Selected quotes from each chapter in Charles Montgomery’s new book – Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. 
Today: ‘Getting it wrong.’
… as individuals and as a species, humans just aren’t that well equipped to make decisions that maximize our happiness.
… happiness is not a condition at all. It is an urge genes employ to get an organism working harder and hoarding more stuff … We have been hardwired for active dissatisfaction.
Anyone with faith in economic man would think that people would put up with the pain of a long commute only if they enjoyed even greater benefits from cheaper housing or bigger, finer homes or higher-paying jobs. … A couple of University of Zurich economists discovered this simply isn’t the case. … Their finding was seemingly straightforward: the longer the drive, the less happy people were.
… a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.
… when choosing how to live or move, most of us are not as free as we think. Our options are strikingly limited, and they are defined by the planners, engineers, politicians, architects, marketers, and land speculators who imprint their own values on the urban landscape. … The simple, rational plan extinguished the intrinsic social benefits of messy public space ….
When making decisions, we tend to pay too much attention to spectacular but rare threats and too little to dangers that creep up on us over time. … the seemingly healthy dispersed suburb offers systems of living that can reasonably be considered lethal. … Just living in a sprawling city has the effect of four years of aging.
… killer drivers are so common in sprawl that the carnage they create far exceeds the damage by killers who use other weapons. … The only difference is that most of suburbia’s killers didn’t mean it.
“People don’t respond to campaigns based on guilt and fear. They have a hard time linking their actions to costs far in the future. And they resent governments that fine or punish their behavior, even when they know it is unsustainable.”
… The sustainable city has got to promise more happiness than the status quo. It has to be healthier, higher in status, more fun, and more resilient than the dispersed city. It has got to lure us closer together than the dispersed city. It has got to reward people for making efficient choices when they move around. It has got to be a city of hedonic satisfaction, of distilled joys that do not cost the world.
