Book review: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

If you've been along this blog very long at all you will realize that I love some nonfiction, and what I have for you today is a nonfiction book that I hope will be of interest to everyone because it's a book about how the design of the places that we live dictate how we live our lives and how happy we can be.

There were so many interesting points in this book that I don't know if I can do them in a reasonable paragraph type of set up so you're getttttttting bullet points!

• You know how you could have a big old house, a shorter commute and a stress free commute if you lived in a smaller city but a lot of people would rather live in a shoebox of an apartment with an awful commute and in general a more expensive hectic environment? That's called "hectic thriving". You know "if you can make it there you can make it anywhere" type of thing

• There was a whole super interesting/depressing section about how a long commute negatively effects almost all aspects of your life - your relationship with everyone (spouse, children, neighbors), how often you see your friends, your neighborhood, even how you participate in things like politics. (Shorter commutes, you want it.) 94% of people in Atlanta commute by car. Average commute? 44 miles a day. The stats on commutes for the SF Bay area and Atlanta were *gagging noises here*.

• This probably isn't super surprising but the advent of the mass produced automobile DRASTICALLY changed the layout of our cities. In a very short period of years we went from a "people hanging out on their stoops, kids playing in the street, everyone just kind of hangs out in the neighborhood" to a lot of people getting hit by cars and people being relegated into very small, sometimes pretty useless public spaces.Cars are king in most places and it kinda blows. Amsterdam, you are my complicated queen, as usual. Here is a sobering statistic about traffic deaths: "Imagine a completely full Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing all onboard. That's how many people die on US highways every year".

• Did you know that there is a perfect depth of front yard that "is shallow enough for conversations but deep enough to allow for retreat?" It's 10.6 feet deep.

That's just a couple of quick highlights from this book that I thoroughly enjoyed. I give it 4 out of 5 stars!