Happy City: A Job description

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 towards 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 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 design 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.

Charles Montgomery, “Happy City: transforming our lives through urban design”, (UK: Penguine Books, 2013), p.42