Selected quotes from each chapter in Charles Montgomery’s new book – Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. 
Today: ‘How to be closer.’
The evidence suggests that to get closer to one another, we need a little more distance from one another, and a little more nature – but not too much, and not the sort of nature we might think we need.
… humans are hardwired to find particular scenes of nature calming and restorative. … Nature is not merely good for us. It brings out the good in us.
It’s not certain certain that the pseudo-savanna is actually the best view for the human brain. It turns out that the happiness paradox – that gulf between what we choose and what is good for us – even extends to landscapes. … The “messier” and more diverse the landscape, the better.
One big park won’t do. … (nature) has to be integrated right into the urban fabric. … As Gil Penalosa once put it, cities need in sizes S,M, L, and XL.
Quite simply, biological density must be the prerequisite for architectural density.
City life … demands a kind of aloofness and distance, so that crowding, while pushing us together physically, actually pushes us apart socially. … human density and crowding are not the same thing. The first is a physical state. The second is psychological and subjective. … We tolerate other people more when we know we can escape them.
… the effect of density is nuanced. For one thing, wealthier people do better in apartment towers than poor people. … People living in towers consistently reported feeling more lonely and less connected than people living in detached homes.
We cannot be forced together. The richest social environments are those in which we feel free to edge closer together or move apart as we wish. They scale not abruptly but gradually, from private realm to semiprivate to public; from bedroom to parlor to porch to neighbourhood to city, something most tower designers have yet to achieve.
One almost-ideal urban geometry was perfected in many North American cities more than a century ago. … during the golden age of streetcar suburbia, property development and streetcar development went hand in hand. … Market streets were lively and bustling, while the residential streets behind them were quiet and leafy. Most people got their own house and yard … Without modern suburbia’s massive yards, wide roads, and strict segregation of uses, almost everything you needed was a five-minute walk or a brief streetcar ride away. In the streetcar city, greed helped produce density’s sweet spot.
… we can find various geometries to save ourselves and the planet. They do not all involve stacking our lives into the sky, but they are almost all tighter than what the proponents of dispersal have been selling us.
