Inside Vancouver
Sad City - continued
By Charles Montgomery published Sep 2, 2008
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Ours is one of the most beautiful, vibrant, and livable cities in the world. Why aren’t we happy?
Nobody is really sure what that is. It could be that towers don’t offer the easy, over-the-fence banter that neighbours on the ground share. One-bedroom apartments have an obvious isolating effect on their residents. Sociologists have suggested that even elevators can discourage interaction by forcing people into uncomfortably close quarters. We’ve been programmed since youth not to bother people in enclosed spaces.
The lesson here is that packing people together doesn’t necessarily bring us closer (and that fancy countertops and shiny new appliances are no guarantee of happiness). Which is a worry, given Vancouver’s position on the population curve. We’re a young city, a mongrel city, and our many races and cultures get along much better than social theorists think they should. But Metro Vancouver is expected to grow by almost a million people in the next three decades. If the city’s EcoDensity Charter is any indication, we’re going to be packing them into basement suites, coach houses, and, yes, more towers. How do we ensure that density doesn’t actually isolate us? How do we turn a more crowded city into a machine for happiness rather than hostility?
LAST YEAR I FLEW to Bogotá, Colombia, to see the results of what may be the world’s first urban happiness intervention. Yes, that Bogotá, home to kidnappers, narco-revolutionaries, and some 80,000 new civil-war refugees every year. Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor who turned Bogotá into a laboratory for theories of well-being, took me for a bike ride. He was convinced that status was a key ingredient of happiness. (Research shows he was right: a steep status gradient—reflected in, say, a wide income gap—can be toxic. People who feel low on the societal ladder get sick more often, even if they enjoy the same access to health care as the rich. Low-status bureaucrats get stressed out and die young. So do low-status monkeys.)
A die-hard capitalist, Peñalosa felt he couldn’t do much to narrow the gap between rich and poor, but at least he could redesign the city so the poor didn’t feel left out of civic life. “In a good city people do not feel inferior,” he explained. “Citizens should not feel excluded. The more time people spend in places open to everyone, the better a city is.”
