Category: Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities

Happy mobility is in multiple modes

 

City life is as much about moving through landscapes as it is about being in them.
 
This is a critical point; not only does the city shape the way we move, but our movements shape the city in return.
 
Charles Montgomery (p. 176)

 

Here’s the psychological appeal of the car: mastery.  Charles Montgomery reports, in Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, that when the road is clear, drivers of their own cars feel “much more in charge of their lives than transit users or even their own passengers (p. 179).” This is how our relationship with cars started, with a sense of freedom and control. Yet over time, this experience of freedom and speed, on open roads, is not the truth of cities: “The urban system neutralizes their power. Luxury and sports cars might still offer their drivers a status bump, but the car’s muscles cease to matter when it is surrounded by other cars (p. 179).”

These are important words: the car’s muscles cease to matter when it is surrounded by other cars.

The result is this: people are not happy on their commutes.

Montgomery has found that self-propelled commuters “report feeling that their trips are easier than the trips of people who sit still for most of the journey (p. 181).” He goes on to note that these are sentiments of  people in American and Canadian cities, designed in ways that make walking and cycling unpleasant and dangerous. Further, in The Netherlands, “where road designers create safe spaces of bikes, cyclists report feeling more joy, less fear, less anger, less sadness than both drivers and transit users (p. 181).” He reaches this conclusion (p. 184):

  1. People are not maximizing happiness on their commutes.
  2. People are overwhelmingly choosing the most polluting, expensive and place-destroying way of moving.

How we move matters because it shapes who we are. Remember this: cities design our lives, and the city is a happiness project of our own creation. Our time in cars diminishes our happiness and the social fabric of our neighbourhoods. Further, “They are by far the biggest source of smog in most cities. They produce more greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than almost any other way of travelling, including flying by jetliner (p. 184).” We make our city habitats. We can remake our city habitats.

Here’s what Montgomery offers as a way to rethink mobility in cities; our approach to design needs to embrace and explore:

  1. Complexity in transportation and human experience (Eric Brittan via Montgomery, p. 198).
  2. Multiple modes of transportation. “Each of us has a unique set of abilities, weaknesses and desires. Each of us is compelled and thrilled by a unique set of sensations. Every trip demands a unique solution (p. 197).”
  3. Experimentation, thinking of the city as a laboratory that invites and rewards experimentation (p. 216).
  4. Physics and psychology of mobility (p. 216).

With the above, design principles emerge that generate happiness:

  1. Design for connectivity: more intersections mean more walking, and more disconnected cul-de-sacs mean more driving (p. 186).
  2. Design destinations within reach (p. 189).
  3. Feed active transportation and transit systems the resources they need. When starved, they are bound to disappoint (p. 193).
  4. Design choice into the city. Can you walk to work, or ride a bike? Can you catch a bus or train? Can you get to the doctor or a restaurant for supper without a car (p. 194)?
  5. Design for freedom for everyone, not just the brave (p.  211).
  6. Design for multiple modes of transportation. “Each of us has a unique set of abilities, weaknesses and desires. Each of us is compelled and thrilled by a unique set of sensations. Every trip demands a unique solution (p. 197).”

What’s in the way? The private car that uses 7.5 times more space than a person on a bus or a bicycle (p. 221). In part, it is the habits of professionals. It is also the choices we make as citizens.

The reasons why we like the car won’t go away – the perceived control of the car can also surface as real-time arrival data for bus/train users. As a psychological intervention, the wait feels shorter when you know what is happening, when (p. 202). We might also find the rewards of freedom from owning, when we experience the cooperative benefits of extreme sharing (bicycles, cars, public infrastructure). We simply need to build in the sense of control and freedom we desire into other modes of transportation.

We can all work on this: city hall and our public institutions, the business community, community organizations and citizens. This is the new mastery: choosing the city we want to generate together.

We can choose happy mobility.

We can choose a happy city.

We can choose to build the city to save the world.

 

The proximity/retreat conundrum

 

The conundrum of the city is found in two words: proximity and retreat. For Charles Montgomery (Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design), we want to be close to each other and far apart at the same time:

We need the nourishing, helping warmth of other people, but we also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but we also need retreat. We benefit from the conveniences of proximity, but these conveniences can come with the price of overstimulation and crowding. We will not solve the conundrum of sustainable city living unless we understand these contradictory forces and resolve the tension between them (p. 106). 

Our current design to resolve this tension is in the dispersed city. We are in retreat from each other, and we demand and create expanses of space between us. At the same time, we recognize that the most exciting city places are alive with people and activity. Charles Montgomery (Happy City) notes that the very purpose of the city, before refrigeration and the internet, was to “come together every day to trade, to talk, to learn, and to socialize on the street.” We can now meet most of our needs without a physical space, so Montgomery asks,

Can we build – or rebuild – city spaces in ways that enable easy connections and more trust among both familiars and strangers? The answer is a resounding yes. The spaces we occupy can not only determine how we feel. They can change the way we regard other people and how we treat one another (p. 156).

The question under the question: can we design and build cities that improve our social habitat, and deepen our connections with the people we know and don’t know? Can we improve city life by city design?

Below, a few of Montgomery’s findings.

Crowding (proximity) is a design challenge.

The city that feels like a conundrum is not stepping in to the design challenge. Charles Montgomery:

… the detached house … is a blunt instrument: it is a powerful tool for retreating with your nuclear family and perhaps your direct neighbours, but a terrible base from with 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. On the other hand, life in places that feel to corded to control can leave us so overstimulated and exhausted that we retreat into solitude. Either way, we miss out of the wider range of relationships that can make life richer and easier (p. 128).

Happiness is in our hands. We need to live closer to each other to be happier, yet we have to design our cities so they work, or we will not be happier. Density, crowding, proximity, whatever you want to call it, is not something we have to tolerate. We simply have to design with clear objectives in mind.

Nature is needed at every scale. 

Designing for proximity means weaving nature into the urban fabric – at every scale. This is a prerequisite for architectural density. For Montgomery, here’s why:

  1. Nature brings out the good in us. People who live in areas with more parks are more helpful and trusting than people who don’t, regardless of their income or race (p. 111). 
  2. Biological complexity matters. The suburban savannah of grass and a few trees is not good for us. The more varieties of trees and birds and nature, the better it is for our brains.  (p. 111-115)
  3. Nature needs to be woven into the urban fabric. We need to be able to see it and touch it (p. 120). Proximity matters, so we need to do this at all scales. Small things count.

He reminds us that the challenge of living in dense environments is not simply aesthetic; it is also social. And nature can help us with that. Montgomery:

… we know nature in cities makes us happier and healthier. We know it makes us friendlier and kinder. We know it helps us build essential bonds with other people and the places in which we live (p. 123). 

Design for conviviality and control.

We can choose friendly – happy – design and have opportunities to retreat when needed. We are looking for a balance of conviviality and control – social spaces that are nourishing, allowing us to choose to be close to others, or be separate. Design matters.

Every plaza, park, or architectural facade sends messages about who we are and what the street is for (p. 160). 

Nature makes us more trusting and generous toward other people (p. 161), but nature isn’t the only design offering for our consideration as we recreate our cities. Sharp architectural angles light up the brain’s fear centres (p. 161). Blank walls are antisocial spaces. This is what Montgomery’s book is all about – creating cities for people.

Traffic design can be about liveability. We can choose to integrate social life with velocity. We can choose to allow neat things to happen. We can choose to make places. We can choose to design roads for happiness. Montgomery:

Cities that are serious about the happiness of their citizens have already begun to confront their relationship with velocity. they are making what once seemed to be radical decisions about what – and whom – streets are for (p. 173). 

______

Montgomery’s work provides a window into how we can design our habitats to better serve citizens. He reminds us that we design cities, and in turn cities design our lives. We make our cities, so the city is our happiness project. In the mix, the habits of city-building professionals shape our cities; yet these same professionals are charged with serving the public interest. As the public interest evolves, so too will the habits of professionals. Ultimately, it is our job as citizens to engage with our cities, and professionals, to build a city to save the world.

We are retrofitting our cities to serve ourselves.

Where do you see people retrofitting your city?

 

 

Hint – Edmonton’s Dustin Bajer is organizing the YEG River Valley Food Forest Planting event on July 19, 2014.

 

 

Cascading synchronicity

 

There is synchronicity in synchronicity.

Three days ago the words wild synchronicity were front and center in my being; today the words are “cascading synchronicity”.  And it all has to do with walks in the wilderness.

_____

Cascade – Noun

  1. A small waterfall, typically one of several that fall in stages down a steep rocky slope
    • A mass of something that falls or hangs in copious quantities
    • A large number or amount of something occurring at the same time
  2. A process whereby something, typically information or knowledge, is successively passed on
    • A succession of devices or stages in a process, each of which triggers or initiates the next

Cascade – Verb

  1. (Of water) pour downwards rapidly and in large quantities
    • Fall or hang in copious quantities
  2. Pass (something) on to a succession of others
  3. Arrange (a number of devices or objects) in a series or sequence

Origin

  • Mid 17th century from French, from Italian cascara, from cascare “to fall”, based on Latin casus.

(Note – above from Oxford Dictionary)

_____

Three weeks ago I left Washington’s Cascade Mountains, where I went on a wilderness quest, with the support and guidance of Ann Linnea, Christina Baldwin and Deborah Greene-Jacobi (and apprentice guide LeAnn Blackert).  I walked up the meadow of the Smith Canyon Valley, and up the valley to the right to set up a camp on the flank of the Sacred Mountain for 48 hours of solo time, alone in the wild.

The valley
Photo credit: Ann Linnea

Since my return home, having turned my back on the Sacred Mountian, writing has been one of the ways I listen to myself, to integrate and incorporate the experience of the wilderness quest. Much of the writing has surfaced in blog posts:

  1. I went to rewire the reptilian in me
  2. I found myself face to face with the ways Chronos + Kairos time show up in my life
  3. I realized the quest was also about Earth gazing from Earth
  4. I received an invitation to explore  my soul hungers
  5. I noticed wild synchronicity around me

_____

While sitting in the living room this week, I noticed a map my husband left on the coffee table. “Lake Minnewanka,” just north of Banff jumped out at me, and I recalled a walk along the shores of the lake almost seven years ago. I was in the middle of an intense learning experience and our hosts wisely gave us the gift of time that afternoon to integrate what we were learning, and decompress. We had a few choices, one of which was a guided walk in Canada’s Rocky Mountains with Rosemary.

I have to confess that Rosemary drove me nuts. I was hungry to get moving and do something physical after two and half days of sitting and concentration. I was alive to be outside, on the move. And Rosemary kept stopping. And talking. And we hardly moved at all.

I had a conversation with myself about how to handle my frustration. I could just bolt and do my own thing, but since we were a group, my hosts would get in trouble; to bring a group into Banff National Park, you must have a guide. I could just play along. I chose to surrender, to listen to what she was saying. I didn’t give up – I surrendered to Rosemary and her wisdom.

And what I heard was remarkable.

How nature – the wilderness – works is, of course, very similar to how humans work.

Upon returning to the formal part of learning experience, we were asked to write, in free flow, to let out what was in us. Rosemary’s wise words, as I received them, came through:

 

firestorm

eagle nest
beaver dam
broken and whole
sawdust
 
conversation
 
self and selfless
ice and snow
grass and green
onion shoots
 
conversation
 
evidence of animals
not seen
fire and rebirth
not destruction
 
conversation
 
the flames are on
the lee side
when the wind 
blows strong
 
amid the firestorm

 

I recognize this experience with Rosemary at Lake Minnewanka as THE point in my life where I learned to listen.

And then, in my living room, I noticed the name of a river that feeds the lake:

Cascade.

______

These two wilderness experiences have provided me with space into which I can expand into myself, and in so doing I expand my capacity to listen to the world within and around me, and to listen to me within me, and around me.  One experience was quick, the other longer in duration; both significant.

______

Synchronicity.

  1. The simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

(Note  – above from Oxford Dictionary)

______

Noticing synchronicity is an invitation to explore a non-linear world. Noticing synchronicity is noticing a portal into deeper understanding of self, and our relationship with others and our places. It isn’t about explanation, but it is about understanding.

The synchronicity – having the word “cascade” pop into my consciousness as it did – invited me into a conversation with myself about the meaning of the word “cascade” in my life. The result of this conversation with myself is this post. I can see that the wilderness quest naturally flowed from my experience with Rosemary. Even though it was years later, I can see the trajectory; I can see a series of cascading events. The synchronicity is in how I happened upon the word “cascade” on the random map on the coffee table.

I’m betting that these synchronicities, the wild and the cascading, will be foundations for more synchronicities.

What synchronicities are you noticing in your life? How do you explore them?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wild synchronicity

 

Synchronicity is the Universe tapping you on the shoulder, inviting you to notice what resonates with you. It’s a portal into your deeper self.

Three things are tapping me on the shoulder:

  1. Three weeks ago I was in the middle of a wilderness quest; two days and two nights in the wild with no food. I am in the process of integrating this experience into my life – mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically. 
  2. As I fell asleep, for several nights after the wilderness quest, I could see clear images on my eyelids. A friend named this phenomenon: hypnagaia. With a little research, I found the acronym WILD. Wake Induced Lucid Dreams.
  3. While listening to David Whyte’s What to Remember While Waking, he speaks of the revelations we have where we no longer recognize ourselves, and the wilderness skills we need because we don’t recognize “home”.

As I weave these threads together, I see that the wilderness quest was a way to wake myself up – to me. I knew heading in to this experience that I wanted to crack myself open. I thought the crack would let light in, and what I would see would shake me up. I wanted to see what would come of it.

The wilderness quest crack is not only about letting light in – it is as much about letting my light out. It is about seeing things I have never seen before, and welcoming and integrating them into my very being. It is about waking up, everyday, any time of day. Being awake in every moment.

 

 

Build the city to save the world

 

Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they’ve got handles, they’re rough and hard.
 
Isabel Allende

 

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 10 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 on board. That’s how many people die on U. S. highways every year… A rational policy maker would wage war, not on other nations, but on traffic deaths. 
 
Charles Montgomery
 

Six significant ideas in Montgomery’s Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design, about why things go wrong in our cities:

  1. Happiness never stands still. Happiness is inherently remote. “…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.”
  2. We are hardwired for active dissatisfaction. “Hunter-gatherers… compulsively looked ahead in order to kill more game or collet more berries than they did yesterday, were more likely to make it through lean times and thus pass on their genes. In this model, happiness is not a condition at all. It is an urge genes employ to get an organism working harder and hoarding more stuff. The human brain has not changed much in the ten thousand years since we began to farm.”
  3. We make bad decisions all the time, and these decisions shape our cities. We are not equipped to make decisions that maximize utility because we are not equipped to make decisions with the longer term in mind. For example, we choose long commutes, even though the longer people choose to commute, the less happy people are with their entire lives. Extrinsic rewards trump the intrinsic rewards.
  4. We generate unreasonable expectations.  Our culture sends us messages about about what is important in our lives. “Our brains are pushed and pulled by the powerful synergy of memory, culture, and images. So our concept of the right house, car, or neighbourhood might be as much a result of happy moments from our past or images that flood us in popular media as of any rational analysis of how these elements will influence the moments of our lives.”  You know  the things that harm us in our cities – time spent in cars, lack of walkability and social cohesion, pollution – yet we are so attached the things that generate the negative that we ignore the information so we can live up to our unreasonable expectations.
  5. The habits of professionals make the same cognitive mistakes as the rest of us. Everything described above applies to citizens and professionals alike – but the professionals (the architects, landscape architects, engineers and planners) build the city and give us our choices. Limited choices. This is true, but Montgomery does not acknowledge the power of the consumer and how as citizens we also shape our city. Where we choose to spend our money is where the developers will go… We all make the cognitive mistakes.
  6. Presentism: “we let what we see and feel today bias our view of the past and future.” This is a cognitive error. Example: too much traffic on the road, so I want more lanes; lanes immediately fill up with cars; too  much traffic on the road, so I want more lanes; I forget that the last time this happened, the solution did not help; I want more lanes.

The real issue facing us are the cognitive blocks that “prevent us from recognizing the connection between the way we live in cities and the massive risks now facing our world and our species.” There are clear safety and environmental threats to how we move in our cities, yet we are held back, “…in part by the autopoieisis of urban systems that have their own momentum and staying power. But we are also held back by our own imperfect minds.”

So what?

The sustainable city has got to promise more happiness than the status quo. It has got to be healthier, higher in status, more fun, and more resilient than the dispersed city. It has got to lure us together rather than push us apart. It has got to reward people for making efficient choices when they move around. It has got to be a city of hedonic satisfaction, of distilled joys that do not cost the world. The city shapes our decisions. It always has.
 
Charles Montgomery

Now what?

Montgomery’s challenge is to build the city that will save the world. Pieces of that city are being born all over the planet right now. The innovative acts and activities where people are pouring themselves into their work that makes the world a better place; they are improving the physical and social habitats of our cities, and our economic lives.

Strategies you can use to create the city that will save the world:

What are you doing to create the city that will save the world?

 

*****

I’ve posted a few times about Charles Montgomery’s Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design. Here they are for you to explore:

Soul hungers

 

Two weeks ago today I emerged from the wilderness after two days and two nights alone, on a vision quest in the Cascade Mountains of Washington.

At the end of my fast, I was reflecting on a passage by John O’Donohue, where he invites the reader to “Listen to the voices of longing in your soul. Listen to your hungers.”

I wrote this in my sketchbook:

day 2 of vision quest. late afternoon, early evening o’clock. 6 meals missed. this is an interesting time to think of hunger because I am really hungry. 

 _____

As part of the process to prepare for the vision quest, I went for a walk in Elk Island National Park, Canada’s first wildlife sanctuary, and now home to North America’s largest land mammal – the bison.

They welcomed me to the trail head.

Bison welcom

They surrounded me while I paused midday for a snack.

Bison at lunch

They shared their land with me. And as I followed one of their trails off the official trail, I came upon a green, glass bottle.

the bottle - medium

These bison are here because of a series of human interventions. Humans created this sanctuary, a sanctuary needed because of human activity. But in the middle of this natural area the bottle was out of place. I know nothing of its story, of how long it has been here, or who left it. The only thing it could tell me was that was made in Canada (this was imprinted on the bottom).

I picked it up, initially because I felt a need to carry out any garbage I found. As I carried it around with all my own questions about the bottle, I wondered what questions the bottle might have for me.

We walked together and we sat together.

the bottle in the field

And eventually, a couple weeks later and just before leaving for the vision quest, it asked me this:

For what are you a vessel? 

_____

On that last night in my tent, hungry, the beginnings of an “answer” came.

Today is tuesday
on the Sacred Mountain
which means I notice
what I’m really hungry for
i have shelter
i am warm enough
my thirst is quenched
 
my hunger is 
for my soul to be seen
by me
for my soul to be seen
by others
for my soul to be seen
by this place
 
to see Me
to see Others
to see my Place
 
I am hungry for Me
 
here I am.
 
 
 

 

Habits of professionals

 

Two ideas of Charles Montgomery:

… cities must be regarded as more than engines of wealth; they must be viewed as systems that should be shaped to improve human well-being…

The dispersed city lives not only in the durability of buildings, parking lots, and highways, but also in the habits of professionals who make our cities.

A question of mine:

What role do professionals have in the design of our cities – and our entrenchment, replication and expansion of our current city pattern?

In a recent post, Cities design our lives, I touched on Charles Montgomery’s notion of autopoieisis in cities: that cities, like many other systems, are prone to reproduce themselves. So what is the role of the professional in this process? The engineers, architects, landscape architects and city planners?

Let’s start by getting clear on the roles in city making.  Marilyn Hamilton offers four perspectives of the city, each of which has a distinct and essential role in the creation and recreation of the city (check out Integral City):

4 quadrants - city lego playmobil

  1. Citizens express the centre of gravity of the city’s values. In democratic countries, citizens have the power to elect and criticize the other voices in the city.  They have power as intentional consumers. They express the power of engagement and intention.  They are the voice of the city spirit.
  2. Civic managers are the voice of city expertise; they are the guides  that oversee the needs of the city.  They are the people who work at city hall, school boards, health institutions on our behalf.  They are the voice of the city brain.
  3. Civic developers are the people who traditionally ‘conceive of, invest in and build the infrastructure of the city’.  These voices focus on the future – the vision and promise of the city.
  4. Civil society are the cultural voice of the city. These are the social organizations and non-government organizations that attend to the social needs of the city. They are the voices of the city’s heart.

While the dispersed city is the result of the habits of professionals, it is also the result of what we expect of professionals.  City-building professionals are city managers work in city hall, reporting to the elected officials who are chosen by the citizens. City-building professionals also work for civic developers (or are developers) who are responding to the consumer choices of citizens, as well as to the rules and incentives established by the civic managers. Moveover, all of these roles are responding to the cultural voice of the city and civil society.

These roles are a network of feedback loops that, all together, are the dance of city making. The city-building professionals shape the perspectives, and are shaped themselves by the perspectives. The habits of professionals have influence and are influenced.

This means that the whole city system needs to see, and make, the shift toward a more sustainable, or happy, city. We are all a part of it. And yes, there are habits of professionals – and everyone else’s habits in what is expected of professionals.

Professions support the status quo and push new things, but the new things only happen when the decision makers decide to make the new things happen. And those decision makers are everywhere: in city hall, in living rooms, in board rooms, and in community centres. Everyone’s work on the margin, promoting and trying out new ideas, is essential for us to see what else is possible for our cities.

Remember this: city-building professionals are required to serve the public interest.

In your city, who is talking about whether your city is serving the public interest?

 

*****

I’ve posted a couple times about Charles Montgomery’s Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design. Here they are for you to explore:

 

 

Earth gazing from Earth

 

A week ago today, I emerged from the wilderness at dawn after two days, two nights alone and fasting on a vision quest (see Rewire the reptilian, and Chronos + Kairos). It occurs to me today that this was a form of Earth gazing at many scales, from Earth rather than from space. I contemplated my self, my Higher Self and the nature of me and nature around me. I see today that I was contemplating my planet and my relationship with it.

*****

Earth gazing
 
Overview
a look at ourselves
a glance
at the dancing light of stardust
integrating interconnectedness
in space
already

This is a wee poem I caught while watching the Planetary Collective‘s trailer about the Overview Effect – humanity’s recent ability to see ourselves from a cosmic perspective. We have an emerging big picture view of ourselves. We live on a planet, and there are implications of this understanding for life on Earth.

The big change is that we now can see a unity of life that we could not see previously. Space travellers see a form of unity of life, of coherence. A oneness of consciousness. A delicate oasis in infinity. This understanding is crucial because who we are, our existence, is at stake. Our choices are made in a delicate balance that is destructive or sustainable. Says Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell:

We humans are responsible for ourselves.

*****

This little film tells us that much of astronauts’ spare time, while in space, is doing what they call Earth gazing. Not quite a meditation, but quiet time in awe.

We can’t all go into space – yet. But we can explore the wonder of our planet and open ourselves to a more full relationship with the fullness of our world.

How do you Earth gaze from Earth?

 

 

Cities design our lives

 
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 sprawls capes of modern North America, the evidence shows that cities do indeed design our lives. 
 
Charles Montgomery (p. 43)

A simple syllogism for you: A. The design of our cities impacts our social networks. B. The quality of our social networks impacts the quality of our lives. C. Therefore, the design of our cities impacts the quality of our lives.  And since we design our cities, we are also designing the quality of our lives – our personal, individual lives and also the lives of others. The places we make shape us.

Charles Montgomery, in Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design, writes,

A healthy social network looks like the root of a tree. From the most important relationships at the heart of the network, thinner roots stretch-out to contacts of different strength and intensity. Most people’s root networks are contracting, closing in on themselves, circling more and more tightly around spouses, partners, parents, and kids. These are our most important relationships, but every arborist knows that a tree with a small root-ball is more likely to fall over when the wind blows (p. 54).

People are increasingly solitary and we are at risk of falling – individually and collectively – when the wind blows. For Montgomery, this is because of our changing social habitat (marriages are not lasting as long; people work longer hours; people move more frequently) as well as our physical habitat (increased commute times; less trust found in monofunctional, car-dependant neighbourhoods than in walkable neighbourhoods with diverse housing, shops and places to work). The research is showing that social habitats struggle when our physical habitat in cities allows for dispersal (see Chapter 3 – The (Broken) Social Scene).  Our proximity to each other is important.

Here’s Montgomery’s take on how we got here:

  1. Put everything in its right place. Zoning, the rules that tell us what we can and can not do on our land that emerged first in the 1880s to ban laundries from a California city’s core, have “ensured that first-generation suburbs closer to downtowns do not grow more diverse and dense. They have pushed new development out to the ever-expanding urban fringe and beyond… And they have ensured that these new developments will, in turn, resist most efforts to change or adapt them over time (p. 69).”
  2. We lost the shared street. When cars first arrived on our streets, our streets were shared places for everyone: “The road was a market, a playground, a park, and yes, it was a thoroughfare… It was a chaotic environment littered with horse dung and fraught with speeding carriages, but a messy kind of freedom reigned (p. 69). As cars and trucks emerged in American cities in the 1920s, road culture was transformed: “more than two hundred thousand people were killed in motor accidents in the United States that decade. Most were killed in cities. Most of the dead were pedestrians. Half were children and youth (p. 70 [1]).” The subsequent design – and subsidized financing – of city streets put motorists first.
  3. Freedom for cars to move. Futurama, “a vast pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York… showed people the wondrous world they would inhabit in 1960 if cities embraced the Motordom vision (p. 73).” Futurama was characterized by speed, “sleek highways propelling citizens from orderly cities to pristine open spaces (p. 73).” 24 million people saw the exhibit and the high speed philosophy; the cultural shift toward the automobile lifestyle was cemented (p. 73).” The sponsor: Shell Oil.
  4. The momentum of autopoiesis. Cities are a system that, like many others, are prone to entrenchment, replication and expansion. “Once the system of dispersal was established in early suburbs, it began to repeat itself in plan after plan – not because it was the best response to any particular place, but because of the momentum of autopoieisis (p. 75).” It is easier to repeat work that has been done before – and it fuelled and age of unprecedented wealth.

But the choice is not between suburbs and downtown; “We must redesign both landscapes and the fabric that connects them in ways that answer the needs that led us to retreat in the first place (p. 77).” To do this, we must examine how our physical environment affects how we feel. To do this, we need to examine what influences our health and controls our behaviour. For Montgomery, we need to understand the psychology of the urban world and then make decisions about our place in the urban world.

We design our cities; cities design our lives.

We can choose to build places that make us feel good.

What are the qualities of urban places that make you feel good?

 

 

Note –

[1] Norton, Peter D., Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 21.

 

The city is a happiness project

 

 The city is ultimately a shared project, … a place where we can fashion a common good that we can simply not build alone.
 
Charles Montgomery (p. 41).

 

“The city has always been a happiness project,” are the words that form the title of the first chapter, and the premise of, Charles Mongomery’s book, Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design. As a social project, the city gives us the challenges we need to thrive.

Drawing on Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia (contentment), and developmental physiologist Carol Ryff’s work, he found the following checklist for happiness, or what would best be referred to as the good life (p. 36):

  • Self acceptance, or how well you know and regard yourself
  • Environmental mastery – you ability to navigate and thrive in the world
  • Positive relations with others
  • Personal growth throughout life
  • Sense of meaning and purpose
  • Feelings of autonomy and independence

In fact, Ryff’s research found that there is a “synergistic power of living a meaningful, challenging, and connected life … A bit of heroic struggle can be good for you (p. 37).” This idea state is what Ryff calls ‘challenged thriving’. [1] For Montgomery, this means that a good city is measured “not only by its distractions and amenities but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work, and meaning (p. 37).” The tension in the city is necessary – for our growth and our happiness.

The tension in cities  moderates our relationships with other people. Embodied in every citizen is the tension between selfishness and altruism: “… each of us benefits when some of us subsume private goals for the sake of the community, and everyone benefits when everyone cooperates… At the same time, the drive by each of us to promote our own interests creates a dynamism and wealth that can overflow through the city (p. 40-41).”

Cities are a shared project that allows us to thrive together. The city challenges us to do more than simply live together. Montgomery points out that “we are hard-wired to trust one another, in spite of our natural wariness of strangers (p. 39).” This trust allows us to move past simply living together and improve.  The city challenges us to thrive together, and understand that our fate is a shared one (p. 42).

Montgomery also names potential accomplishments of the city, after it meets our basic needs of food, shelter and security (p. 43):

  • Maximize joy and minimize hardship
  • Lead us toward health, rather than sickness
  • Offer citizens real freedom to live, move and build our lives
  • Build resilience against economic and environmental shocks
  • Apportion – fairly – space, services, mobility, joys, hardships and costs
  • Enable us to build and strengthen bonds between friends, families and strangers (bonds that give life meaning and represent the city’s greatest achievement  and opportunity)
  • Acknowledge and celebrate our common fate, open doors to empathy and cooperation, to help us tackle great challenges

This list – his recipe – is an initial set of indicators for us to use as we ascertain if the cities we create are the cities we want.

How does your city fashion a common good?

 

 

Note

[1]  Ryff, Carol D., and B. H. Singer, “Know Thyself and Become What You Are: A Eudaimonic Approach to Psychological Well-Being,” Journal of Happiness Studies, 2006:13-29.