Quotes from Charles Montgomery

The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness.

Happiness is a house with many rooms, but at its core is a hearth around which we gather with family, friends, the community, and sometimes even strangers to find the best part of ourselves.

You are important—not because you're rich, but because you are human.

listen to the parts of ourselves that are more inclined toward curiosity, trust, and cooperation.

We were born to move—not merely to be transported,

having one friend or family member to confide in had the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income.

a human on a bicycle is the most efficient traveler among all machines and animals.

Partly because sprawl has forced Americans to drive farther and farther in the course of every day, per capita road death rates in the United States hover around forty thousand per year. That's a third more people than are killed by guns. It's more than ten times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

We drive as fast as road designs tell us to drive. The result: drivers kill four times as many pedestrians on spacious suburban residential streets than on the narrow streets of traditional neighborhoods, because those spacious roads make driving faster feel safer. And it is not collisions that kill people, but collisions at high speed.

People who live in monofunctional, car-dependent neighborhoods outside of urban centers are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighborhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services, and places to work.

sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that life is a series of performances in which we are all continually managing the impression we give other people.

There is no single answer to any problem in the city. The solution comes from a multiplicity of answers.'"*

Here's an image that sticks: imagine a loaded Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone aboard. That's how many people die on U.S. highways every year.

everything remains inherently connected to everything else.

The sad part is that a place's popularity can actually destroy the elements that contribute to happiness. The more we flock to high-status cities for the good life—money, opportunity, novelty—the more crowded, expensive, polluted, and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that rich, high-status states in the United States are among the least happy in the country.

Aside from the financial burden, people who endure long drives tend to experience higher blood pressure and more headaches than those with short commutes. They get frustrated more easily and tend to be grumpier when they get to their destination.

Enrique Peñalosa with a big and simple idea: that urban design should be used to make people happier.

The conclusion: killer drivers are so common in sprawl that the carnage they create far exceeds the damage done by killers who use other weapons. In fact, someone who walks out her door on the edges of sprawl suburbia is much more likely to die at the hands of a stranger than someone moving through most American central cities or inner suburbs. The only difference is that most of suburbia's killers didn't mean it.

Globally, traffic injuries are the greatest killer of ten- to twenty-four-year-olds.* A rational actor would be terrified of suburban roads. A rational policy maker would wage war, not on other nations, but on traffic deaths.

The logical response to these converging crises would be to alter our individual and collective behavior in order to stave off disaster. It demands using less energy and raw materials. It means moving more efficiently and moving shorter distances. It means living closer together and sharing more spaces, walls, and vehicles. It means collecting experiences rather than objects.

The garden was not merely a biophilic intervention. It was a social machine.

having one friend or family member to confide in had the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income. Economists love to turn relationships into numbers.

The curious part was this: most students said that they knew that social life would be more important to their happiness than architecture, yet they still put greater weight on physical features. This is the standard mis-weighing of extrinsic and intrinsic values: we may tell each other that experiences are more important than things, but we constantly make choices as though we didn't believe

Part of the problem is that sprawl's wide streets and big lots take up so much space that cities can't afford to build fire stations close by, so it takes fire trucks longer to reach each blaze.)