Description
For this assignment you are being asked to produce an essay on the historic, sociological and ethical Perspectives on the smart city phenomenon – based on the literature covered as well as trends, definitions, facts, insights covered in class. Your essay need not to be summary of all content covered. Ideally it reads like a synthesis with a well articulated point of view of your own on where ‘urbanism’ is going, where our cities should be going, where digitalization should be going and why within the context of a modern urban innovation agenda today. We have covered so many aspects of the urbanism, smart city developments and 4IR’s impact on cities in ways that appear binary, but where synthesis is gold: centralized modes of organization versus networked, distributed designs; urbanism as a discipline of urban planning versus urbanism as a discipline of urban complexity and sociology; top down urban innovation management, versus bottom up; digitalization as an art uf urban efficiencies versus digitalization as a design shift. I encourage you to drive your own synthesis
One of the ways of approaching it would be to ask yourself the following question: if I were the Chief Innovation Officer of my City, I would aim for X, use Y, taking into consideration A, B, and C – using the literature in the process. As you may have discovered in class, I take a practical and applied leadership perspective on the content we cover. As noted per the beginning of the course, this is what I expect from you also. Drive thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis and apply. Assume you are that leader that needs to make tough decisions – applying what you have learned in the process. This is what I’m looking for. I will grade on the following aspects:
– Your understanding of the literature we have covered
– Your ability to arrive at your own point of views on the subject matter
– Your ability to translate the above in perspectives that are executable or help a person in charge execute on the topic at hand
– Your ability to arrive at synthesis on topics or aspects that easily polarize
– Quality of language/expression /narrative
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ALSO BY CHARLES MONTGOMERY
The Last Heathen: Encounters with Ghosts and
Ancestors in Melanesia
Copyright © 2013 Charles Montgomery
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any
form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or
stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the
case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada
Limited.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint a haiku from Honku:
The Zen Antidote to Road Rage by Aaron Naparstek, copyright © 2003
by Villard Books. Reprinted by permission of Aaron Naparstek.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Montgomery, Charles, 1968-, author
Happy city : transforming our lives through urban design / Charles Montgomery.
Includes bibliographical references.
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-66913-9
1. City planning. 2. Public spaces–Planning. 3. Architecture–Human factors.
4. Architecture and society. 5. Happiness. I. Title.
HT166.M66 2013
307.1’216
C2011-900111-X
C2012-907032-7
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.randomhouse.ca
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157
million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi
157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout
le pays.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
1. The Mayor of Happy
2. The City Has Always Been a Happiness Project
3. The (Broken) Social Scene
4. How We Got Here
5. Getting It Wrong
6. How to Be Closer
7. Convivialities
8. Mobilicities I: How Moving Feels, and Why
It Does Not Feel Better
9. Mobilicities II: Freedom
10. Who Is the City For?
11. Everything Is Connected to Everything Else
12. Retro tting Sprawl
13. Save Your City, Save Yourself
Epilogue: The Beginning
Notes
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
1. The Mayor of Happy
There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work,
in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own
problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself … The fact is, a
person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends
entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.
—Christopher Alexander,
The Timeless Way of Building
I chased the politician through the bowels of a dull cement o ce
block on the edge of a twelve-lane freeway. Everything about him
suggested urgency. He hollered with the hurried fervor of a
preacher. He wore the kind of close-trimmed beard favored by men
who don’t like to waste time shaving. He jogged through the
building’s basement parking deck in a long-legged canter, like a
center forward charging for a long pass.
Two bodyguards trotted behind him, their pistols jostling in
holsters. There was nothing remarkable about that, given his
profession—and his locale. Enrique Peñalosa was a perennial
politician on yet another campaign, and this was Bogotá, a city
with a spectacular reputation for kidnappings and assassination.
What was unusual was this: Peñalosa didn’t climb into the armored
SUV typical of most public gures in Colombia. Instead, he hopped
on a knobby-tired mountain bike and quickly cranked his way up a
ramp into the searing Andean sunlight. Then he was o , jumping
curbs and potholes, riding one-handed, weaving across the
pavement, and barking into his cell phone while his pin-striped
trousers apped in the breeze. His bodyguards, a photographer,
and I all pedaled madly behind, like a throng of teenagers in the
wake of a rock star.
A few years earlier, this ride would have been a radical and—in
the opinion of many Bogotanos—suicidal act. If you wanted to be
assaulted, asphyxiated by exhaust, or run over, Bogotá’s streets
were the place to be. But now it was 2007, and Peñalosa insisted
that things had changed. We would be safe. The city had gotten
happier, thanks to his plan. Happier—that was the word he used
over and over again, as though he owned it.
Young women giggled as he passed. Overall-clad laborers
waved.
“Mayor! Mayor!” a few of them shouted in Spanish, though it
had been six years since Peñalosa had held that job, and his
campaign to regain it had barely begun. He waved back with his
phone hand.
“Buenos días, hermosa!” he said to the girls.
“¿Cómo le va?” he answered the men.
“Hola, amigo!” he o ered to anyone who looked his way.
“We’re living an experiment,” he nally yelled back at me as he
pocketed his cell phone. “We might not be able to x the economy.
We might not be able to make everyone as rich as Americans. But
we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel
rich. The city can make them happier.”
There it was, the declaration I have seen bring tears to so many
eyes with its promise of urban revolution and redemption.
It’s been six years since my ride with the Mayor of Happy, but the
memory has remained with me, as vivid as the Andean sun. That
was the day the journey began.
You may never have heard of Enrique Peñalosa. You may not
have been among the crowds that gave him a hero’s welcome in
New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, Lagos, or Mexico City over the
last decade. You may never have seen him raise his arms like an
evangelist or holler his philosophy over the noise of a hundred
idling car engines. But his grand experiment and his even grander
rhetoric inspire an urbanist fervor wherever he goes. Peñalosa has
become one of the central gures in a movement that is changing
the structure and soul of cities around the world.
I rst saw Peñalosa work his rhetorical magic back in the spring
of 2006. The United Nations had just announced that some day in
the following months, one more child would be born in an urban
hospital or a migrant would stumble into a metropolitan
shantytown, and from that moment on, more than half the world’s
people would be living in cities. Hundreds of millions more were
on their way. By 2030 almost ve billion of us will be urban. That
spring, Habitat, the UN’s agency for human settlements, called
thousands of mayors, engineers, bureaucrats, and do-gooders
together for the World Urban Forum. The delegates met in a
harborside convention center in Vancouver to gure out how to
save the world’s exploding cities from disaster.
The world had little inkling of the great recession slouching on
the horizon, yet the prognosis was bleak. The problem? On the one
hand, cities were pumping out most of the world’s pollution and 80
percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. On the other, all
predictions suggested that cities were going to be slammed by the
e ects of climate change, from heat waves and water scarcity to
waves of migrants running from droughts, oods, and water wars.
The experts agreed that cities would bear more than three-quarters
of the cost of adapting to global warming. They would be short on
energy, tax revenue, and jobs. There seemed to be no way they
were going to be able to help citizens meet the goals of security
and prosperity that urbanization had always seemed to promise.
The gathering was sobering.
But the mood changed when Peñalosa took the podium. He told
the mayors that there was hope, that the great migration was not a
threat—no!—it was a tremendous opportunity to reinvent urban
life. As poor cities doubled or tripled in size, they could avoid the
mistakes that rich cities had made. They could o er their citizens
lives that were better, stronger, freer, and more joyful than those
o ered by most cities of the day. But to accomplish this, they
would have to completely rethink their beliefs about what cities
are for. They would have to let go of a century of thought about
city building. They would have to let go of some of their dreams.
To make his point, Peñalosa told a story.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, Bogotá had become a
truly horrible place to live—one of the very worst on earth.
Overwhelmed with refugees; seared by a decades-old civil war and
sporadic terrorism in the form of grenades and rebombs (deadly
“explosive potatoes” being the most common means of attack);
and hobbled by tra c, pollution, poverty, and dysfunction, the
Colombian capital was regarded both at home and abroad as a
living hell.
When Peñalosa ran for the mayor’s seat back in 1997, he refused
to make the promises doled out by so many politicians. He was not
going to make everyone richer. Forget the dream of becoming as
wealthy as Americans: it would take generations to catch up to the
gringos, even if the urban economy caught re and burned blue for
a century. The dream of riches, Peñalosa complained, served only
to make Bogotans feel bad.
“If we de ned our success just in terms of income per capita, we
would have to accept ourselves as second- or third-rate societies—
as a bunch of losers,” he said. No, the city needed a new goal.
Peñalosa promised neither a car in every garage nor a socialist
revolution. His promise was simple. He was going to make
Bogotans happier.
“And what are our needs for happiness?” he asked. “We need to
walk, just as birds need to y. We need to be around other people.
We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we
need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality.”
Ironically, in giving up the chase for the American dream,
Peñalosa was invoking a goal set out in the American Constitution:
by pursuing a di erent kind of happiness, Bogotans, despite their
relatively meager paychecks, really could beat the gringos.
These days, the world is not lacking for happiness gurus. Some
insist that spiritual practice is the answer. Others tell us that we
must simply ask the universe for prosperity, that we can get closer
to God by getting richer, and get richer by inching closer to God.
But Peñalosa did not call for mass counseling or religious
indoctrination or state-funded courses in positive psychology. He
did not preach the law of attraction or the tenets of transformative
wealth. This was a gospel of transformative urbanism. The city
itself could be a device for happiness. Life could be improved, even
amid economic doldrums, by changing the shapes and systems that
de ned urban existence.
Peñalosa attributed an almost transcendent power to a certain
kind of urbanity. “Most things that people buy in stores give them
a lot of satisfaction the moment they buy them,” Peñalosa told me.
“But after a few days, that satisfaction decreases, and months
later, it completely melts away. But great public space is a kind of
magical good. It never ceases to yield happiness. It’s almost
happiness itself.” The humble sidewalk, the park, the bike path,
and the bus were suddenly elevated to the psycho-spiritual realm.
Peñalosa insisted that like most cities, Bogotá had been left
deeply wounded by the twentieth century’s dual urban legacy:
First, the city had been gradually reoriented around private
automobiles. Second, public spaces and resources had largely been
privatized. Cars and mobile vendors took over public plazas and
sidewalks. People had walled or fenced in what were once public
parks. In an age where even most of the poor had televisions,
common civic space was disregarded and degraded.
This reorganization was both unfair—only one in ve families
even owned a car—and cruel. Urban residents had been denied the
opportunity to enjoy the city’s simplest daily pleasures: walking on
convivial streets; sitting around in public; talking; gazing at grass,
water, falling leaves, and other people. And playing: children had
largely disappeared from Bogotá’s streets—not because of the fear
of gun re or abduction, but because the streets had been rendered
dangerous by sheer speed. When any parent shouted, “Watch out!”
everyone in Bogotá knew that a child was in danger of being run
over. So Peñalosa’s rst and most de ning act as mayor was to
declare war: not on crime or drugs or poverty, but on private cars.
“A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but
it can’t be both,” he announced.
He then threw out the city’s ambitious highway expansion plan
and instead poured his budget into hundreds of miles of bike paths;
a vast new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas; and a network of
new libraries, schools, and day-care centers. He built the city’s rst
rapid transit system, using buses instead of trains. He hiked gas
taxes and banned drivers from commuting by car more than three
times a week. I’ll discuss the details later, but the thing to
understand here is that this program redesigned the experience of
city living for millions of people, and it was an utter rejection of
the philosophies that have guided city builders around the world
for more than half a century. It was the opposite of the city that
North American laws, habits, the real estate industry, nancing
arrangements, and development ideologies have favored. In
particular, it was the opposite of the vision that millions of middleclass people around the world have chased to suburbia.
In the third year of his term Peñalosa challenged Bogotans to
participate in an experiment, a día sin carro. As of dawn on
February 24, 2000, all private cars were banned from city streets
for the day. More than eight hundred thousand vehicles sat still
that Thursday. Buses were jam-packed and taxis hard to come by,
but hundreds of thousands of people followed Peñalosa’s example
and hit the streets under their own steam, walking, cycling,
skating to work and school.
It was the rst day in four years that nobody was killed in
tra c. Hospital admissions fell by almost a third. The toxic haze
over the city thinned. People still got to work, and schools reported
normal attendance. Bogotans enjoyed the day so much that they
voted to make it a yearly a air, and to ban all private cars during
rush hour every day by 2015. People told pollsters that they were
more optimistic about city life than they had been in years.
Peñalosa recounts this story with all the fervor of Martin Luther
King on the Washington Mall, and with similar e ect. I saw three
thousand people at the World Urban Forum leap up from their
chairs and cheer in response. UN statisticians brought their hands
together despite themselves. Indian economists beamed and
loosened their ties. Senegalese delegates shook and danced in their
carnival-colored wraps. Mexican architects whistled. My heart beat
faster, too. Peñalosa seemed to be a rming what so many urban
thinkers are sure of, but very rarely have the guts or the audacity
to say. The city is a means to a way of life. It can be a re ection of
all our best selves. It can be whatever we want it to be.
It can change, and change dramatically.
The Movement
Is urban design really powerful enough to make or break
happiness? The question deserves consideration because the happy
city message is taking root around the world. Since Peñalosa’s
three-year term in o ce—consecutive terms are illegal in
Colombia—delegations from dozens of cities have landed in Bogotá
to study its transformation. Peñalosa and his younger brother,
Guillermo, the city’s former parks manager, were called to advise
cities on every continent. While the elder proselytized from
Shanghai to Jakarta to Lagos, the younger hit Guadalajara, Mexico
City, and Toronto. While Guillermo whipped up hundreds of
activists in Portland, Enrique was urging planners in Los Angeles
to let tra c become so unbearable that drivers simply abandoned
their cars. In 2006 Enrique Peñalosa was the talk of Manhattan
after he announced to crowds of gridlock-obsessed New Yorkers
they should ban vehicles entirely from Broadway. Three years
later, the impossible vision began to come to life around Times
Square. The happy city had gone global.
The Peñalosa brothers are far from alone in the happy city
crusade. The movement has its roots in the antimodernist foment
of the 1960s and has gradually drawn architects, neighborhood
activists, public health experts, transportation engineers, network
theorists, and politicians into a battle for the shape and soul of
cities—a confrontation that is nally reaching critical mass. They
have torn down freeways in Seoul and San Francisco and
Milwaukee. They have experimented with the height, shape, and
facades of buildings. They have turned the black top of suburban
shopping malls into mini-villages. They have recon gured entire
towns to better suit children. They have torn down backyard fences
and reclaimed neighborhood intersections. They are reorganizing
the systems that hold cities together and rewriting the rules that
dictate the shapes and functions of our buildings. Some of these
people aren’t even aware that they are part of the same
movement, but together they are aiming a wrecking ball at many
of the places we have spent the last half century building.
Peñalosa insists that the unhappiest cities in the world, the ones
perfectly calibrated to turn wealth into hardship, are not the
seething metropolises of Africa or South America. “The most
dynamic economies of the twentieth century produced the most
miserable cities of all,” Peñalosa told me over the roar of tra c in
Bogotá. “I’m talking about the U.S., of course—Atlanta, Phoenix,
Miami, cities totally dominated by private cars.”
For most Americans, the claim that prosperity and the cherished
automobile propelled wealthy cities away from happiness is
practically heresy. It is one thing for a Colombian politician to
o er advice to the world’s poor, but it is quite another for him to
suggest that the world’s most powerful nation should be taking
design criticism born on the potholed byways of South America. If
Peñalosa is right, then not only have generations of planners,
engineers, politicians, and land developers been mistaken, but
millions of us have taken a wrong turn on the road to the good
life.
But then again, over the last few decades, prosperity and wellbeing in America have followed completely di erent trajectories.
The Happiness Paradox
If one was to judge by sheer wealth, the last half century should
have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the United
States and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan, and Great
Britain. Riches were piled upon riches. By the turn of the century,
Americans traveled more, ate more, bought more, used more space,
and threw away more stu than ever before. More people than
ever got to live the dream of having their own detached home. The
stock of cars—and bedrooms and toilets—far surpassed the number
of humans who used them.* It was an age of unprecedented bounty
and growth, at least until the great recession of 2008 stuck a
needle into the balloon of optimism and easy credit.
And yet the boom decades of the late twentieth century were not
accompanied by a boom in happiness. Surveys show that people’s
assessment of their own well-being in the United States pretty
much atlined during that time. It was the same with citizens in
Japan and the United Kingdom. Canada fared only slightly better.
China, the new star of supercharged GDP growth, is providing yet
more evidence of a paradox. Between 1999 and 2010, a decade in
which average purchasing power in China grew more than
threefold, people’s ratings of their own life satisfaction stalled,
according to Gallup polls (although urbanized Chinese were
happier than their rural cousins).
In the nal decades of the last century, Americans increasingly
complained of personal problems. By 2005 clinical depression was
three to ten times as common as it was two generations ago. By
2010, one in ten Americans reported that they su ered from
depression. Six to eight times as many college students experienced
depression in 2007 as they did in 1938. Although this may be
partly due to cultural factors—it’s now more acceptable to talk
about depression—objective mental health statistics are not
encouraging. High school and college students—the easiest group
to survey—climbed higher and higher on what mental health
researchers cheerily call the Paranoia, Hysteria, Hypochondriasis,
and Depression scales. One in ten Americans is taking
antidepressants.
Analysis from free-market think tanks such as the Cato Institute
assures us that “high levels of economic freedom and high average
incomes are among the strongest correlates of subjective wellbeing,” which is to say that being rich and free should make us
happier. So why wasn’t the half-century surge in wealth
accompanied by a surge in happiness? What was counteracting the
e ect of all that money?
Some psychologists point to the phenomenon dubbed the
“hedonic treadmill”: the natural human tendency to shift our
expectations along with our changing fortunes. The treadmill
theory suggests that the richer you get, the more you compare
yourself to other rich people and the faster the wheel of desire
spins beneath your feet, so that you end up feeling as though you
haven’t made any progress. Others blame the growing income gap,
and the realization by millions of middle-class Americans that they
were falling farther behind the richest members of society,
especially during the last two decades. There is some explanatory
truth in both of these theories, but economists have crunched the
survey numbers and concluded that they only partially explain that
widening gap between material and emotional wealth.
Consider this: The decades-long expansion in the American
economy paralleled the migration of society from the country to
cities, and from cities to the in-between world of sprawl. Since
1940, almost all urban growth has actually been suburban. In the
decade before the big bust of 2008, the economy was driven to a
large extent by the boundless cul-de-sac-ing, tract housing, and bigbox power centering of the landscape at the urban fringe. For a
time, it was impossible to separate growth from suburbanization.
They were the same thing. More people than ever got exactly what
they thought they wanted. Everything we have come to believe
about the good life would suggest that this suburban boom was
good for happiness. Why didn’t it work? And why was faith in this
model so quick to evaporate? The urban shake-up that began with
the mortgage crisis in 2008 hit the newest, shiniest, most sprawling
parts of the American city the hardest.
Peñalosa’s argument was that too many rich societies have used
their wealth in ways that exacerbate urban problems rather than
solve them. Could this help explain the happiness paradox?
It’s certainly a good time to consider the idea, now that tens of
thousands of freshly paved cul-de-sacs across the United States
have passed six springs without sprouting new homes. From the
United States to Ireland to Spain, communities on the edge of
suburban sprawl, that most American of forms, have yet to regain
their precrash value. The future of cities is uncertain.
We have reached a rare moment in history where societies and
markets appear to be teetering between the status quo and a
radical change in the way we live and the way we design our lives
in cities. For the rst time in nine decades, census data in
2010/2011 showed that major American cities experienced more
growth than their suburbs. It’s too early to tell if this is a complete
turning of the tide of urban dispersal. Many forces are at play,
from the lingering housing market slowdown and high
unemployment to historically low population mobility. But other
forces are systemic and powerful enough to permanently alter the
course of urban history.
First is a reckoning on energy. It will probably never again be
inexpensive to ll a gas tank. There is too little easy oil left in the
ground, and there are too many people competing for it. The same
goes for other nonrenewable forms of energy and raw materials.
The sprawl city requires cheap energy, cheap land, and cheap
materials, and the days of cheap are over. Another force is a truth
acknowledged by every sober, informed observer: cities are
contributing to the crisis of climate change. If we are going to
avoid the cataclysmic e ects of global warming, we must nd
more e cient ways to build and live. Of course it is not at all
certain that a rush back to urban density will produce better lives
than did suburban dispersal.
But the happy city theory presents an alluring possibility.
If a poor and broken city such as Bogotá can be recon gured to
produce more joy, then surely it’s possible to apply happy city
principles to the wounds of wealthy places. And if more
extravagant, private, polluting, and energy-hungry communities
have failed to deliver on happiness, then the search for a happier
city might well be expected to reveal a greener, more resilient city,
a place that saves the world while saving our own lives. If there
was a science behind it, presumably that science could also be used
to show how all of us might renovate good feelings in our
communities.
Of course, Peñalosa’s rhetoric is not science; it raises as many
questions as it answers. Its inspirational qualities do not constitute
proof of the city’s power to make or break happiness, any more
than the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” is proof that all you really
do need is love. To test the idea, you would have to decide what
you meant by happiness, and you would need a way to measure it.
You would have to understand how a road, a bus, a park, or a
building might contribute to good feelings. You would have to
tabulate the psychological e ects of driving in tra c, or catching
the eye of a stranger on the sidewalk, or pausing in a pocket park,
or of feeling crowded or lonely, or of the simple feeling that the
city you live in is a good or bad place. You would have to go
beyond politics and philosophy to nd a map of the ingredients of
happiness, if it exists at all.
The cheers in that Vancouver ballroom echoed in my ears for the
ve years I spent charting the intersection of urban design and the
so-called science of happiness. The quest led me to some of the
world’s greatest and most miserable streets. It led me through the
labyrinths of neuroscience and behavioral economics. I found clues
in paving stones, on rail lines, and on roller coasters, in
architecture, in the stories of strangers who shared their lives with
me, and in my own urban experiments. I will share that search
with you, and its hopeful message, in the rest of this book.
One memory from early in the journey has stuck with me,
perhaps because it carries both the sweetness and the subjective
slipperiness of the happiness we sometimes nd in cities.
It occurred on the afternoon that I chased Enrique Peñalosa
through the streets of Bogotá. Just as he had insisted on that rst
ride, our cycle across what was once one of the most infamous of
cities was a breeze. The streets were virtually empty of cars.
Nearly a million of them had stayed home that morning. Yes, it
was el día sin carro, the car-free experiment that had grown into a
yearly ritual.
At rst the streets felt slightly eerie, like landscapes from a postapocalyptic Twilight Zone episode. All the rumble and roar of the
city quieted. Gradually we expanded into the space left by the cars.
I let go of my fear. It was as though an immense tension had been
lifted from Bogotá, as though the city could nally shake out its
exhaustion and breathe. The sky was a piercing blue. The air was
clear.
Peñalosa, who was running for reelection, needed to be seen out
on his bicycle that day. He stumped compulsively, hollering that
same “Cómo le va” at anyone who appeared to recognize him. But
this did not explain his haste or his quickening pace as we
traversed the north end of the city toward the Andean foothills. He
stopped answering his phone. He stopped answering my questions.
He ignored the whimpers of the photographer who crashed his
bicycle on the curb ahead of him. He gripped his handlebars with
both hands, stood up, and muscled into his pedals. It was all I
could do to keep up with him, block after block, until we arrived at
a compound ringed by a high iron fence. Peñalosa dismounted,
breathing hard.
Boys in crisp white shirts and matching uniforms poured through
a gate. One of them, a bright-eyed ten-year-old, pushed a
miniature version of Peñalosa’s own bicycle through the crowd.
Peñalosa reached out, and suddenly I understood his haste. The guy
had been rushing to pick up his son from school, as other parents
were doing that very moment all up and down the time zone.
Millions of minivans, motorbikes, hatchbacks, and buses were
congregating outside schools from Toronto to Tampa at this very
moment—the same ritual, the same drumming of steering wheels,
the same stop and go, the same corralling and ferrying of children.
Only here, in the heart of one of the meanest, poorest cities in the
hemisphere, father and son would roll away from the school gate
for a carefree ride across the metropolis. This was an unthinkable
act in most modern cities. It was also a demonstration of
Peñalosa’s urban revolution, a terri c photo op for the happy city.
The Mayor of Happy
Enrique Peñalosa in Bogotá, 2007 (Andrés Felipe Jara Moreno, Fundación por el País Que
Queremos)
“Look,” he yelled to me, waving his cell phone toward the
bicycles that ooded around us. “Can you imagine if we designed
the entire city for children?”
We followed a wide avenue that had indeed lled with children,
as well as suited businessmen, young ladies in short skirts, apronclad ice-cream men pushing refrigerated tricycles, and vendors
selling sweet arepas from pushcart ovens. They did seem happy.
And Peñalosa’s son was safe—not because of those bodyguards, but
because he could travel freely, even veer that bike wildly o course
without fear of being struck by a speeding automobile. As the sun
fell and the Andes caught re, we arced our way along the wideopen avenues, then west along a highway built just for bicycles.
The kid raced ahead. Peñalosa let go of his impulse to campaign.
He followed his son, laughing, and the bodyguards hu ed and
pedaled hard to catch up, and Juan, the photographer, wobbled
behind on his bent rims.
At that point I wasn’t sure about Peñalosa’s ideology. Who was
to say that one way of moving was better than another? How
could anyone know enough about the needs of the human soul to
prescribe the ideal city for happiness?
But for a moment I forgot my questions. I let my handlebars go,
raised my arms in the air in the cooling breeze, and remembered
my own childhood of country roads, afterschool wanderings, lazy
rides, and pure freedom. I felt ne. The city was mine.
* Americans used to get by with one bathroom. Now half of households have two or more. In
1950 there was one car for every three Americans. By 2011 there were almost enough motor
vehicles to put every man, woman, and drooling baby behind a wheel. In 2010 Americans
racked up more than double the highway miles than in 1960. They ew ten times as far in
airplanes. Their new homes o ered more than three times as much square footage for each
inhibitant. The wealth explosion was even re ected in land lls: in 2010 the average person
produced nearly four and a half pounds of garbage every day—a 60 percent jump from 1960.
2. The City Has Always Been a Happiness
Project
The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has
never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one … We
will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men show by their
behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of
life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They
strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to
do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we
ought not to do.
—Aristotle, Rhetoric
If you wandered into the city-state of Athens a little over twentyfour hundred years ago, you would invariably nd your way to the
agora, a broad plaza lled with market stalls and lined by the
Athenian governing council’s meeting chambers, law courts,
marbled temples, altars to gods, and statues of heroes. It was a
glorious place, simultaneously stately and messy with commerce. If
you pushed your way through the crowds of shoppers and vendors,
you might have encountered
