Kaid Benfield

Measuring cities in happiness

Director, NRDC Smart Growth Program, Mar 05, 10.

“With our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success. This might mean that all kids have access to sports facilities, libraries, parks, schools, nurseries.” These are the words of Enrique Peñalosa, who served as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, for three years, and who has become an evangelist for improving the quality of life for city dwellers everywhere.
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David Burwell, who founded the Rails to Trails Conservancy and co-founded the Surface Transportation Policy Project in the US, refers to Penalosa as “one of the great public servants of our time. He views cities as being planned for a purpose—to create human well-being. He’s got a great sense of what a leader should do—to promote human happiness.”

Walljasper, himself clearly an admirer of Penalosa’s work, also gives credit to others in the mayor’s administration, as well as to his civic-minded predecessor (and, as it happens, successor) as mayor, Antanas Mockus. At the core of their many achievements is an understanding that, as a city with great poverty in the developing world, Bogota has a responsibility to provide an especially rich public realm for its citizens. American cities would do well to take note.
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Reading about Penalosa, I couldn’t help but recall The Architecture of Happiness, a book by one of my very favorite writers and thinkers, Alain de Botton. Here’s an on-point passage about the book from de Botton’s website:
“One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kind of walls, chairs, buildings and streets we’re surrounded by.

“And yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be - and argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.

“Whereas many architects are wary of openly discussing the word beauty, the book has at its centre the large and naïve question: ‘What is a beautiful building?’ It amounts to a tour through the philosophy and psychology of architecture, which aims to change the way we think about our homes, streets and ourselves.”

Penalosa’s chief concern, of course, has not been architecture per se, but rather the setting and infrastructure that supports it, and thereby supports our lives and well-being. But the same principles apply, and I bet the two of them would make fascinating conversants over a dinner of bandeja paisa.

Full story: Constructing a city around the concept of happiness
Source: NRDC Switchboard blog, March 5, 2010

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