Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (5 page)

The first tract suburbs were grand acts of entrepreneurism by bold, self-interested developers. And their product—detached single-family homes on their own yards—promised newcomers a world of privatized comforts. The innovation precipitated a powerful new economic engine: as people moved from inner cities to detached homes in increasingly distant sprawl, they bought furniture and appliances to fill those homes, and cars to move between increasingly disconnected destinations.

The market economist’s case for suburban sprawl goes like this: if you can judge what makes people happy by observing how they spend their money, then the fact that so many people have purchased detached homes in urban sprawl is proof that it leads to happiness. As writers such as Robert Bruegmann and Joel Kotkin have argued, sprawl fulfills American’s
preferences
for privacy, mobility, and detachment from the problems of high-density environments. By this way of thinking, sprawl reflects every individual’s natural-born right to maximize utility.

But this interpretation ignores a few inconvenient truths. First, as I will explore in this book, our preferences—the things we buy, the places we choose to live—do not always maximize our happiness in the long run. Second, sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was
designed
.

*   *   *

How are we to judge the happy prescriptions of the city builders and citizens who came before us and now work among us? Does the detached suburban home really make its owners more independent and free? Did the democratic gathering spaces of ancient Athens really help lead the Greeks any closer to
eudaimonia
? Do perfectly straight highways produce more feelings of freedom than narrow, winding roads? Can beautiful architecture lead us to a shared sense of optimism? Which of the high-minded schemes of the great city builders have actually produced more of the pleasurable feelings Jeremy Bentham called “hedons”? Does Enrique Peñalosa—or anyone else who promises happier design—have a leg to stand on?

These questions take us all the way back to Socrates: What is happiness, really? Now is a great time to take another stab at defining it, because during the decades that the suburban project accelerated, a network of psychologists, brain scientists, and economists devoted themselves to the study of the subject that intrigued the Greeks, stumped the Enlightenment scholars, and provided fodder for those who design cities to this day.

A Science of Happiness

In the early 1990s the University of Wisconsin psychologist Richard Davidson attempted to isolate the sources of positive and negative feelings in the human brain. Doctors have long noticed that people with damage to the front left side of their brain (the left prefrontal cortex) sometimes, and quite suddenly, lose their sense of enjoyment in life. In this, Davidson saw a clue to the neuroscience of happiness. He attached electroencephalogram (EEG) monitor caps—which measure electrical activity—to the scalps of volunteers and then showed them short film clips designed to elicit either happiness and amusement or disgust. He found that the happy clips—say, of smiling babies—produced more activity in the left prefrontal region of his volunteers’ brains, while images of deformed infants activated the right prefrontal region. Those brains were offering up a map of feelings.

Later, Davidson surveyed his volunteers on their feelings and then slid them, one by one, into a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. (fMRI machines map activity in the brain by tracking levels of blood oxygenation, which are revealed in varying levels of magnetism.) He found that people who claimed to be happy tended to have more blood flowing to that left prefrontal region than to the right side. In another study, researchers got people to rate and record their mood every twenty minutes during the workday and give blood samples every two hours. The worse people rated their own moods, the higher the concentrations of cortisol (the hormone most associated with stress and anxiety) were in their blood.

These and scores of similar experiments in the past couple of decades have produced an insight that might seem intuitive, but which we had no way of proving until recently: if you want to gauge how happy people are, just ask them.
*
Most people who tell researchers they are happy are not only telling the truth but are right.

This may not seem surprising. After all, most of us are pretty sure if we are happy or not. But these revelations refuted the classic tenet of economics: the assumption that only our purchasing decisions can truly reveal what makes us happy. Now economists and psychologists can use surveys to see how huge numbers of people are feeling, taking us one step closer to fulfilling Bentham’s dream of figuring out what it is that makes people feel good or bad.

That project found its modern-day champion in the Princeton psychology professor Daniel Kahneman, the only noneconomist who has ever won a Nobel Prize in Economics.

Rather than modeling human decisions and satisfaction through simplified mathematical equations—as economists had done for decades—Kahneman and his colleagues conducted experiments to see what made life pleasant or unpleasant for people in the real world. They called their new science “hedonic psychology.” Much like Bentham, they argued that the best way to judge happiness was to conduct a thorough account of life’s good and bad moments. One of Kahneman’s early studies established a link between happiness and urban life. He asked more than nine hundred working women in Texas to divide the previous day up into episodes, like scenes in a movie, and then to describe everything they did and how they felt at the time. Of all the ways they passed their days, having sex made the women happiest of all, with socializing coming a close second. What made them least happy? Commuting to work.

A purely hedonic approach to urban happiness would determine how the city affects our mood, then would boost the good stuff and stamp out the bad. Environmental psychology has found plenty of raw material for such a task. Researchers have proved, for example, that we are bothered by snakes, spiders, sharp edges, loud, unpredictable noises, darkness, and dead-end alleys, but we enjoy novelty, soft edges, nice scents, gentle surprises, and pleasant memories.

There is a place that has sought to deliver these things, in part by blotting out any sign of the discomforts and ugliness of the modern city. If you have kids, chances are they have begged you to take them there. Officially branded “The Happiest Place on Earth” when it opened its gates in 1955, Disneyland was conceived as a pay-per-visit alternative to the freeways and sprawl that were just beginning to dominate Southern California.

Inside Disneyland, even today, every architectural detail, every view, every transportation experience, every sensation—right down to the texture of the pavement and the scent of the air—was designed with the express purpose of tipping the hedonic scale. Cinderella’s Castle, a reminder of childhood fantasies, marks the center of the perfect universe. A lush garden or forest is always just around the corner. The stomach-churning spins and drops of Space Mountain last just long enough to give riders a shared experience of danger, but not long enough for induced stress hormones to start compromising our immune systems. It’s no accident that every Disneyland visit begins and ends with a walk along Main Street U.S.A., a parade of cartoon-cute shops and unhurried bustle that simulates the perfect small town that films, television, and the Disney entertainment machine itself have imprinted on all our memories. By turning the spigot on those memories, Disneyland can give you the sense that you have come home, no matter where in the world you grew up. It is a lovely feeling for all but the most diligent skeptic.

If ephemeral pleasures are all there is to happiness, then Disneyland really would be the happiest city on earth. Architects and town planners have copied its forms in shopping centers, downtowns, and neighborhoods around the world. Neuroscientists marvel at the virtuosity of its designs (and I’ll explain some of its successes later in this book). But like Disney’s films, the happiness of Disneyland requires a suspension of disbelief. You must pretend along with cheery shopkeepers and mascots whose job title—“cast member”—belies a contractual obligation to maintain their smiles. You must not ponder the hard work and grit of daily life that are hidden so skillfully behind Main Street U.S.A.’s facades and the berm that separates the park from the sprawl of Southern California. When the street artist Banksy propped an inflatable Guantánamo Bay detainee inside the park, Disneyland’s trains actually ground to a halt so that the site could be cleansed of the offending reference to real life. Any interruption of the cheery choreography is a threat to this carefully crafted hedonic machine.

We are left with the question of authenticity: If you’re happy, does reality matter? The philosopher Robert Nozick once challenged people to imagine an “experience machine” that would sink occupants into a lifelong dream, something like a coma state, in which neuropsychologists could stimulate their brains, simulating the most wonderful pleasures imaginable. Nozick argued that plugging into the machine would be a kind of suicide. He predicted that most people would opt for a life that was less pleasant, but one that involved real challenges, real striving, real pleasure and pain.

Even if it were possible to live out one’s life in Disneyland, a eudaimonic approach would surely require seeing past Disney’s consumable facades, acknowledging the struggles of the cast members who play its character roles, and engaging with the urban systems that support the experience machine. Disneyland and its visitors contribute to the traffic and urban blight that awaits beyond its berms. You cannot separate one pleasurable moment from the system that created it, or your own role in creating that system. The question then is, how can real designs in real places infuse life with the sensual and sensory pleasures we often pay to experience? Should they even try?

Beyond the Hedonic City

Our rejection of the experience machine carries us back to the deeper notion of happiness for which the Greeks argued. So does the evidence from the emerging field of happiness economics, where Kahneman’s peers have tried to understand what influences the happiness of entire societies, drawing on data produced by census reports and polls such as the massive World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll. These surveys don’t simply measure
affect
, or people’s relative cheeriness in the moment. They ask how people feel about their entire life.
*
The hope is to distill
eudaimonia
down to a number that can be compared with just about any variable, from income to unemployment to the length of our commutes and the number of friends we have, and then to understand all the ingredients that combine to create life satisfaction.
^†

These surveys are fueling a revolution in economics, partly because they contest the power of massive advances in spending power to make societies happier. After countries reach the standard of living that many first world countries hit around 1960, happiness and gross national product stop following the same trajectory.
^‡
Income matters, of course, but it is only part of the story.

It’s true that if you live in a poor country, getting richer goes hand in hand with getting happier. This makes sense. You are unlikely to say you are happy when you cannot offer food, shelter, and security to your children. But in the world’s rich countries, working harder to earn more money gets less effective once you’ve passed the average income mark. After that, each extra dollar delivers proportionately less satisfaction.

If money isn’t everything, what is the full recipe for happiness? Adam Smith’s followers in classical economics have never produced a plausible answer, but the surveys offer a few. People who are well educated rate their happiness higher than those who aren’t. Employed people are happier than unemployed people—even in European states where generous welfare policies insulate citizens from the most destructive effects of unemployment.

Life satisfaction is strongly influenced by location.
*
People in small towns are generally happier than people who live in big cities. People who live next to the ocean report being happier than those who don’t. Living under the flight path of commuter jets is terrible for happiness. Persistent wind is bad, too. But we do not always respond logically to environmental stimulus. Living near garbage dumps seems to make people much less happy than living near toxic waste sites, presumably because they can smell the dump but not the toxic threat. The devil you know is harder on happiness than the devil you don’t, at least in the short term.

Self-reported happiness correlates with a lot of things that money cannot buy. Leisure time and shorter commutes are good. So is good health (although
feeling
healthy is more important than actually
being
healthy, and that feeling may have more to do with the quality of your friendships than with your medical plan). Believing in some kind of God helps. But so does just showing up at a church or temple—whether you believe or not—and so does participation in volunteer groups that have nothing to do with religion. The environment we live in really does matter. Public health officers working with the London borough of Greenwich compared conditions in council housing estates (subsidized housing) with all kinds of environmental factors, and they found, not surprisingly, that mold in apartments dragged people’s happiness down much more than, say, street conditions or dog poop on the sidewalks.

But Carol Ryff, a developmental psychologist who collaborated with Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, argues that such lists still don’t get us close enough to a definition of the good life that Aristotle would endorse. Indeed, she bristles at the mere mention of the word
happiness
.