Quotes from Charles Montgomery

In his other great treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that human conscience comes from social relationships, and that the natural empathy produced by being among other people is an essential part of well-being and should guide our actions.

First, as I will explore in this book, our preferences—the things we buy, the places we choose to live—do not always maximize our happiness in the long run. Second, sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed.

Dubbed the evolutionary happiness function, the equation explains the psychological process that both fuels our desire for bigger homes and ensures that we will be dissatisfied shortly after moving in. Dissatisfaction, it suggests, is inevitable.

each of us benefits when some of us subsume private goals for the sake of the community, and everyone benefits when everyone cooperates. As the oxytocin studies illustrate, our brains reward us for working well together.

shaped people's behavior by inviting them to come together and to linger.

Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities.

It is not certain that we can all make the leap to universal empathy, but what is clear is this: as a social project, the city challenges us not just to live together but to thrive together, by understanding that our fate is a shared one.

Another big mistake came with well-meaning efforts to deal with salient dangers such as house fires. Before World War II, the typical residential street in the United States and Canada was only twenty-eight feet wide. If cars were parked on either side, two drivers approaching each other in the middle could barely pass.

Sociologists point out that the suburbs have done an efficient job of sorting people into communities where they will be surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic status. Meanwhile, the architectures of sprawl inhibit political activity that requires face-to-face interaction. It is not that sprawl makes political activity impossible, but by privatizing gathering space and dispersing human activity, sprawl makes political gatherings less likely.

Suburban zoning and development codes grew so powerful and so entrenched by the end of the twentieth century that the people who financed and built most of suburbia had all but forgotten how to make anything but car-dependent sprawl.

Trust is the bedrock on which cities grow and thrive. Modern metropolitan cities depend on our ability to think beyond the family and tribe and to trust the people who look, dress, and act nothing like us to treat us fairly, to honor 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. Civilization is a shared project.

There is a message for all city makers here. It is that with the right triangulation, even the ugliest of places can be infused with the warmth that turns strangers into familiars by giving us enough reason to slow down.

We have not had a free market in real estate for eighty years," Ellen Dunham-Jones, Georgia Tech professor of architecture and coauthor of Retrofitting Suburbia, told me. "And because it is illegal to build in a different way, it takes an immense amount of time for anyone who wants to do it to get changes in zoning and variance. Time is money for developers, so it rarely happens.

All this reinforces the concept that Edward O. Wilson dubbed biophilia, which holds that humans are hardwired to find particular scenes of nature calming and restorative.

The city is a means to a way of life. It can be a reflection of all our best selves. It can be whatever we want it to be. It can change, and change dramatically.

A study of Los Angeles revealed that people who live in areas with more parks are more helpful and trusting than people who don't, regardless of their income or race. Nature is not merely

You cannot separate the social life of urban spaces from the velocity of the activities happening there.

Most people's root networks are closing in on themselves, circling more and more tightly around spouses, partners, parents and kids. These are our most important relationships, but every arborist knows that a tree with a small root-ball is more likely to fall over when the wind blows.

In fact, Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.

The city that acknowledges and celebrates our common fate, that opens doors to empathy and cooperation, will help us tackle the great challenges of this century.

It means living closer together and sharing more spaces, walls, and vehicles. It means collecting experiences rather than objects.

Collective problems such as pollution and climate change demand collective responses. Civilization is a shared project.

Researchers for Hewlett-Packard convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travelers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters.*

Peñalosa's argument was that too many rich societies have used their wealth in ways that exacerbate urban problems rather than solve them. Could this help explain the happiness paradox?