There are 13 chapters in Charles Montgomery’s new book – Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. 
Here are selected quotes from each chapter – today ‘The (broken) social scene’:
Urban life has now been stretched to such an extent that suburbia, exurbia, and edge cities together form a distinct system that has transformed the way that entire city-regions function. This is the system that some have come to call sprawl. I will call it the dispersed city, for the characteristic that defines almost every aspect of it.
These neighbourhoods accomplish several historic feats: They take up more space per person, and they are more expensive to build and operate than any urban form ever constructed …. Given how many millions have chosen to call it home, you would expect that the dispersed city would produce greater happiness.
… the only factor powerful enough to hold down people’s self-reported happiness in the face of all that wealth was the country’s declining social capital – the social networks and interactions that keep us connected with others. It was even more corrosive than the income gap between rich and poor.
Living in dispersal correlates with a shocking retreat from public life ….
The most powerful drag (on social interaction potential) should now come as no surprise. It’s decentralization: the more thinly a city spreads out, the less access citizens have to one another. … Urban distance does more than just limit face-to-face time. It actually changes the shape and quality of our social networks: the longer the commute, the farther apart one’s friends tended to live from one another, like a web being stretched in all directions.
So very true. For my wife to see her best friend it’s 45 minutes by car off-peak and she doesn’t drive. By transit it’s 90 minutes plus 1/2 mile walk. My colleagues and I rarely socialize outside work hours because we’re scattered across Vancouver, Burnaby, New West, Coquitlam, PoCo, Richmond, Delta, Surrey, North Van and Bowen Island.
When I got married my wife wanted to move to the ‘burbs where we could have a big house with a big yard and be close to her best friend. I insisted on staying in the city so neither of us would have to face a long commute. The neighbourhood we were able to afford had a good school, good parks, a direct bus downtown and wide roads leading in every direction, but it didn’t have shops and services nearby. As the only driver I ended up behind the wheel far more than I wanted and we wasted many a weekend just getting our shopping done.
We have since moved to a walkable neighbourhood and the difference is night and day. We walk to the produce market and grocery store, we walk to the hair dresser and credit union, we walk to the coffee shops and restaurants. We used to recognize neighbours by their vehicles, now we know their faces and names.