Book Review: Happy City by Charles Montgomery
One of my closest school friends, Conor, now lives with his wife and two kids in a dormitory commuter town in Maryland, USA. My partner and I went to visit about a decade ago and stupidly forgot to take our driving licenses so we couldn’t hire a car.
Our first full day there, we wanted to travel into Washington to do the tourist thing. Conor offered to drop us off at the railway station, but, as it was only a mile away, we said we’d walk. Conor said “No way. My Dad tried that once and he came back white and shaking. He had to cross several interstate slip roads and nearly died.” The idea that you couldn’t walk from a suburban house to a station a mile away – or to any form of shop or other amenity for that matter – simply stunned us.
This kind of living is the target of Charles Montgomery’s Happy City. He argues that uncontrolled sprawl makes us unhappy by locking us into our cars and failing to give us space to interact and be convivial. He travels the world to show us exemplars: Vancouver, Bogota, Paris, Freiburg (Germany) and Houten (the Netherlands). As he winds his way, he lightens the design theory with travelogue notes, touring the neighbourhoods with some of the experts he interviews and seeing first hand what they talking about.
While the focus is on the happiness of a city’s citizens, Montgomery cleverly weaves in the bigger picture of sustainability. The same solutions that make us happy – local services everybody can access by bus, by foot or on bike – come with a much lower carbon footprint than sprawl.
Montgomery acknowledges limitations in some attempts at urban design, but non-US readers would benefit from a deeper analysis of heroic failure (we already get the ‘sprawl bad’ message). For example, Malmö famously tried to design a car-free neighbourhood at Western Harbour but ended up having to retrofit a multi-storey carpark – and I could quote more. Given the theme of the book is urban design, it would be good to know why so many well-meaning designs have failed and others succeed.
That grumble aside, I was certainly inspired by Happy City. Any book that demonstrates so vividly that sustainability, happiness and economic vibrancy can go hand in hand is alright by me.