What makes a city a great place to live – your commute, property prices or good conversation?
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#'City life is as much
about moving through landscapes as it is about being in them.'
Illustration: Francesco Bongiorni for the Guardian
Two bodyguards trotted behind Enrique Peñalosa,
their pistols jostling in holsters. There was nothing remarkable about
that, given his profession – and his locale. Peñalosa was a politician
on yet another campaign, and this was Bogotá, a city with a reputation
for kidnapping and assassination. What was unusual was this: Peñalosa
didn't climb into the armoured SUV. Instead, he hopped on a mountain
bike. His bodyguards and I pedalled madly behind, like a throng of
teenagers in the wake of a rock star.
A few years earlier, this
ride would have been a radical and – in the opinion of many Bogotáns –
suicidal act. If you wanted to be assaulted, asphyxiated by exhaust
fumes or run over, the city's streets were the place to be. But Peñalosa
insisted that things had changed. "We're living an experiment," he
yelled back at me. "We might not be able to fix the economy. But we can
design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich. The city
can make them happier."
I first saw the Mayor of Happiness work
his rhetorical magic back in the spring of 2006. The United Nations had
just announced that some day in the following months, one more child
would be born in an urban hospital or a migrant would stumble into a
metropolitan shantytown, and from that moment on, more than half the
world's people would be living in cities. By 2030, almost 5 billion of
us will be urban.
Peñalosa insisted that, like most cities, Bogotá
had been left deeply wounded by the 20th century's dual urban legacy:
first, the city had been gradually reoriented around cars. Second,
public spaces and resources had largely been privatised. This
reorganisation was both unfair – only one in five families even owned a
car – and cruel: urban residents had been denied the opportunity to
enjoy the city's simplest daily pleasures: walking on convivial streets,
sitting around in public. And playing: children had largely disappeared
from Bogotá's streets, not because of the fear of gunfire or abduction,
but because the streets had been rendered dangerous by sheer speed.
Peñalosa's first and most defining act as mayor was to declare war: not
on crime or drugs or poverty, but on cars.
He threw out the
ambitious highway expansion plan and instead poured his budget into
hundreds of miles of cycle paths; a vast new chain of parks and
pedestrian plazas; and the city's first rapid transit system (the TransMilenio),
using buses instead of trains. He banned drivers from commuting by car
more than three times a week. This programme redesigned the experience
of city living for millions of people, and it was an utter rejection of
the philosophies that have guided city planners around the world for
more than half a century.
In the third year of his term, Peñalosa
challenged Bogotáns to participate in an experiment. As of dawn on 24
February 2000, cars were banned from streets for the day. It was the
first day in four years that nobody was killed in traffic. Hospital
admissions fell by almost a third. The toxic haze over the city thinned.
People told pollsters that they were more optimistic about city life
than they had been in years.
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Colombian students ride their bicycles during 'No car day' in Bogota.
The day-long ban on all private car traffic on the city's
streets
forces residents to use public transportation or bicycles to get
to and from work.
Photograph: Jose Miguel Gomez/Reuters
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One memory from early in the journey has stuck with me, perhaps
because it carries both the sweetness and the subjective slipperiness of
the happiness we sometimes find in cities. Peñalosa, who was running
for re-election, needed to be seen out on his bicycle that day. He
hollered "Cómo le va?" ("How's it going?") at anyone who
appeared to recognise him. But this did not explain his haste or his
quickening pace as we traversed the north end of the city towards the
Andean foothills. It was all I could do to keep up with him, block after
block, until we arrived at a compound ringed by a high iron fence.
Boys
in crisp white shirts and matching uniforms poured through a gate. One
of them, a bright-eyed 10-year-old, pushed a miniature version of
Peñalosa's bicycle through the crowd. Suddenly I understood his haste.
He had been rushing to pick up his son from school, like other parents
were doing that very moment up and down the time zone. Here, in the
heart of one of the meanest, poorest cities in the hemisphere, father
and son would roll away from the school gate for a carefree ride across
the metropolis. This was an unthinkable act in most modern cities. As
the sun fell and the Andes caught fire, we arced our way along the
wide-open avenues, then west along a highway built for bicycles. The kid
raced ahead. At that point, I wasn't sure about Peñalosa's ideology.
Who was to say that one way of moving was better than another? How could
anyone know enough about the needs of the human soul to prescribe the
ideal city for happiness?
But for a moment I forgot my questions. I
let go of my handlebars and raised my arms in the air of the cooling
breeze, and I remembered my own childhood of country roads, after-school
wanderings, lazy rides and pure freedom. I felt fine. The city was
mine. The journey began.
Is urban design really powerful enough to
make or break happiness? The question deserves consideration, because
the happy city message is taking root around the world. "The most
dynamic economies of the 20th century produced the most miserable cities
of all," Peñalosa told me over the roar of traffic. "I'm talking about
the US Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, cities totally dominated by cars."
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Red Transmilenio buses pull into the Museum of Gold station
in front
of the 16th century Iglesia de San Francisco, Bogota's oldest restored
church.
Photograph: John Coletti/Getty Images
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If one was to judge by sheer wealth, the last half-century should
have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the US and other rich
nations such as Canada, Japan and Great Britain. And yet the boom
decades of the late 20th century were not accompanied by a boom in
wellbeing. The British got richer by more than 40% between 1993 and
2012, but the rate of psychiatric disorders and neuroses grew.
Just
before the crash of 2008, a team of Italian economists, led by Stefano
Bartolini, tried to account for that seemingly inexplicable gap between
rising income and flatlining happiness in the US. The Italians tried
removing various components of economic and social data from their
models, and found that the only factor powerful enough to hold down
people's self-reported happiness in the face of all that wealth was the
country's declining social capital: the social networks and interactions
that keep us connected with others. It was even more corrosive than the
income gap between rich and poor.
As much as we complain about
other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social
desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less
likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and
depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer.
They consistently report being happier.
There is a clear connection between social deficit and the shape of cities. A Swedish study
found that people who endure more than a 45-minute commute were 40%
more likely to divorce. People who live in monofunctional, car‑dependent
neighbourhoods outside urban centres are much less trusting of other
people than people who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is
mixed with shops, services and places to work.
A couple of
University of Zurich economists, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, compared
German commuters' estimation of the time it took them to get to work
with their answers to the standard wellbeing question, "How satisfied
are you with your life, all things considered?"
Their finding was
seemingly straightforward: the longer the drive, the less happy people
were. Before you dismiss this as numbingly obvious, keep in mind that
they were testing not for drive satisfaction, but for life satisfaction.
People were choosing commutes that made their entire lives worse. Stutzer and Frey
found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% 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.
Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling On Happiness,
explained the commuting paradox this way: "Most good and bad things
become less good and bad over time as we adapt to them. However, it is
much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that
change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house, because the
house is exactly the same size every time. But we find it difficult to
adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of
misery."
The sad part is that 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 Londoners are among the least happy people in the UK, despite the city being the richest region in the UK.
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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.
Illustration: Francesco Bongiorni for the Guardian
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When we talk about cities, we usually end up talking about how
various places look, and perhaps how it feels to be there. But to stop
there misses half the story, because the way we experience most parts of
cities is at velocity: we glide past on the way to somewhere else. City
life is as much about moving through landscapes as it is about being in
them. Robert Judge, a 48-year-old husband and father, once wrote to
a Canadian radio show explaining how much he enjoyed going grocery
shopping on his bicycle. Judge's confession would have been unremarkable
if he did not happen to live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the
average temperature in January hovers around -17C. The city stays frozen
and snowy for almost half the year. Judge's pleasure in an experience
that seems slower, more difficult and considerably more uncomfortable
than the alternative might seem bizarre.
He explained it by way of a
story: sometimes, he said, he would pick up his three-year-old son from
nursery and put him on the back seat of his tandem bike and they would
pedal home along the South Saskatchewan river. The snow would muffle the
noise of the city. Dusk would paint the sky in colours so exquisite
that Judge could not begin to find names for them. The snow would
reflect those hues. It would glow like the sky, and Judge would breathe
in the cold air and hear his son breathing behind him, and he would feel
as though together they had become part of winter itself.
Drivers
experience plenty of emotional dividends. They report feeling much more
in charge of their lives than public transport users. An upmarket
vehicle is loaded with symbolic value that offers a powerful, if
temporary, boost in status. Yet despite these romantic feelings, half of
commuters living in big cities and suburbs claim to dislike the heroic
journey they must make every day. The urban system neutralises their
power.
Driving in traffic is harrowing for both brain and body.
The blood of people who drive in cities is a stew of stress hormones.
The worse the traffic, the more your system is flooded with adrenaline
and cortisol, the fight-or-flight juices that, in the short-term, get
your heart pumping faster, dilate your air passages and help sharpen
your alertness, but in the long-term can make you ill. 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
travellers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police
facing mobs of angry protesters.
But one group of commuters report
enjoying themselves. These are people who travel under their own steam,
like Robert Judge. They walk. They run. They ride bicycles.
Why
would travelling more slowly and using more effort offer more
satisfaction than driving? Part of the answer exists in basic human
physiology. We were born to move. Immobility is to the human body what
rust is to the classic car. Stop moving long enough, and your muscles
will atrophy. Bones will weaken. Blood will clot. You will find it
harder to concentrate and solve problems. Immobility is not merely a
state closer to death: it hastens it.
Robert Thayer, a professor of psychology at California State University, fitted dozens of students with pedometers,
then sent them back to their regular lives. Over the course of 20 days,
the volunteers answered survey questions about their moods, attitudes,
diet and happiness. Within that volunteer group, people who walked more
were happier.
The same is true of cycling, although a bicycle has
the added benefit of giving even a lazy rider the ability to travel
three or four times faster than someone walking, while using less than a
quarter of the energy. They may not all attain Judge's level of
transcendence, but cyclists report feeling connected to the world around
them in a way that is simply not possible in the sealed environment of a
car, bus or train. Their journeys are both sensual and kinesthetic.
In 1969, a consortium of European industrial interests charged a young American economist, Eric Britton,
with figuring out how people would move through cities in the future.
Cities should strive to embrace complexity, not only in transportation
systems but in human experience, says Britton, who is still working in
that field and lives in Paris. He advises cities and corporations to
abandon old mobility, a system rigidly organised entirely around one way
of moving, and embrace new mobility, a future in which we would all be
free to move in the greatest variety of ways.
"We all know old
mobility," Britton said. "It's you sitting in your car, stuck in
traffic. It's you driving around for hours, searching for a parking
spot. Old mobility is also the 55-year-old woman with a bad leg, waiting
in the rain for a bus that she can't be certain will come. New
mobility, on the other hand, is freedom distilled."
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A row of Velib rental bicycles are parked at the rue de La Harpe in
Paris.
Dozens of cities have now dabbled in shared bike programmes,
including London, Montreal, Melbourne and New York
Photograph: Horacio
Villalobos/EPA.
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To demonstrate how radically urban systems can build freedom in
motion, Britton led me down from his office, out on to Rue Joseph Bara.
We paused by a row of sturdy-looking bicycles. Britton swept his wallet
above a metallic post and pulled one free from its berth. "Et voilà! Freedom!" he said, grinning. Since the Paris bike scheme, Vélib',
was introduced, it has utterly changed the face of mobility. Each
bicycle in the Vélib' fleet gets used between three and nine times every
day.
That's as many as 200,000 trips a day. Dozens of cities have now
dabbled in shared bike programmes, including Lyon, Montreal, Melbourne,
New York. In 2010, London introduced a system, dubbed Boris Bikes for
the city's bike-mad mayor, Boris Johnson. In Paris, and around the
world, new systems of sharing are setting drivers free. As more people
took to bicycles in Vélib's first year, the number of bike accidents
rose, but the number of accidents per capita fell. This phenomenon seems
to repeat wherever cities see a spike in cycling: the more people bike,
the safer the streets become for cyclists, partly because drivers adopt
more cautious habits when they expect cyclists on the road. There is
safety in numbers.
So if we really care about freedom for
everyone, we need to design for everyone, not only the brave. Anyone who
is really serious about building freedom in their cities eventually
makes the pilgrimage to Copenhagen. I joined Copenhagen rush hour on a
September morning with Lasse Lindholm, an employee of the city's traffic
department. The sun was burning through the autumn haze as we made our
way across Queen Louise's Bridge. Vapour rose from the lake, swans
drifted and preened, and the bridge seethed with a rush-hour scene like
none I have ever witnessed. With each light change, cyclists rolled
toward us in their hundreds. They did not look the way cyclists are
supposed to look. They did not wear helmets or reflective gear. Some of
the men wore pinstriped suits. No one was breaking a sweat.
Lindholm
rolled off a list of statistics: more people that morning would travel
by bicycle than by any other mode of transport (37%). If you didn't
count the suburbs, the percentage of cyclists in Copenhagen would hit
55%. They aren't choosing to cycle because of any deep-seated altruism
or commitment to the environment; they are motivated by self-interest.
"They just want to get themselves from A to B," Lindholm said, "and it
happens to be easier and quicker to do it on a bike."
The Bogotá
experiment may not have made up for all the city's grinding inequities,
but it was a spectacular beginning and, to the surprise of many, it made
life better for almost everyone.
The TransMilenio moved so many
people so efficiently that car drivers crossed the city faster as well:
commuting times fell by a fifth. The streets were calmer. By the end of
Peñalosa's term, people were crashing their cars less often and killing
each other less frequently, too: the accident rate fell by nearly half,
and so did the murder rate, even as the country as a whole got more
violent. There was a massive improvement in air quality, too. Bogotáns
got healthier. The city experienced a spike in feelings of optimism.
People believed that life was good and getting better, a feeling they
had not shared in decades.
Bogotá's fortunes have since declined.
The TransMilenio system is plagued by desperate crowding as its private
operators fail to add more capacity – yet more proof that robust public
transport needs sustained public investment. Optimism has withered. But
Bogotá's transformative years still offer an enduring lesson for rich
cities. By spending resources and designing cities in a way that values
everyone's experience, we can make cities that help us all get stronger,
more resilient, more connected, more active and more free. We just have
to decide who our cities are for. And we have to believe that they can
change.
#Πηγή:
The secrets of the world's happiest cities_Charles Montgomery
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/01/secrets-worlds-happiest-cities-commute-property-prices?CMP=twt_gu
The Guardian,
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