned to rely on one another. It was a little like the effect of a play-off game on a high school basketball team. To use the language of social capital, they bonded. At the same time, each core group was also forced to reach out to the rest of the neighborhood—the skeptical, the suspicious, the homeless, and the fellow who was just plain pissed off that nobody was going to plant honeysuckle by the sidewalk. They bridged. They did the things that so many city dwellers have forgotten. They changed the city, and then it changed them.

You can see it in Lakeman himself, who, though still not quite satisfied—he wants bends in his streets and a raised piazza and a car-free zone with garages at its edge—is no longer the brooding, alienated loner. The morning after the Sellwood painting party Lakeman and I tromped over from his house to survey the updated piazza. His knees were scuffed and stained, as though he had spent the dawn hours crawling through his garden, which in fact he had. He sipped from a tall glass of water, watching a couple of children pause to hop between the painted lily pads in the intersection. A woman appeared halfway down Ninth. Recognizing Lakeman, she marched up and fixed her eyes on him.

“Lakeman,” she said. “You’re babysitting my kid next week.”

He nodded and smiled.

If you didn’t know his story, you would have thought it was the reluctant smile of a man who had been caught, trapped. Ten years before, no neighbor would have dared ask such a thing. They would have been strangers. But Sellwood had changed. No one was anonymous anymore, and village life came with obligations. Lakeman was home.

Epilogue: The Beginning

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

—David Harvey, 2008

No age in the history of cities has been so wealthy. Never before have our cities used so much land, energy, and resources. Never before has the act of inhabiting a city demanded converting so much primordial muck into atmosphere-warming gas. Never before have so many people enjoyed the luxury of private domesticity and mobility. Despite all we have invested in this dispersed city, it has failed to maximize health and happiness. It is inherently dangerous. It makes us fatter, sicker, and more likely to die young. It makes life more expensive than it has to be. It steals our time. It makes it harder to connect with family, friends, and neighbors. It makes us vulnerable to the economic shocks and rising energy prices inevitable in our future. As a system, it has begun to endanger both the health of the planet and the well-being of our descendants.

Our challenge lives in the way we build, but also in the way we think. It is a design problem, but it is also a psychological problem. It lives in the tensions that exist within each and every one of us—that endless tug-of-war between fear and trust, between status aspirations and the cooperative impulse, between the urge to retreat and the need to engage with other people. As much as they embody a philosophy of living, cities also reflect our cognitive frailties, and the systematic errors every one of us tends to make when deciding what will make us happy in the long run.

We have made mistakes.

We have been seduced by the wrong technologies. We gave up true freedom for the illusory promise of speed. We valued status over relationships. We tried to stamp out complexity instead of harnessing it. We let powerful people organize buildings, work, home, and transportation systems around too simplistic a view of geography and of life itself.

Most of all, we let the urban project be guided by what the sociologist Richard Sennett once called a “great, unreckoned fear of exposure,” wherein we translated the uncertainty of city life into retreat instead of curiosity and engagement. We let the fear of being uncomfortable, inconvenienced, or hurt guide us into cities that not only isolate us but rob us of all the ease and pleasure and richness we might enjoy if the city were just a little bit more layered, a little bit more complex, a little bit messier.

It is not too late to rebuild the balance of life in our neighborhoods and cities and, in so doing, to build a more resilient future. The task demands that we listen to the parts of ourselves that are more inclined toward curiosity, trust, and cooperation. It demands that we acknowledge truths that we have long told each other, but which we have forgotten in making our cities: we may have been hardwired for dissatisfaction and for status anxiety, but we are also built to feel good when we trust and cooperate with one another. We all need privacy, but we are uniquely suited to get along in settings where, when the stage is right, we manage to turn complete strangers into people worthy of respect and care. We find our best selves not alone on the savanna or on the highway, but in the group, on a team, in the village. The truth is woven into human history, the architecture of our brains, and the spirals of our DNA. We all carry within us the person that Henri Lefebvre called the
citadin
and Mark Lakeman simply called the
villager
.

The city that responds to those truths, that respects the cooperator, the walker, the villager in each of us also happens to be a healthier place to live. It nurtures our relationships. It insulates us against economic hardships. It offers a thrilling new freedom to choose how to move and how to live. It manifests that ineffable but undeniably good feeling we all get when we know we are most truly alive.

The struggle for the happy city is going to be long and difficult. The broken city lives in the rituals and practices of planners, engineers, and developers. It lives in law and code, and in concrete and asphalt. It lives in our own habits, too. Those of us who care about the living city are going to have to fight for it in the streets, in the halls of government, in the legal and social codes that guide us, and in the ways we move and live and think.

The champions of the happy city have begun to show us the way.

There have been victories at city hall. Visionary mayors, planners, and even traffic engineers have demonstrated that the urban experience can be transformed by changing the city’s hardware.

There have been victories in law. In adopting new sets of rules about how to build places, hundreds of cities have abandoned the high modernist code of separation and segregation and have set themselves on a course of slow but certain change.

There have been victories in thousands of neighborhoods where people have challenged the written and unwritten rules of how we move, live, and share space. Whether it’s hauling furniture onto the street, staging neighborhood car-free days, tearing down the fences between their yards, turning metered parking stalls into miniature parks, or planting guerrilla gardens under cover of night, urban activists are taking design—and their future—into their own hands. They are proving that stubbornness and imagination can hack the old urban operating system. Victory is not guaranteed, not in every fight, but every time one of us stands up to dispersal, we chip away at its power and get a chance to find new life within ourselves.

Changing Places

It’s also true that not all of us have the wherewithal to wrestle our cities into shape. It takes more than guts and imagination. It takes time. If you happen to live in dispersed sprawl, you may well be too busy working, commuting, ferrying kids to appointments in distant destinations, and coping with the demands of the horizontal city to start a revolution. It may be all you can do to pursue your own happiness as best you can in systems that were terribly designed for the challenge. Sadly, relief is unlikely to come to your door in the form of a monorail or a teleport or even a New Urbanist retrofit. There is too much sprawl to repair, and not enough money to do it. No matter how much you complain or rant or pray, the roads that entrap you will not suddenly become free of traffic, at least not without an economic meltdown even more severe than the last one.

This does not mean it is not possible to slip the shackles of dispersal. You can reengineer your relationship with the city simply by changing your place in it. That is what Kim Holbrook did. Remember Kim: the daughter of super-commuters, she spent her teen years playing mom to her younger brother in Tracy, California, while her parents drove back and forth to work in the Bay Area. By her early twenties Kim was out on the highway, driving alone to a job sixty miles away, just like her father and her grandmother. It took an emotional earthquake, a violently ill boy, and a frantic, tearful drive back to her son’s day-care center to convince her to break the long-distance habit. The last time I saw her, Kim and her husband, Kevin, had rented a little house in a humble neighborhood right in Sacramento, close to schools, shopping, and Kim’s new job as a lease administrator. They were saving $800 a month in gas bills, but more important, they could eat dinner every night with their young son, who was thriving. It’s a start.
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This kind of personal retrofit demands that you confront your own habits and relationship with the city. It means redefining your notion about what the good life is supposed to look like. It means pursuing a different kind of happiness. It is, in itself, a course of urban activism that can have a dramatic effect on you and, because everything is connected, your city. To demonstrate, let me leave you with one last story—that of a life transformed.

A decade ago Conrad Schmidt lived unremarkably. The South African expatriate drove his Jeep YJ to work every weekday morning in the suburbs of his adopted city of Vancouver. That took an hour. He spent most of his day in front of a computer, writing software to control the robots that made cars, toys, and cigarettes in American factories. At the end of his workday Schmidt drove home again. Another hour. Sometimes, when traffic got really bad, he would grip the steering wheel as tightly as Randy Strausser had, and fight the overwhelming urge to scream. That sense of panic, of being trapped, stayed with him even after he parked his car. But drive he did, year after year, for the sake of that job. A layer of fat spread across his stomach and buttocks. Sometimes he would drive to a gym in order to work off the pounds and the frustration. Most days he just had no time for that.

Schmidt survived until, at the age of thirty-four, he realized that his decision to fit his days to the demands of sprawl shaped most everything about him. It dictated how he got around, how much stuff he bought, the shape of his body, even the amount of carbon dioxide he pushed into the atmosphere. Carbon—that was the one that stung him. He had studied the science, and he couldn’t stand the thought that he was helping fuel the climate crisis. One day he’d have kids. He felt like he was stealing from them.

Schmidt reengineered his life in stages. First he followed his fancy to a neighborhood with a reputation for street culture, a place where he could walk to buy his milk and newspaper, and enjoy the journey, to boot. He may not have considered the dynamics of population density, average lot size, or zoning regulations when he moved. He did not realize that he was enjoying the benefits of a century-old calculus, or that a long-gone streetcar line had shaped his new neighborhood. He knew only that the place felt good. It felt easy. There were people out on the main street all the time. He got to know some of them.