WHO doesn't want health + happiness?
Adapted from Happy City by Charles Montgomery.
More people than ever in this country now have the economic freedom to buy pretty much what they want, from flat screen televisions, to foreign holidays and new cars. And for most people what they want, ultimately, is stuff that will make them happy and keep them healthy. Based on this logic, it would seem that a suburban lifestyle must be great for our happiness as we continue to build and buy homes on large, dispersed estates that contain little else other than more houses that are all the same as each other. It fulfils people’s preferences for privacy, mobility and detachment from the problems associated with dense, urban living.
This has been backed up by the economists who have insisted that as long as the economy continues to grow and people's incomes increase, life has been getting better and people have been getting happier. But since the 1960s when most first world countries hit a decent standard of living, people’s happiness and gross national product stopped following the same trajectory. Income is important to happiness, but is only part of the equation. When it comes to life satisfaction, once people reach a certain standard of living it is the quality and quantity of our relationships with other people, not our income that has the greatest influence on our happiness.
No matter how much we may cherish privacy and solitude, strong, positive relationships appear to be at the heart of a happy life, and nothing matters more to our happiness than our relationships with other people. As much as we may complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than living in a social desert.
Our personal social landscape is primarily determined by the distance that we must travel every day to live our lives, which in-turn, is determined by the layout of our towns or cities. Commute 60 miles a day by car and the chances are that your relationships with everyone from your spouse to that guy who’s always tending his garden at the end of the road will be poorer than if you could walk to work in 15 minutes. And yet the towns and cities that we have been designing, and the homes that we have been buying seem to not just ignore this fact, but actively act against it.
Increased mobility has offered us the opportunity to seemingly have our cake and eat it – to live in the middle of nowhere and work in the centre of our towns and cities. To have the benefits of the countryside and of urbanity at the same time. But as we continue to suburbanise we are actually making it harder for social interactions to occur.
The form of our towns and cities shapes our travel behaviour. For at least the last half-a-century the majority of Government investment in the way that we travel has focused on the car and its requirements. For many people, if they woke up tomorrow morning and decided to leave the car at home and wanted to take a different mode of transport to work or to school or to the shops then realistically they probably couldn’t. Real choice has been designed out of these places. For those who do not have access to a car, who have no choices at all, there is no access to jobs or education or stores, never mind parties or cinemas or restaurants.
People who live in entirely residential, car-dependent neighbourhoods outside of urban centres are much less trusting of other people than those who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services and places to work. They are also much less likely to know their neighbours. They are less likely to get involved with social groups and even less likely to participate in politics. They don’t answer petitions, don’t attend rallies and don’t join political parties or social advocacy groups. Most importantly these people are being starved of the casual social encounters that keep people connected, strong and healthy.
Trust is the bedrock on which towns and cities grow and thrive and our towns and cities depend on our ability to think beyond the family and the tribe. We need to be able to trust the people who look, dress and act nothing like us to treat us fairly, to honour commitments and contracts, to consider our well-being along with their own, and most of all, to make sacrifices for the general good. Collective problems such as pollution and climate change demand collective responses. Civilisation is a shared project. But if the design of our towns and cities actively discourage the informal interactions on which we build an understanding and an empathy for one another then this trust cannot be generated.
Add to this the fact that suburbs take up more space per person, and they are more expensive to build and operate than any urban form ever constructed. They require more roads for every resident, more water pipes, more sewers, more power cables, utility wiring, pavements, signposts and landscaping. They cost more for Councils to maintain, and to protect with emergency services, and they pollute more and pump more carbon into the atmosphere. In short, the dispersed city is the most expensive, resource-intensive, land-gobbling, polluting way of living ever built.
The problem is that we just aren’t that well equipped to make decisions that maximise our happiness. We struggle to perceive the value of things in absolute terms. This means that we are always comparing what we have with the next thing that we want to buy. What we don’t anticipate is that no matter what we have, we will always be comparing it with something else. The result is that we consistently fail to distinguish between fleeting and lasting pleasures. For example, we put far too much weight on obvious differences between homes, such as the number of bathrooms and architectural features, and far too little on things that are not so glaringly different, such as the sense of community and the quality of relationships that could be developed.
Although it is true that most of us say we would prefer to live in a walkable community over one that forces us to drive long distances, most of us also want to live in a detached home with plenty of privacy and space. We are torn between competing needs, with none being more contradictory than the push-pull between proximity and isolation. While we do need the nourishing, helping warmth of other people, we also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but we also need to retreat. The ideal world becomes one in which we reap the benefits of other people choosing to live in apartments and town houses nearby, but not close enough to disturb our sleep. This is a classic social dilemma where we will all be better off if we live in compact towns and cities, but any one of us would individually be better off in our own little piece of suburbia not too far away.
However the detached house in suburbia is a blunt instrument: it is a powerful tool for retreating with your nuclear family and perhaps your neighbours, but a terrible base from which to nurture other intensities of relationships. Your social life must be scheduled and formal. Serendipity disappears in the time eaten up by the commute.
Our forebears recognised the advantages of coming together in towns and cities to trade, to talk, to learn and to socialise. This was the purpose of towns and cities – to bring people together so that their efforts could be greater than the sum of their parts. That advantage still remains. But towns and cities are not without their potential problems. Life in places that feel too crowded to control can leave us overstimulated and exhausted such that we retreat into isolation. Any successful town or city must provide places that help us moderate our interactions with strangers without having to retreat entirely. The critical issue for creating sociability is not human density per se, but rather our ability to control when and how much we interact with others. The richest social environments are those in which we feel free to edge closer together or move further apart as we wish. They scale not abruptly but gradually, from private realm to semi-private to public.
We need to start thinking more about what will make us all happier in the long-term and what this means for the places where we live. Towns and cities must be regarded as more than engines of wealth. Rather, they must be viewed as systems that should be shaped to improve human well-being. We all want to be happy and healthy, and it appears that the secret to this is a broad and deep social life that goes beyond our immediate friends and family. As nothing seems to govern the number and quality of these relationships as much as the type of neighbourhood in which we live, it’s time we started promoting and investing in more compact towns and cities rather than suburbs and estates. The fact they are also our best response to the challenges of climate change and economic growth seems like a pretty useful bonus.
This has been backed up by the economists who have insisted that as long as the economy continues to grow and people's incomes increase, life has been getting better and people have been getting happier. But since the 1960s when most first world countries hit a decent standard of living, people’s happiness and gross national product stopped following the same trajectory. Income is important to happiness, but is only part of the equation. When it comes to life satisfaction, once people reach a certain standard of living it is the quality and quantity of our relationships with other people, not our income that has the greatest influence on our happiness.
No matter how much we may cherish privacy and solitude, strong, positive relationships appear to be at the heart of a happy life, and nothing matters more to our happiness than our relationships with other people. As much as we may complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than living in a social desert.
Our personal social landscape is primarily determined by the distance that we must travel every day to live our lives, which in-turn, is determined by the layout of our towns or cities. Commute 60 miles a day by car and the chances are that your relationships with everyone from your spouse to that guy who’s always tending his garden at the end of the road will be poorer than if you could walk to work in 15 minutes. And yet the towns and cities that we have been designing, and the homes that we have been buying seem to not just ignore this fact, but actively act against it.
Increased mobility has offered us the opportunity to seemingly have our cake and eat it – to live in the middle of nowhere and work in the centre of our towns and cities. To have the benefits of the countryside and of urbanity at the same time. But as we continue to suburbanise we are actually making it harder for social interactions to occur.
The form of our towns and cities shapes our travel behaviour. For at least the last half-a-century the majority of Government investment in the way that we travel has focused on the car and its requirements. For many people, if they woke up tomorrow morning and decided to leave the car at home and wanted to take a different mode of transport to work or to school or to the shops then realistically they probably couldn’t. Real choice has been designed out of these places. For those who do not have access to a car, who have no choices at all, there is no access to jobs or education or stores, never mind parties or cinemas or restaurants.
People who live in entirely residential, car-dependent neighbourhoods outside of urban centres are much less trusting of other people than those who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services and places to work. They are also much less likely to know their neighbours. They are less likely to get involved with social groups and even less likely to participate in politics. They don’t answer petitions, don’t attend rallies and don’t join political parties or social advocacy groups. Most importantly these people are being starved of the casual social encounters that keep people connected, strong and healthy.
Trust is the bedrock on which towns and cities grow and thrive and our towns and cities depend on our ability to think beyond the family and the tribe. We need to be able to trust the people who look, dress and act nothing like us to treat us fairly, to honour commitments and contracts, to consider our well-being along with their own, and most of all, to make sacrifices for the general good. Collective problems such as pollution and climate change demand collective responses. Civilisation is a shared project. But if the design of our towns and cities actively discourage the informal interactions on which we build an understanding and an empathy for one another then this trust cannot be generated.
Add to this the fact that suburbs take up more space per person, and they are more expensive to build and operate than any urban form ever constructed. They require more roads for every resident, more water pipes, more sewers, more power cables, utility wiring, pavements, signposts and landscaping. They cost more for Councils to maintain, and to protect with emergency services, and they pollute more and pump more carbon into the atmosphere. In short, the dispersed city is the most expensive, resource-intensive, land-gobbling, polluting way of living ever built.
The problem is that we just aren’t that well equipped to make decisions that maximise our happiness. We struggle to perceive the value of things in absolute terms. This means that we are always comparing what we have with the next thing that we want to buy. What we don’t anticipate is that no matter what we have, we will always be comparing it with something else. The result is that we consistently fail to distinguish between fleeting and lasting pleasures. For example, we put far too much weight on obvious differences between homes, such as the number of bathrooms and architectural features, and far too little on things that are not so glaringly different, such as the sense of community and the quality of relationships that could be developed.
Although it is true that most of us say we would prefer to live in a walkable community over one that forces us to drive long distances, most of us also want to live in a detached home with plenty of privacy and space. We are torn between competing needs, with none being more contradictory than the push-pull between proximity and isolation. While we do need the nourishing, helping warmth of other people, we also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but we also need to retreat. The ideal world becomes one in which we reap the benefits of other people choosing to live in apartments and town houses nearby, but not close enough to disturb our sleep. This is a classic social dilemma where we will all be better off if we live in compact towns and cities, but any one of us would individually be better off in our own little piece of suburbia not too far away.
However the detached house in suburbia is a blunt instrument: it is a powerful tool for retreating with your nuclear family and perhaps your neighbours, but a terrible base from which to nurture other intensities of relationships. Your social life must be scheduled and formal. Serendipity disappears in the time eaten up by the commute.
Our forebears recognised the advantages of coming together in towns and cities to trade, to talk, to learn and to socialise. This was the purpose of towns and cities – to bring people together so that their efforts could be greater than the sum of their parts. That advantage still remains. But towns and cities are not without their potential problems. Life in places that feel too crowded to control can leave us overstimulated and exhausted such that we retreat into isolation. Any successful town or city must provide places that help us moderate our interactions with strangers without having to retreat entirely. The critical issue for creating sociability is not human density per se, but rather our ability to control when and how much we interact with others. The richest social environments are those in which we feel free to edge closer together or move further apart as we wish. They scale not abruptly but gradually, from private realm to semi-private to public.
We need to start thinking more about what will make us all happier in the long-term and what this means for the places where we live. Towns and cities must be regarded as more than engines of wealth. Rather, they must be viewed as systems that should be shaped to improve human well-being. We all want to be happy and healthy, and it appears that the secret to this is a broad and deep social life that goes beyond our immediate friends and family. As nothing seems to govern the number and quality of these relationships as much as the type of neighbourhood in which we live, it’s time we started promoting and investing in more compact towns and cities rather than suburbs and estates. The fact they are also our best response to the challenges of climate change and economic growth seems like a pretty useful bonus.
