Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

Happy City explores how urban design influences human happiness and well-being. Charles Montgomery examines whether dense urban living—with its subways, sidewalks, and apartment towers—offers greater happiness than car-dependent sprawl, which has dominated development for decades. Montgomery travels through major cities worldwide to investigate this question at the intersection of urban design and happiness research. He documents examples including a mayor in Bogotá who introduced a distinctive red bus system to reduce status anxiety, an architect who adapted medieval Tuscan town design principles for modern New York, a Paris activist who converted urban freeways into public beaches, and American suburbanites who redesigned their streets and neighborhoods to improve their lives. Drawing on historical analysis, psychological research, and Montgomery's own urban experiments, the book argues that retrofitting cities to prioritize happiness can address environmental and resource challenges. Montgomery contends that the happy city, the green city, and the low-carbon city are fundamentally the same place.