Chris’s latest essay in Vancouver is Awesome:
Building the Happy City, Just by Living It:
I somehow managed to carve out some quality time with Happy City, the new book by East Vancouver’s own Charles Montgomery. In it, Montgomery envisions the 21st century city not just as a wealth creation machine, but also a happiness creating one.
He argues the post-war suburban experiment (which he refers to as the “dispersed city”) has not only been an economic and environmental disaster, it has done little to improve our overall quality of life; leading to feelings of isolation, selfishness, and a myriad of physical and emotional diseases we are only just beginning to understand.
Not only is it an engrossing and fascinating read, but it was also quite a personal one, perfectly articulating our family’s decade-long journey from the suburbs of Toronto to the heartbeat of Vancouver. … It has been a pursuit of happiness, not through financial success or the accumulation of goods, but through four straightforward ideas: proximity, mobility, autonomy, and simplicity.
Which Chris then goes on to detail. It’s all here.
A good time to remind everyone that Charles Montgomery will be speaking as part of the “Rethinking Transportation” series on March 26 at SFU Woodwards. Still time to reserve a space here.
