Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery Read Free Book Online Page A

Washington State, Ryff itches to return to the challenges of her laboratory on the snow-blown campus of the University of Wisconsin.
    The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness. The good city should be measured not only by its distractions and amenities but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work, and meaning.
    What Matters Most
    Of all of these, the most important psychological effect of the city is the way in which it moderates our relationships with other people. This last concern is so powerful and so central to personal and societal well-being that researchers who study it become positively evangelical. Economist John Helliwell is a case in point. The University of British Columbia professor emeritus has distinguished himself in decades of research on quantitative macroeconomics, monetary policy, and international trade. But since his late-career conversion to happiness economics, Helliwell prefers to introduce himself as Aristotle’s research assistant, and he tends to begin his lectures with a sing-along version of the children’s song “The More We Get Together, the Happier We’ll Be.” He has evidence to back that song up; and cities, countries, and the United Nations are listening.
    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.
    Economists love to turn relationships into numbers. Helliwell produced this: if 10 percent more people thought they had someone to count on in life, it would have a greater effect on national life satisfaction than giving everyone a 50 percent raise. But it is not only our close relationships that count. Our trust in neighbors, police, governments, and even total strangers has a huge influence on happiness—again, much more than income does.
    Imagine that you dropped your wallet somewhere on your street. What are the chances you would get it back if a neighbor found it? A stranger? A police officer? Your answer to that simple question is a proxy for a whole list of metrics related to the quality of your relationship with family, friends, neighbors, and the society around you.
    In fact, ask enough people the wallet question, and you can predict the happiness of cities. Helliwell had it inserted into various Canadian surveys, and he found that cities where people believed they’d get their wallets back always scored highest for life satisfaction. It was the same with neighborhoods within those cities. Trust was the key, and it mattered far more than income: three of Canada’s biggest, richest cities—Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver—were among the least trusting and also among the least happy. St. John’s, a rocky outpost and the capital of perennially poor Newfoundland, was near the top of trust and happiness lists. Meanwhile, citizens of the country where people trust their neighbors, strangers, and even their government the most—the Danes—consistently come out on or near the top of happiness polls. A similar lesson appears over and over again in psychology, behavioral economics, and public health. Happiness is a house with many rooms, but at its core is a hearth around which we