Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (7 page)

I propose a basic recipe for urban happiness drawn from the insights of philosophers, psychologists, brain scientists, and happiness economists. What should a city accomplish after it meets our basic needs of food, shelter, and security?

• The city should strive to maximize joy and minimize hardship.

• It should lead us toward health rather than sickness.

• It should offer us real freedom to live, move, and build our lives as we wish.

• It should build resilience against economic or environmental shocks.

• It should be fair in the way it apportions space, services, mobility, joys, hardships, and costs.

• Most of all, it should enable us to build and strengthen the bonds between friends, families, and strangers that give life meaning, bonds that represent the city’s greatest achievement and opportunity.

• The city that acknowledges and celebrates our common fate, that opens doors to empathy and cooperation, will help us tackle the great challenges of this century.

None of these goals are radical. The challenge now is to see just how the shapes and systems of our cities contribute to meeting them. How are today’s cities performing? How would we build differently, and live differently, if we could chart the connection between the designs of our cities and the map of happiness? What would we change if we could?

It is audacious to believe that the city might build happiness just by changing its shape.

But it is foolish not to chase the thought, because around the world, and especially amid the sprawlscapes of modern North America, the evidence shows that cities do indeed design our lives.

3. The (Broken) Social Scene

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

—Aristotle,
Politics

If someone asked you to draw a picture of a city, what would it look like? Would you sketch a forest of tall buildings and monuments? Would there be taxis, bicycles, buses, or subways? Would there be streets crowded with shops, and lots of people walking on sidewalks, in parks, or on plazas? If you drew any combination of these things, most people who saw your picture would know that they were looking at a city. This is curious because the majority of Americans (and, increasingly, people in other countries) live in places that just don’t look like that picture.

Most of us do not live near anything like a traditional downtown or near any architecture that might appear in the design magazines that supposedly follow the latest trends. We do not live in the sooty slums of the industrial revolution, nor do we live in the spacious Manhattan apartments inhabited by TV characters who can’t possibly afford them. The pursuit of domestic comforts has led us to a landscape that is unique in history but ubiquitous in geography, and increasingly familiar around the world.

Anyone serious about exploring how modern cities influence happiness has got to start by looking clearly at the landscape to which we have devoted the vast majority of our resources over the last half century. I found my guide to that place in a parking lot in Stockton, California, in sprawl’s worst season.

Cesar Dias, a fast-talking, chubby-cheeked deal maker, was a Realtor with Stockton’s Approved Real Estate Group. He was the kind of guy who could see the upside of just about any bad news, including the mortgage crisis that was then sweeping the country. At the time, San Joaquin County, a collection of farm towns turned commuter havens a couple of hours east of San Francisco, was California’s foreclosure capital. In 2007, more people had lost their homes in Stockton, the county seat, than anywhere else in the nation except Detroit. Dias had rented a couple of minibuses, shrink-wrapped them in images of smiling homebuyers, and invited the world to come scavenge the county for deeply discounted pieces of the American dream.

One sunny Saturday I joined Dias as he and the other sales guys herded a few dozen potential buyers onto a pair of buses. There were soda and chips for everyone and, apparently, deals galore. Dias took pains to convince us all to see the mortgage crisis as a fantastic opportunity: a moment of vulnerability as the housing market showed a crack in its armor of optimism.

We left Stockton’s desiccated downtown, climbed the on-ramp to Interstate 5, cruised above an archipelago of industrial parks and power centers, and soon emerged into a pastiche of artificial lakes, golf courses, and wide, silent streets whose names evoked the landscapes they had buried: Brookside, Golden Oak, Pine Meadow. The van slowed wherever burnt lawns and unkempt gardens revealed the opportunity of bank foreclosures. The tour hit a dozen houses in three hours. The bus vibrated with a euphoric sense of good fortune and urgency.
“Vámonos!”
Dias would shout each time the convoy pulled up to a
FOR SALE
sign. “It’s a half-price sale!”

Cheered on, the group would sprint over the lawn and charge into the open maw of the next stucco-fronted home. We dashed from room to room, upstairs and down, taking phone shots of damaged drywall, checking carpets, and knocking on the moldings of faux-Victorian fireplaces.

At one point the crowd filed into a house (an “executive home,” according to Dias’s flyer) in the managed community of Spanos Park East. Three-car garage. Grand foyer. Formal dining room. Plantation shutters. It was a fine place—but Dias wasn’t impressed. I found him standing outside, scowling at the front lawn. The grass had been left unkempt and unwatered for months. It was the color of a bale of straw.

“The bank should have come by and sprayed this,” he said.

“You mean watered it?” I asked.

“No, sprayed it green.
Painted
it,” he said, exasperated but dead serious. There were so many bank-owned homes for sale in Stockton that any blemish threatened to suck the air right out of an already-deflated price. Banks and sellers needed to keep up appearances, to convince people that this American dream was coming back to life.

Dias called his enterprise the Repo Home Tour, but it was much more than that. This was a journey to the frontier of the world’s biggest-ever experiment in city building. Three-quarters of all U.S. construction in the last three decades has looked like the terrain we were traversing.

The development pattern is elegantly simple: Over here are the residential zones, generally distinguished by detached homes, broad lawns, and wide, curving streets, each zone anchored by an elementary school. Over there are the commercial districts, or power centers, where national retailers occupy warehouse-size boxes clustered like islands in dark oceans of parking. And over there are the office and industrial parks, with their own ample surface car-storage zones. All of these distinct urban units are connected by high-speed freeways and arterial roads so generous that they have obliterated the once-meaningful metric of proximity. They loop around the various distilled districts, skirt the old city center, and shoot across farms and mountains until they pierce the heart of the nearest metropolis. Distance is reduced to abstraction. Home is simultaneously far from and close to everything else, depending on the number of cars on the road at any moment. Through the windows of a tour bus on a sunny Saturday morning, life in this landscape appeared perfectly ordered.

Observers of this particular way of organizing cities have tried to name it. When our great-grandparents first moved to residential enclaves outside the city core, we called such places suburbs. When suburbs began to scatter beyond the urban edge, some called them exurbs. When, in the 1980s, downtown businesses seemed to be moving en masse to freeway-fed business parks and megamalls,
Washington Post
reporter Joel Garreau dubbed these new agglomerations “edge cities.” But urban life has now been stretched to such an extent that suburbia, exurbia, and edge cities together form a distinct system that has transformed the way that entire city-regions function. This is the system that some have come to call sprawl. I will call it the dispersed city, for the characteristic that defines almost every aspect of it.

While the world’s architectural critics and so-called thought leaders tend to focus their attention on iconic structures and rare designs, the journey to the happy city must begin out here, in the landscape of the infinitely repeated form, on the plains of dispersal. For every new urban plaza, starchitect-designed tower, or sleek new light-rail network, there are a hundred thousand cul-de-sacs out in the dispersed city. This is the environment that, more than any other, defines how Americans and millions of people in wealthy cities across the globe move, live, work, play, and perceive the world, and how millions more will live if cities return to the trajectory they were on before the crash. If you are going to talk about the modern city, you have to begin out here, at the edge of the urban blast radius.

These neighborhoods accomplish several historic feats: They take up more space per person, and they are more expensive to build and operate than any urban form ever constructed. They require more roads for every resident, and more water pipes, more sewers—more power cables, utility wiring, sidewalks, signposts, and landscaping. They cost more for municipalities to maintain. They cost more to protect with emergency services. They pollute more and pour more carbon into the atmosphere. In short, the dispersed city is the most expensive, resource-intense, land-gobbling, polluting way of living ever built. Anyone with any faith in the human ability to make good decisions about our well-being would expect that this massive investment in dispersal has enabled healthier, safer, more resilient, and more joyful lives. Given how many millions have chosen to call it home, you would expect that the dispersed city would produce greater happiness. But good cheer was in short supply that spring in San Joaquin County.

Dias, like so many Americans, believed that the hardship and instability of the foreclosure crisis was ephemeral, a kind of temporary madness sparked by greedy bankers and their now-infamous predatory lending practices. Many of Dias’s own clients had fallen for subprime mortgage offers in the boom years. Now that those people were gone—nobody in the tour really wanted to talk about
where
they had gone or who they were—Stockton was bound for a comeback. The hard times were over. These edge neighborhoods would perk up once low house prices attracted a new set of residents better able to pay for them. My fellow Repo tourists certainly subscribed to this view. They were calculating their offers even before we got back to the office.

But there is a flaw in this optimistic logic. It ignores the role of the urban system itself. A fuller accounting leads right back to the map of the dispersed city. Instability was designed right into the exurbs of San Joaquin County.

Imagine you lived, say, along the gentle curve of Erickson Circle in Weston Ranch, a collection of several hundred modest 2,500-square-foot homes just off I-5, south of Stockton. (In a five-minute cruise through this neighborhood, I counted two dozen
FOR SALE
signs and half a dozen dejected-looking families loading their beds and chairs and big-screen TVs into rented moving trucks.
*
) If you wanted to pick up some milk, you would drive to the closest grocery store, which would be the Food 4 Less, about two miles away. If you wanted to work out, that would be five-odd miles to the In-Shape Health Club, just off Highway 4. Your kids could walk to school, but the nearest community swimming pool would be six miles away, and the happening mall, Park West Place, would be twelve miles north on I-5. As for work, if you were like your neighbors, you would commute sixty miles to San Francisco, a distance that translated into a four-hour round-trip on bad days. This journey would not make you unique: the majority of Weston Ranch’s boom-time buyers were commuters escaping high home prices in the Bay Area. At the time, Weston Ranchers had a stronger relationship with a distant metropolis than they did with their own city.

It was this distance, as much as climbing mortgage rates, that broke the commuter’s back. After holding steady for nearly fifteen years, gas prices doubled between 2004 and late 2006 to past $3 per gallon, then spiked to more than $4 in the summer of 2008. Suddenly the folks who commuted to the Bay Area from San Joaquin County were forking out more than $800 for fuel each month—for some, more than a quarter of their wages, and in many cases, more than people were spending on their mortgages. Families with kids, who were bound to even more mandatory road miles, were in the most trouble of all.

It was the same in dispersed neighborhoods all across the country. Moving to the edge committed real estate migrants to a massive, sustained investment in automobiles and fuel. The average exurban family needs at least one more car than do families who live close to where they work, shop, study, and play. That family also spends twice as much just getting around in order to meet its daily needs. It’s very, very hard for people in the dispersed environment to cut back on driving. This is one reason that by 2011, the average family of four spent more on transportation than on taxes and health care combined. (It’s also a reason that the farther a house was from a vibrant city center, the more likely it was to experience foreclosure during the crash, the deeper its price collapsed, the less likely that price has bounced back since, and the less analysts now expect it to be worth in the future.
*
)

So from a purely economic perspective, the newest parts of the dispersed city flunk the resilience test. Investing in a detached home on the urban edge is like gambling on oil futures and global geopolitics. Of course this fragility is not just an economic problem. It’s also a social problem. When people lose their homes, local relationships get severed and holes are torn in the lives of families and neighborhoods. These stories have been recounted in heart-wrenching detail in popular media over the last few years, so I will not dwell on them. The more fascinating and telling story, in my opinion, involves the foreclosure era’s survivors: people who scored amazing deals on dream homes on the urban edge and still live there today. After spending time with them, I do not envy their hot deals at all. Their travails serve as a warning about the social costs of distance and the dangers of rebooting the sprawl machine.