“What city are you in?” Charles Montgomery asks on the other end of the video call. With another interviewee, the question might seem strange, but speaking with Montgomery it is not so. After all, what we are here to talk about is precisely cities and how their design can – or not – make us happier. Montgomery has dedicated a book to him, ‘Happy City’, which has just appeared in Spanish in Captain Swing.
What makes us happy and what doesn’t in our cities leads to analysis. The years of the pandemic and especially the period of confinement and de-escalation, when we discovered, thanks to that possible kilometer of daily travel, the green limitations of our neighborhoods, showed what we needed. It was a friendlier city, one that made us feel better, with more trees and more light in our houses.
Those months —and the experiences of teleworking— also made more evident the burden that the time lost commuting around the city represented for some people. A 2004 study that Montgomery collects in his book measured brain activity during commutes to work in a group of volunteers: at rush hour, the stress caused by traffic is greater than that felt by riot police before facing a demonstration . In the megacities, the average is to spend more than an hour on each of these journeys, which feel eternal.
The debate on the impact that the design of cities has on the quality of life of its inhabitants, even in an issue that may seem so subjective and difficult to approach from an academic point of view such as happiness, is not new. Experts in urban planning and many other subjects have been talking about it for decades, even centuries. In fact, ideas as old as model factory cities or 19th century garden cities addressed these questions in one way or another.
Even in the essence of today’s modern cities, those failed cities for happiness, there are reflections on what will make our lives better. Those cities of the 20th century —whether because of the capitalist model of the dispersed American city or because of the more left-wing of the legacy of Le Corbusier— believed that separating personal and work life would help improve the quality of life. It was the proposal that became the dominant model —or models— and fragmented our day-to-day life into compartments: the neighborhood for sleeping, the neighborhood for working, the neighborhood for shopping.
«I am not pessimistic about cities. I am very concerned about the fate of the world, but I know that cities are part of the solution.”
If two models with such different origins came to something so similar, were we then doomed to that unhappy city? Montgomery thinks for a while on the other side of the screen before saying that he is optimistic. “Our cities are a product of technology and politics, but also of human emotion and the brilliance and failure of human knowledge,” he recalls. “We will constantly be wrong, but we will also be right in many ways,” he notes.
If the current urban model fails —as studies and the experiences of its inhabitants indicate— and the death of cities does not seem imminent at all —UN statistics indicate that more and more people around the world will live in urban areas— The key is to change them. «I am not pessimistic about cities. I am very concerned about the fate of the world, but I know that cities are part of the solution,” says Montgomery.
The essence of the happy city
From the outset, perhaps we should not forget what a city is. As the expert recalls, “the purpose of a city is to unite people.”
But against the idea, there is the pragmatic list of what to do to change the design. “We need to prioritize people over cars. That’s the first rule of happy cities,” Montgomery says. “You can build a city that works for people or for cars, but you can’t do it for both at the same time,” she says. The examples of success that he shows in his book have been achieved by making public transport efficient and desirable, by opening the streets to bicycles or pedestrianization. Adding green areas and public service buildings are key elements.
“The purpose of a city is to bring people together”
Also, recalls the specialist, we must “rediscover complexity.” That is, it is necessary to understand that “a happy city is a city diverse in uses and people”, he indicates. In short, the antithesis of going to sleep in your neighborhood and commuting for 50 minutes to go to work the next morning.
This means embracing that spaces are shared —something in the end that is the essence of how European cities have always been: you lived in the same place where you do your shopping— and geographically close to people. Montgomery even sets a goal in minutes: it would be advisable to have everything accessible within an 8-minute walk from home. The public transport stop, the shops, the supermarket… “No one walks carrying weight for more than 8 minutes,” she explains.
Also, it’s crucial that people get out of the house. It is not only that you can buy or have a coffee in your neighborhood, it is also that you interact with others. It is not for nothing that the great epidemic of the 21st century is, it is said, that of loneliness.
And, of course, it has to be accessible to all its inhabitants. “You can’t build a happy city if low-income people, if the working class, can’t afford to live there,” he points out. For this reason, it is important that models that simplify renting be promoted, as it has done for decades, points out Montgomery, Vienna. Nor can it be a city emptied of its inhabitants and taken over by tourists.
The author himself knows it firsthand. «After writing this book, I lived through a very sad breakup. I felt terribly lonely and lived in a city with very expensive real estate. I tried to buy a house and couldn’t. I felt that the city rejected me », he says. What saved him, so to speak, was the urban model: he met a group of people who implemented a ‘cohousing’ model, living in apartments with common areas and shared resources that encourage their inhabitants to interact. It’s green, it’s sustainable and, above all, it’s human.
Because that is the summary of what changing urban design can mean. As Montgomery points out, it’s not just happiness, it’s also “the green city and the low-carbon city.”
More gardens and more health
Even redesigning cities can help solve other problems. The microbiologist Andrea Muras points out in ‘The war against superbugs’ how rethinking the design of cities can help improve the microbiota of its inhabitants, making it healthier. “Yes, I think it’s a very interesting approach,” she explains on the other end of the phone, “trying to give everyone a little corner of nature that they can go to.”
Parks or gardens could help “we have the opportunity to continue being exposed to those good bacteria of nature.” Green areas not only help us with the microbiota, they also improve physical health in general —they encourage us, for example, to be less sedentary— and mental health. We will be, as if it were the slogan of a yogurt advertisement, happy on the outside and happy on the inside.
Material for the culture war
And if few discuss urban problems —noise, pollution, lack of green areas— the same cannot be said of their solutions. Proposals to change the design of cities have become the latest material for culture wars, as has happened in recent months with the 15-minute city. Although its creator, Carlos Moreno, defines it as “neighborhood life, but in the 21st century”, interpretations of what it entails have become increasingly political.
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