By guest contributor Alison Grover. She recently wrote about bike parking.
I recently had the pleasure of reading, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2014). I savored almost every one of its 313 pages. Read this book if you care about the design of our built environment.
The author, Charles Montgomery is an award-winning writer, researcher, and urbanist from Vancouver, British Columbia. He draws on his experiences living in Vancouver as well as his travels. Although this book was published over ten years ago, the ideas presented remain salient and valuable.
Happy City is a collection of research and anecdotes illustrating what it means to live in a city that’s conducive to human happiness. Throughout the book, we learn about urban design, psychology, and neuroscience, getting to the heart of what produces joyful city residents. In a nutshell: it’s all about our social connections.
One insight that resonated with me was a highlight on Mark Lakeman and The City Repair Project, a Portland-based placemaking group. You’ve probably either heard of them or seen their work in colorful, painted intersections around town. These were started as a response to Portland’s urban grid, where, “in most neighborhoods, the streets themselves became the only shared public space…[the grid] has a profound effect on the people who must inhabit it: it estranges them from the process of shaping their own world” (p. 305). Many times, I have wondered why sidewalks are practically the only public spaces in my southeast Portland neighborhood. Where is our gathering space? Parks, street plazas, and food truck pods offer informal, convivial public space; but we need more, especially on the east side, in order to get to know our neighbors and build ownership of our communities.
Montgomery illustrates both the social isolation of living in dispersed suburbs, and conversely, the stress induced by ultra high-density apartment style living. He suggests that the happiest density lies somewhere in between. An ideal medium density would have enough people to support services, transit, and walkability, while keeping building heights below a couple of stories.
This book reads more like a novel rather than a manual on urban design. Montgomery doesn’t simply bombard us with research insights from the fields of design and psychology. Rather, he delivers information at the human scale for an enjoyable reading experience in the same way that human scale cities make for enjoyable lives. As the reader, you become invested in peoples’ stories while gaining insight from the experiences of a super-commuter in Northern California, a co-housing community in Vancouver, BC, and cramped apartment residents in New York City, to name a few.
Throughout the book, Montgomery builds trust by going further than quoting urban planners, architects, politicians, and psychology experts. He’s cycling alongside Jan Gehl in Copenhagen. He’s chasing Enrique Penalosa around Bogota on a mountain bike. He’s chatting with Eric Britton while navigating Paris traffic on a bike. His writing is well-researched and well-rounded.
Overall, I would recommend this book to those interested in convivial public spaces, walkable communities, meeting one’s neighbors, combatting social isolation, and democratizing housing and transportation. I hope you gain as much from it as I did. Happy reading!
Alison Grover has a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture and has been biking in Oregon since 2017.
Thanks for reading.
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Thanks for the book recommendation! Sounds like an interesting read.
Quick question about
How does this work? Single story buildings only? That can’t be right. What am I missing?
Does the book talk about how to get to there from here?
It seems that even if the theory is neighborhoods that function best at X density, if neighborhoods existing are at 50% of X density, redeveloping some of the existing low-density buildings would require some higher buildings (3-5 stories) to get to critical density in the neighborhood to support walkable services.
When I said “a couple”, what I really meant to convey was “several”. In the vicinity of 3-6 stories
How does one “beat” the spirit of “rugged individualism” out of the common American?
I will look for this book as it seems an interesting read. I am very pessimistic that we will ever find the motivation and the money to ever build such things on a large scale because American thought is based on the notion that individualism is sacred. It is a betrayal of all that is just and holy to tell a sovereign citizen how to live, where to live, how to get places, and who to socialize with. We also are head-over-heels in love with comfort, television, social media, and image to the point that going outside and dealing with strangers is the scariest thing imaginable. Best to stay indoors (or in a nice “safe” car) rather than risk anything awkward or unpleasant. America was also based on the dream of homesteading in wide open places. Cities, small domiciles, high density living, and sharing are antithetical to deeply ingrained thinking.
Personally, I would love to see a more happy and collectively connected society but the most recent election kind of puts an end to such idealism. It just reinforces to me that it will never happen in my lifetime. Even the civic and national leaders on our side don’t possess the courage and the resources to make meaningful changes. We’ll get some painted lines, a dedicated ped/bike bridge, and public places that get forgotten and overrun by bad elements once the initial grand opening hype goes quiet. Barring some wholesale shifts in thinking, I just don’t think that shared spaces and the common good will ever be the default position in U.S. urban planning.
It is a good book and definitely worth reading. The book helped me better understand something that goes beyond our collective individualism – that the physical design of the built landscape impacts happiness. It also helped me realize that positive change comes one project at a time. National, or even state leaders can influence that, but not nearly as much as can the City of Portland. I think BP has done a great job of focusing on the City of Portland projects that over time crease the place that has a profound impact upon our happiness. It is however a very frustrating effort given our collective individualism and in my opinion, collective stupidity for putting up with a car centric transportation system that makes us not only unhappy, but unhealthy.
I will have to look for this book.
PS. It was great to read the review and see Mark Lakeman;s name and The City Repair Project noted. BOTH had great impacts on my professional practice in Vancouver in the early 2000s, plus just enjoying such spaces as a human powered traveler through Portland’s grass roots public spaces.
For those new to the region or just too young, these spaces may now be ubiquitous and almost taken for granted (like the mini libraries too) BUT there was a time when local public works departments / city inspectors etc. would actively punish any curbside placemaking that was not corporate or official. I remember – in our public works department – when there would be complaints submitted (and acted on) of a basketball hoop placed in a parking space on a local residential side street. Versus my reaction that these were generally a positive indicator of kids playing in the street with parental approval – a living canary in the coal mine or sorts.
I’ve been wanting to interview Mark for a long time. Need to have him over.
Exactly! If you want to know which streets are pleasant to live on, count at-street basketball hoops. There’s one is SE with about five on one block.
I read this book after hearing about it from Mr. Money Mustache. It was my first exposure to urbanist ideas. Here I am many years later reading a bike blog from a city I don’t live in on my lunch break. 10/10 would recommend.
Yes – “Read this book if you care about design of better cities”.
Also – Read this book if you care about biking
One and the same.
Nice to see an urbanist who is willing to come clean about their anti-density, anti-sustainability, and pro-capitalism stance.
Below two ****ing stoires? (LOL)
I guess lower-income renters should continue being “happy” with the price-gouging and housing scarcity of the urbanist free-market.
It’s also telling that these <2 story neighborhoods are rare in the cities urbanists claim to admire (e.g. Copenhagen).
Oh I need to check this out!
Probably won’t read this, but I’m guessing the examples given are in existing old world cities where the very well known 4-5 story buildings were the initial design.
The problem with all of the urbanists really is that the suburban metro is 60-75% of US cities. And that many of our cities are facing massive climate risk and losing insurability. Building things takes a LOT of emissions, in addition to money and time. Urbanists just don’t get that their utopia (one I LOVE, having lived in Amsterdam) is not feasible.
At some point, many will grasp that with emigration out of failing cities…folks have an opportunity. They may/should look to the upper NE small towns and cities that have been losing population for decades. It is THERE that we should focus on lifestyles when they are starting to boom. I fear instead the usual developer BS will just repeat the errors of most current US cities.