• on what HAPPINESS is
• and how our urban environments shape our happiness

chpt 1 - mayor of happy; on Bogota mayor’s Penalosa’s approach to city happiness; debunking philosophy of suburbia = happiness

• “On the one hand, cities were pumping out most of the world’s pollution and 80 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. On the other, all predictions suggested that cities were going to be slammed by the effects of climate change, from heat waves and water scarcity to waves of migrants running from droughts, floods, and water wars. The experts agreed that cities would bear more than three-quarters of the cost of adapting to global warming. They would be short on energy, tax revenue, and jobs. There seemed to be no way they were going to be able to help citizens meet the goals of security and prosperity that urbanization had always seemed to promise.”
  • from urbanecon — goal is not to increase utility of city dwellers, but to increase utility of AGRICULTURAL dwellers
• US’s “boom decade of the late twentieth century were not accompanied by a boom in happiness. Surveys show that people’s assessment of their own well-being in the United States pretty much flat-lined during that time”
  • book claims this is not bc of hedonic treadmill, or bc of widening income gap
  • but bc this time corresponded with migration of society from country to cities… “Since 1940, almost all urban growth has actually been SUBurban…. For a time, it was impossible to separate growth from suburbanization.”
• “The sprawl city requires cheap energy, cheap land, and cheap materIals, and the days of cheap are over.”
  • not entirely true
  • Land and Materials: Generally, costs have increased, making sprawling developments less economically feasible.
  • Energy: The situation is mixed. While renewable energy costs have decreased, fossil fuel prices and energy infrastructure challenges may still contribute to higher overall energy costs.
  • On energy

“[as market economists theorize,] sprawl fulfills American’s preferences for privacy, mobility, and detachment from the problems of high-density environments. By this way of thinking, sprawl reflects every individual’s natural-born right to maximize utility. But this interpretation ignores a few inconvenient truths. First, as I will explore in this book, our preferences—the things we buy, the places we choose to live—do not always maximize our happiness in the long run. Second, sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed”

chpt 2 - the city has always been a happiness project… on athens to other famous city projects, and city as a happiness project

Aristotle argued that “the polis was the only vehicle through which a man could really achieve eudaimonia. Anyone who did not concern himself with public life was himself less than whole.”

• “The polis, the city-state, was a shared project that Athenians cared for with almost religious fervor.” // today the modern analogy is VOLUNTEERING, giving back to your community

industrial revolution england london city was so shitty, the accepted theory then was that happiness meant escaping the city entirely… “Private automobiles would free people to escape the central city to build their own self-sufficient compounds in a new kind of urban-rural utopia. In Wright’s planned Broadacre City, citizens would drive their own cars to all the means of production, distribution, self-improvement, and recreation that would be within minutes of their miniature homesteads.”

• this is why america became so car-centric in its pivotal formative decades