Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (47 page)

I know how Schmidt felt, because he had landed in my own accidental neighborhood. Like every truly great community, Commercial Drive functions much like the places people in sprawl pay to visit on their vacations. It is not at all elegant, but because the architecture, the street, and life itself have assumed a human speed, it is a place where you feel good walking, grocery shopping, or just hanging out.

The next step: One day Schmidt left his car at home. He walked to the SkyTrain, the elevated rapid transit line that crossed Commercial Drive a few blocks from his apartment. As the train carried him above the city and then the suburbs, Schmidt gazed down at the stop-and-go traffic. After twenty minutes he stepped off the train and made another life-changing decision. He did not wait for a bus. He took a deep breath and started to run.

Schmidt ran over a bridge and along a river. He ran along the road where he had once gripped his steering wheel in frustration. He ran all the way to work. When he got there, Schmidt could not stop laughing. He felt like a hero. He felt free. He decided to run to work again the next day.

After a few of these trips Schmidt realized that he didn’t need his Jeep anymore, so he sold it. Now he had a few hundred extra dollars in his pocket every month. This emboldened him. One workday morning, still feeling his runner’s high, Schmidt walked into his boss’s office.

“I’d rather not come in on Fridays,” he said.

“Fine,” replied his boss. “But I will have to cut your salary by twenty percent.”

“Fine,” said Schmidt.

It really was fine. With no car, Schmidt didn’t need the money.

He got stronger every day, and he felt younger. He gave up his trips to the gym—why bother with a treadmill when your commute is your workout? He walked up and down the Drive, and he made friends there. They were a lot like him. Many of them had traded their life in dispersal for more time.

When the economy tanked, Schmidt didn’t feel the pain. He didn’t have a big house to lose. He had already sold his home and squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment along with a pretty woman he had met in the neighborhood. After their first baby arrived, they moved to a humble bungalow nearby. These places weren’t fancy, but his life on the Drive was rich with experiences.

It dawned on Schmidt that the less money he made, the better his life was becoming. He had time to pursue the dreams he had never managed to get around to in his old life. For one thing, he began staging costume parties where hundreds of his neighbors would come and dance. He started a new political party based in part on the economics of his own experience, and he called it, naturally, the Work Less Party.

Conrad Schmidt’s new life did not come for free. He earned it by trading away stuff as well as square footage. It was a deliberate journey. But here is the thing: the geometry of our neighborhood set the stage for that new life. The density and mix of buildings and jobs, the scale of streets and parks, the frequency of buses, the speed of roads, and the relationship of the Drive to the rest of the city, especially the nearby downtown, constituted a life-shaping
system
. That system did not just make his days easier, healthier, more connected. It did not just make Schmidt stronger and give him more control over his days. It shrunk his footprint on the city, and on the earth. At the same time, by consciously embracing a local life on the Drive, Schmidt gave right back to it. He gave the neighborhood his money, his time, and, it would not be an exaggeration to add, his love. In so doing, he made it stronger. He became a part of it.

Some people, like me, arrive in the happy city by accident. Some seek it in desperation. Some build it. Some fight for it. Some, like my neighbor Conrad Schmidt, experience a conversion moment. They realize that their place in the city, and the ways in which they move, have tremendous power to shape their own lives, the life of their city, and the future of their world. They realize that the happy city, the low carbon city, and the city that will save us are the same place, and that they have the wherewithal to create it.

This is the truth that shines over the journey toward the happy city. We do not need to wait for someone else to make it. We build it when we choose how and where to live. We build it when we move a little bit closer. We build it when we choose to move a little slower. We build it by choosing to put aside our fear of the city and other people. We build the happy city by pursuing it in our own lives and, in so doing, pushing the city to change with us. We build it by living it.

Notes

1. The Mayor of Happy

Christopher Alexander
: Alexander, Christopher,
The Timeless Way of Building
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 109.

five billion of us will be urban
: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, “State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7,” 2006.

most of the world’s pollution
: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank, “Cities and Climate Change: An Urgent Agenda,” Washington, DC, 2010, 15.

civil war and sporadic terrorism
: Martin, Gerard, and Miguel Arévalo Ceballos,
Bogotá: Anatomía de una transformación: políticas de seguridad ciudadana 1995–2003
(Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2004).

nobody was killed in traffic
:
Stockholm Challenge
,
www.stockholmchallenge.org/project/data/bogot&-car-free-day-within-world-car-free-day-forum
(accessed January 2, 2011).

While the elder proselytized
: Peñalosa has influenced more than a hundred cities. On his advice, cities such as Jakarta, Delhi, and Manila have reclaimed streets from their usurpation by private cars, creating vast linear parks or handing the space to rapid bus systems modeled on Bogotá’s own. “Peñalosa’s philosophy on public spaces had a great impact on our perception of model cities,” Moji Rhodes, an assistant to the mayor in the seething megacity of Lagos, Nigeria, told me after Peñalosa convinced Lagos to start building sidewalks along new roads.

Americans used to get by
: U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistical Abstract of the United States 2009,” Washington, DC, 2009; The World Bank, “Motor Vehicles (per 1,000 People),”
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/is.veh.nveh.p3/countries
(accessed April 28, 2013); U.S. Department of Transportation, Research and Innovative Technology Administration, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “Table 1-37: U.S. Passenger-Miles,”
www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2009/html/table_01_37.html
(accessed April 29, 2013); U.S. Census Bureau, “Median and Average Square Feet of Floor Area in New Single-Family Houses Completed by Location,”
www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf
(accessed April 29, 2013); National Association of Home Builders, “Facts, Figures and Trends for March 2006,” 2006; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2010,” 2010.

power in China
: Crabtree, Steve, and Tao Wu, “China’s Puzzling Flat Line,”
Gallup Business Journal
, 2011,
http://businessjournal.gallup.com/content/148853/china-puzzling-Flat-line.aspx
? (accessed August 31, 2012).

By 2005 clinical depression
: Faris, Stephanie, “Depression Statistics,”
Healthline
, March 28, 2012,
www.healthline.com/health/depression/statistics
(accessed April 29, 2013); Easterbrook, Gregg, “The Real Truth About Money,”
Time
, January 9, 2005,
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1015883,00.html
(accessed December 28, 2010).

Depression scales
: The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a questionnaire used by medical health professionals, is one of the most widely used tests in psychological assessment. The test consists of ten scales: Hypochondriasis, Depression, Hysteria, Psychopathic Deviate, Masculinity/Femininity, Paranoia, Psychasthenia, Schizophrenia, Hypomania, and Social Introversion. See Twenge, Jean M., “Birth Cohort Increases in Psychopathology Among Young Americans, 1938–2007: A Cross-Temporal Meta-analysis of the MMPI,”
Clinical Psychology Review
, 2010: 145–54.

One in ten Americans
: Olfson, Mark, and Steven C. Marcus, “National Patterns in Antidepressant Medication Treatment,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
, 2009: 848–56.

“correlates of subjective well-being”
: Wilkinson, Will, “In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is it Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy?” Policy Analysis, Cato Institute (April 11, 2007).

gap between material and emotional wealth
: Bartolini, Stefano, Ennio Bilancini, and Maurizio Pugno, “Did the Decline in Social Capital Decrease American Happiness? A Relational Explanation of the Happiness Paradox,” Department of Economics, University of Siena, Italy, August 2007,
www.econ-pol.unisi.it/quaderni/513.pdf
(accessed January 1, 2011).

almost all urban growth
: In 1910, only three in ten Americans lived in cities. Now eight in ten do, but five of them actually live in the suburbs. Hobbs, Frank, and Nicole Stoops, “Demographic Trends in the 20th Century,” Special Reports, Series CENSR-4, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2002.

turning of the tide of urban dispersal
: Frey, William H., “Demographic Reversal: Cities Thrive, Suburbs Sputter,” The Brookings Institution, June 29, 2012,
www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/06/29-cities-suburbs-frey
(accessed April 29, 2013).

2. The City Has Always Been a Happiness Project

Sigmund Freud
: Freud, Sigmund,
Civilization and Its Discontents
, vol. 1, in
The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953) 75–76.

Aristotle
: Aristotle, “Rhetoric.”
The Internet Classics Archive
, ed. W. Rhys Roberts, Web Atomics, 350
B.C.
,
http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/rhetoric.html
(accessed December 27, 2010).

“Do not all men desire happiness”
: Modified from
The Dialogues of Plato
, 4th ed., vol. 1, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 278e–282d.

for pleasure alone
: Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
trans. W. D. Ross (Adelaide: ebooks@adelaide, 2006),
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html
(accessed December 27, 2010).

behaving virtuously
: Ibid.

deck of a ship
: Kotkin, Joel,
The City: A Global History
(New York: Modern Library, 2005), 21; Kitto, H.D.F., “The Greeks,” in
The City Reader
, eds. Richard T. Le Gates and Frederick Stout (London: Routledge, 1996), 32–36.

The Roman sense
: Kotkin,
The City
, 29.

Medieval churches
: Sennett, Richard,
The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 15.

Happy the man
: Horace, Epode II (Beutus ille), in
Horace: The Complete Odes and Epode
, trans. David West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4.

felicific calculus
: Bentham, Jeremy,
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1789), Chapter 4.

Bentham made his own
: Bentham, Jeremy,
The Panopticon Writings
, ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso, 1995), 29–95.

Vauxhall Gardens
: Collinson, Peter,
“Forget not mee & my garden…”: Selected Letters, 1725–1768 of Peter Collinson, F.R.S.
, ed. W. Alan Armstrong (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002); Coke, David E. and Alan Borg,
Vauxhall Gardens: A History
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 211.

proposed a City Beautiful
: Boyer, P. S.,
Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

Stalin’s proclamation
:
Happy
:
Cities and Public Happiness in Post-War Europe
, ed. Cor Wagenaar (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005), 65.