Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich. The city can make them happier.”

The treadmill theory suggests that the richer you get, the more you compare yourself to other rich people and the faster the wheel of desire spins beneath your feet, so that you end up feeling as though you haven’t made any progress.

To test the idea, you would have to decide what you meant by happiness, and you would need a way to measure it. You would have to understand how a road, a bus, a park, or a building might contribute to good feelings.

if more extravagant, private, polluting, and energy-hungry communities have failed to deliver on happiness, then the search for a happier city might well be expected to reveal a greener, more resilient city, a place that saves the world while saving our own lives

A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can’t be both

In an age where even most of the poor had televisions, common civic space was disregarded and degraded

The city itself could be a device for happiness

“And what are our needs for happiness?” he asked.

We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality

to accomplish this, they would have to completely rethink their beliefs about what cities are for.