Sam Keller

Happy City

Charles Montgomery

His conclusion seems obvious, and yet it was revolutionary at the time: "What is most attractive, what attracts people to stop and linger and look, will invariably be other people. Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities."
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.
Quality of life and climate action are complementary goals. It's just easier to get people excited about plans that improve their lives. That's why, when the City of New York explains its remarkable transformation in the way the city uses roads, it boasts about its huge improvements in safety, speed, efficiency, and people's taking coffee on public plazas, leaving its goal of reducing the city's greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent to a footnote.
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.
What's clear is that fairness demands that cities stop concentrating subsidized housing in poor zones so all residents and their children can enjoy equal access to decent schools and services. This mixing is the mark of a civilized, democratic, and ethical society.
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.
The greatest problem facing anyone who would repair sprawl remains the godlike power of code. Code is to the city what an operating system is to a computer. It is invisible, but it is in charge. So the battle for American cities has moved from architectural drafting tables to the dense, arcane pages of the zoning codebooks. The winners will determine the shape of cities and the fate of suburbia.
Humans do not perceive the value of things in absolute terms. We never have. Just as our eyes process the color and luminosity of an object relative to its surroundings, the brain constantly adjusts its idea of what we need in order to be happy. It compares what we have now to what we had yesterday and what we might possibly get next. It compares what we have to what everyone else has. Then it recalibrates the distance to a revised finish line. But that finish line moves even when other conditions stay the same, simply because we get used to things. So happiness, in these economists' particular formulation, is inherently remote. It never stands still.
Partly because sprawl has forced Americans to drive farther and farther in the course of every day, per capita road death rates in the United States hover around forty thousand per year. That's a third more people than are killed by guns. It's more than ten times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Here's an image that sticks: imagine a loaded Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone aboard. That's how many people die on U.S. highways every year. Globally, traffic injuries are the greatest killer of ten- to twenty-four-year-olds.* A rational actor would be terrified of suburban roads. A rational policy maker would wage war, not on other nations, but on traffic deaths
But the food cart is starting to become a favorite of urban planners in rich cities. From Portland and Boston to Calgary, planners use mobile vendors as a means of tactical urbanism, infusing enough life to long-dead blocks to draw people and, eventually, brick-and-mortar businesses.
. A Swedish study found that people who endure more than a forty-five-minute commute were 40 percent more likely to divorce.* People who live in monofunctional, car-dependent neighborhoods outside of urban centers are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighborhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services, and places to work. They are also much less likely to know their neighbors. They are less likely to get involved with social groups and even less likely to participate in politics. They don't answer petitions, don't attend rallies, and don't join political parties or social advocacy groups. Citizens of sprawl are actually less likely to know the names of their elected representatives than people who live in more connected places.
Most private cars spend the vast majority of their life span sitting, doing nothing but costing their owners money in insurance, lease payments, parking, and depreciation. Not only do automobile owners need to earn substantially more just to be able to afford to drive, but we increasingly work in order to drive to and pay for fitness facilities to get the exercise that should be a side effect of the daily journey.
Even the smallest of private cars takes up about 150 square feet of road space when standing still. That's thirty times the space used by a person standing, and 7.5 times the space used by a person on a bicycle or on a bus. The numbers diverge exponentially as we start moving. Someone driving alone in a car moving at thirty miles per hour takes up twenty times as much space as someone riding on a bus at the same speed.
Every urban dweller's freedom to live, move, and experience the city as he chooses is inherently conditioned by what every landowner does with his or her property. If a developer builds an auto-dependent neighborhood for ten thousand people at the far end of my city, that system will soon infringe on my own right to enjoy safe and navigable roads. Its drivers will crowd the public right-of-way road until the point of gridlock, and then they will demand that it be widened. They will suck up my tax dollars with their demands for dispersed water, sewage, and electricity systems. If they forbid their neighbors from building new density on their own land, then new settlers will have to move even farther down the road, propagating the system of dispersal that — through geometry and sheet distance — has forced millions of people into one way of moving and living, regardless of their preferences.
This inquiry into the aesthetic value of biological complexity has just begun, but such work suggests that sterile lawns and token trees might be hollow calories for the nature-craving brain. They are better than nothing, but they are not good enough. It would certainly make sense for diverse, complex ecosystems and views to pack a bigger psychological punch than, say, a manicured patch of grass, because they are more likely to draw us into the levels of involuntary attention that are so soothing.
Ample, easy parking is the hallmark of the dispersed city. It is also a killer of street life. A cruise through Los Angeles illustrates the dynamic. The city's downtown has been said to contain more parking spaces per acre than any other place on earth, and its streets are some of the most desolate.
As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it, there is no thought so burdensome that you cannot walk away from it. We can literally walk ourselves into a state of well-being. The same is true of cycling, although a bicycle has the added benefit of giving even a lazy rider the ability to travel three or four times faster than someone walking, while using less than a quarter of the energy. A bicycle can expand the self-propelled travelers' geographical reach by an astounding nine or sixteen times. Quite simply, a human on a bicycle is the most efficient traveler among all machines and animals.
On average, suburbanites pump out about twice the greenhouse gas emissions of people living in dense city centers.
Almost all of us will choose a seat in a restaurant with a view of others. People will show up for the most mundane small-town parades. We like to look at each other. We enjoy hovering in the zone somewhere between strangers and intimates. We want the opportunity to watch and be watched, even if we have no intention of ever actually making contact with one another.
This neighborhood upcycling provides a stunning range in housing choice, which means room for people of different incomes, mobility, ages, tastes, and tolerance for proximity. On my own street, a family of four lives alone in a three-story million-dollar house, right next to a house split for two couples, next to a house owned by Cynthia, a single woman nearing retirement who chopped her place up into three apartments so she could pay her mortgage and live well without making a bundle. Some people like their apartments. Some people like town houses. Some people will not be content without space between themselves and the nearest neighbor. We all find a place here.
For thousands of years, city life naturally led people toward casual contact with people outside of our circle of intimates. In the absence of refrigeration, television, drive-thru, and the Internet, our forebears had no choice but to come together every day to trade, to talk, to learn, and to socialize on the street. This was the purpose of the city. But modern cities and affluent economies have created a particular kind of social deficit. We can meet almost all our needs without gathering in public.
The explosion of research into the benefits of nature suggests that green space in cities shouldn't be considered an optional luxury. As Kuo insists, it is a crucial part of a healthy human habitat. Daily exposure is essential. If you don't see it or touch it, then nature can't do you much good. Proximity matters. But every little bit of nature helps. This means we need to build nature into the urban system, and into our lives, at all scales. Yes, cities need big, immersive destination parks. But they also need medium-sized parks and community gardens within walking distance of every home. They also need pocket parks and green strips and potted plants and living, green walls. As Gil Penalosa once put it: cities need green in sizes S, M, L, and XL.
Helliwell and his team have run several iterations of the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll through their statistical grinders and have found that when it comes to life satisfaction, relationships with other people beat income, hands down. For example, these polls asked people if they had a friend or relative to count on when needed. Just going from being friendless to having one friend or family member to confide in had the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income.
Gehl and others have found that if a street features uniform facades with hardly any doors, variety, or functions, people move past as quickly as possible. But if a street features varied facades, lots of openings, and a high density of functions per block, people walk more slowly. They pause more often. People are actually more likely to stop and make cell phone calls in front of lively facades than in front of dead ones.
this long-unaccounted relationship between distance and energy. Not only does sprawl development cost taxpayers more to build, it costs more to maintain, because each home in a typical community of dispersed single-family homes on big lots needs so much more paved street, drainage, water, sewage, and other services than a home in a denser, more walkable place. A neighborhood of detached homes and duplexes on small lots can be serviced for about a quarter of the cost of servicing typical large-lot detached homes. Dispersed communities also need more fire and ambulance stations than dense neighborhoods do. They need more school buses. The waste is astounding: in the 2005-06 school year, more than 25 million American children were bused to their public schools. The country spent $18.9 billion getting them there — that's $750 for each bus-riding student, which could have been spent on actual learning.
Many people move to the suburban fringe and suffer the commute as a sacrifice for their children. Unfortunately, that quiet cul-de-sac is a less ideal place to nurture kids and teens than we once thought. This landscape doesn't simply leave them stranded; teens from the suburbs — even affluent suburbs — have proved to be more prone to social and emotional problems than their urban counterparts.
"Most good and bad things become less good and bad over time as we adapt to them. However, it is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house because the house is exactly the same size every time we come in the front door. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery, with different people honking at us, different intersections jammed with accidents, different problems with weather, and so on."
As Randy Strausser learned back in Mountain House, the detached house in distant dispersal is a blunt instrument: it is a powerful tool for retreating with your nuclear family and perhaps your direct neighbors, but a terrible base from which to nurture other intensities of relationships. Your social life must be scheduled and formal. Serendipity disappears in the time eaten up by the commute and in that space between car windshields and garage doors
But we should never forget this fact: even though the modern cosmopolitan city makes it easier than ever for individuals to retreat from neighbors and strangers, the greatest of human satisfactions lies in working and playing cooperatively with other people. No matter how much we cherish privacy and solitude, strong, positive relationships are the foundation of happiness. The city is ultimately a shared project, like Aristotle's polis, a place where we can fashion a common good that we simply cannot build alone.
It would take nine planets to supply all we needed if everyone ate, built, traveled, and threw stuff away as Americans do.
No amount of triangulation can account for the corrupting influence that high-velocity transport has on the psychology of public space. In a classic 1971 study of several parallel streets in San Francisco, Donald Appleyard found a direct relationship between traffic and social life. On a street with only light traffic (two thousand cars per day), children played on the sidewalks and street, people socialized on their front steps, and everyone reported having a tight web of contacts with neighbors on both sides of the street. On a nearly identical street with eight thousand cars passing per day, there was a dramatic drop in social activity and friendships. Another similar street with sixteen thousand passing cars saw almost nothing happening in the public realm, and social ties were few and far between. The only significant difference between these streets was the amount of car traffic pouring through them. But
Here is where equity and efficiency collide: because of their light footprint, infrastructure for walkers and cyclists costs only a tiny fraction of auto infrastructure to build and maintain. So cyclists and pedestrian commuters who pay property and income tax actually end up subsidizing their car-driving neighbors.*
To top it off, governments have continued the decades-old practice of pouring tax dollars into highways and low-density infrastructure while spending a tiny fraction of that amount on urban rail and other transit service. For example, of the 18.4 cents per gallon the U.S. government took in gas taxes in 2012, only 2.86 cents went to public transit and almost all the rest was poured into highways.
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.
Most of the noise, air pollution, danger, and perceived crowding in modern cities occurs because we have configured urban spaces to facilitate high-speed travel in private automobiles. We have traded conviviality for the convenience of those who wish to experience streets as briefly as possible. This is deeply unfair to people who live in central cities, for whom streets function as the soft social space between their destinations.