Montgomery’s Happy City is the Ethical City

On Thursday, April 4, author Charles Montgomery came to speak at Viterbo University about his book, Happy City, Ethical City. This was the last public lecture of the semester, and the kick off to the seventeenth Annual Ethics Conference at the university, which ran until April 6, the theme of the conference being ‘The Ethical City’, and explicitly planned around the themes presented in Montgomery’s book.

Montgomery spent over a decade writing this book, studying the intersection of urban design and human happiness. He and his team studied different cities across the world, trying to see how the way that cities are designed and built affect different aspects of a person’s life. The book draws from behavioral economics, neuroscience, psychology, architecture, sociology, public health and other disciplines to answer such a question. “A question that is becoming more important in a time of great social inequality,” Montgomery elaborated.

The Canadian urbanist started his talk with a social experiment. He instructed the audience to turn introduce themselves to someone sitting by them that they didn’t know, and treat them as if they were greeting an old friend they hadn’t seen in years. This is part of something called the ‘old friends’ experiment, in where having a trust building encounter with a stranger releases oxytocin in a person’s brain, something that, as the speaker explained “makes us feel good.”

This was partly to prove his point about how trust in the community increased the standard of living. Social trust is measured, in part, by a very simple question: “if you dropped your wallet and a stranger found it, how likely are you to get it back?” Citizens that answered greater likelihood of getting their wallets back lived in these happier cities.

Now, in how this related to urban design, Montgomery shared that things like surface parking reduces people’s sense of community, particularly in front of businesses. That is one of many examples as “cities change the ways we feel, move, and treat other people.”

Montgomery showcased the research that showed that people who walked and biked more often were on the whole led healthier and happier lives. However, fewer and fewer people in America are biking. The reason is because that in most places, Montgomery explains, the infrastructure simply isn’t there. “Bike lanes are horrible,” the urbanist comments, and urges new ones to be safe and separate from the traffic lanes utilized by cars.

Another way streets can be adjusted to better public health is in how wide they are. Numerous studies have shown that the wider the streets are, the faster drivers feel they can go, with the posted speed limit being a secondary factor. A car going faster means that if there is a collision, a pedestrian is more likely to be killed. So, narrower streets can literally save lives.

“Public health officials are begging cities to change to build more interconnected, walkable spaces,” Montgomery concludes, and finished up by talking about how the design in city systems is improving, as good urban development is better for budgets, reduce greenhouse emissions, and even help with public health.