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Charles&#8217; acclaimed <a href="https://happycities.com/the-book" data-type="URL" data-id="https://happycities.com/the-book" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">book</a>, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, examines the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness. Collaborating with the Guggenheim Museum, Futurewise, the World Health Organization, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the Congress of New Urbanism, among others, Charles has created experiments and design methods that help participants alter their relationships with their cities, and with each other. Among his numerous awards is a Citation of Merit from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society for outstanding contribution towards the public’s understanding of climate change science. Charles is a member of the United Nations Sustainable Solutions Networks sub-council for Happy Cities.

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26 Minutes, a Chinese TV station, interviews Charles Montgomery in his hometown of Vancouver, BC. Listen to Charles discuss the importance of walkable connected places, good public transit and the negative social consequences of living in tall&nbsp;socially isolating towers. Promoting instead walkable mixed use urban developments that foster&nbsp;positive trust building social encounters.



<a href="http://www.fairchildtv.com/newsarchive_detail.php?n=27&amp;topic=462&amp;episode=976">26 Minutes, Part II</a>

Charles talks towers and sociability on the TV show 26 Minutes

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A quick chat with CBC TV&#8217;s Andrew Chang about how to build more happiness in Vancouver (and other big cities):



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How can we make Vancouver happier?

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By Seth Geiser



There were no book readings at the NYC launch of Happy City. Instead, we transformed the <a href="http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/participatory-city-100-urban-trends-from-the-bmw-guggenheim-lab">Participatory City</a> gallery at the Guggenheim Museum into a laboratory of interactive experiments in social trust and happiness. Our goal: to explore, in a visceral way, the relationship between the design of our cities and the shape of human experience.



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&#8220;We are not as free as we might think in cities,&#8221; Charles explained. &#8220;Urban architecture, spaces, and systems all influence the way we think, feel, and act.&#8221;



To demonstrate, Charles, his collaborators Dr. Colin Ellard, Christine McLaren, Omar Dominguez, and I led the audience through three immersive, participatory experiments.



Experience 1: The Subway Squeeze



The setup:&nbsp;A fabric&nbsp;&#8220;subway car&#8221; was installed within the exhibition space and 10-12 volunteers were asked to step inside. Colin strapped skin conductance monitors to five of the participants. The monitors recorded both arousal and skin temperature. What participants didn&#8217;t know was that one of the subway walls would be slowly moving inward, compressing the crowd to uncomfortable levels of intimacy.



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The results:&nbsp;According to Colin, the Subway Squeeze experience triggered remarkably uniform physiological effects. Wrist cuff data showed that nearly all cuffed participants experienced a steady rise in both physiological arousal and body temperature over the course of the brief exposure to the crowded setting. There were sharp peaks of arousal as the crowding intensified. The chart below is emblematic of the effects. Each &nbsp;subway wall contraction (noted by a blue marker across the top) resulted in heightened stress, presumably from the reduction of personal space.



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The takeaways:&nbsp;The findings surprised Colin, who expected there to be more variability in response: &nbsp;&#8220;After all, some people are more accustomed than others to the tight confines of a subway car or a crowded sidewalk or marketplace. But it reminded me of some of our earlier findings in the global <a href="http://www.bmwguggenheimlab.org/where-is-the-lab/mumbai-lab/mumbai-lab-city-projects/testing-testing-mumbai">&#8216;Testing, testing&#8217; experiment</a> in which we showed that even when people experience intense crowding on a daily basis and feel that they&#8217;re used to it, their bodies betray the tell-tale signs of stressful arousal.&#8221;



Experience 2:&nbsp;Virtual Reality Booths



The setup:&nbsp;Recent studies&nbsp;by psychologists at the <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19657048">University of Rochester</a> and elsewhere suggest that when people are exposed to nature, they exhibit more altruistic thoughts and behavior. Despite the constraints of our party environment, we wanted to test this for ourselves.



We asked volunteers to sit in one of two&nbsp;audio-visual immersion booths for&nbsp;8 minutes. Each booth contained a large image and headphones. The first booth depicted a serene, savannah-like landscape and was complemented by a soundtrack of bird song. The second depicted a scene of brutalist&nbsp;concrete architecture, complemented with the sounds of auto traffic.



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The test of their split experiences came when the volunteers were rewarded $10 for their participation and invited to share as much of that reward as they liked with a local charity (revealed later as <a href="http://hesterstreet.org/">Hester Street Collaborative</a>). The act of donation was made privately and anonymously.



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The results:&nbsp;Of the 10 participants, those exposed to the scene of nature exhibited greater generosity than those who were immersed in the cityscape.



Savannah immersion: the average participant donated 80% of their money to charity Brutalist urban immersion: the average participant donated 60% of their money to charity



The takeaways:&nbsp;While our sample size was obviously too small for statistical significance, the results reflect recent insights from environmental psychology. Studies have found that, after being exposed to sensory components of nature, people tend to be more trusting and more generous. As Charles found in the book, &#8220;We know that nature in cities makes us happier and healthier. We know it makes us friendlier and kinder. We know it helps us build essential bonds with other people and the places in which we live.&#8221; Participants were reminded of these emerging truths.



Experience 3: Old Friends



The setup:&nbsp;Inspired by the <a href="http://www.renaldi.com/projects/#id=album-11&amp;num=content-188">Touching Strangers</a> photo project by Richard Renaldi, we paired volunteers with strangers, asked them to share a secret with each other, then encouraged them to pose for photographs as though they were old friends reuniting. Participants seemed surprised and delighted by their own ability to connect with strangers in this way. There was plenty of hugging.



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But the photo was just part of the experiment. Next, we had participants answer a single survey&nbsp;question:&nbsp;&#8220;If you dropped your wallet or purse on the way home tonight, on a scale of 1-10, what is the likelihood that someone would return it to you intact?&#8221; Our volunteers asked the same question of a control group: people in the room who hadn&#8217;t been asked to participate in the photo experience.



The results: Participants emerged &nbsp;significantly more trusting than members of the control group.&nbsp;Of the 22 people who embraced strangers, the average wallet-return prediction was 5.4 out of 10. Of&nbsp;the 48 non-participants polled, the average wallet-return prediction was 4.2 out of 10.



The takeaways: The experience of meeting a stranger, getting to know them, and sharing an embrace seemed to cause people to be a more trusting of other strangers in the rest of the city&#8211;at least in the abstract.&nbsp;It is possible that some self-sorting occurred: people at the event noticed that some people were being paired for photos. More gregarious, trusting people may have been more likely to participate. Still, our results do reflect peer-reviewed studies that have shown that &nbsp;empathic experiences among strangers can cause people to revise their perceptions of strangers in general. The takeaway is that cities that enable more face-to-face, trust-building encounters, may actually help build more general social trust.



Onward



The results of our three experiences are not fit for any peer-reviewed journal, and certainly the Happy City Lab, with its open bar and raucous crowd, was no research laboratory! But these experiences can help us understand in a direct way phenomena that psychologists are observing in labs and now cities around the world. Our environment does influence our feelings of altruism towards other people. Pushing people together into involuntary proximity can stress them out. And positive interaction with a stranger can have ripple effects on social trust.



We ended the night wondering:&nbsp;If we could get more policymakers into the experiments, would they advocate for the infusion of naturalistic spaces? Would they start building more capacity on crowded bus and subway lines? Would they want to hug each other more?



Inspired by the evening&#8217;s results, Team Happy City reconvened at a bar in the East Village where we built social capital until the wee hours.

A night of social experimentation at the Guggenheim

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After decades of research into human happiness, it is time to turn evidence into action for human wellbeing. But governments and city-builders need pragmatic strategies and examples for inspiration.



The UN Sustainable Development Solutions launched the Global Happiness Policy Report to survey and share best practice policies drawn from the research literature and government experiences around the globe. The Global Happiness Council (GHC) is a global network of leading specialists in happiness and key practitioners in areas ranging from psychology, economics, urban planning, civil society, business and government.



As a member of the Happy Cities sub-council, we worked with a small team of collaborators to formulate the report’s chapter focussing on cities. 



This report provides evidence and policy advice to participating governments on best practices to promote happiness and wellbeing. The work of the Council will be complementary to the World Happiness Reports and other research on the measurement and explanation of happiness.



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<div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link" href="https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/api/publications/document?id=304a8bc4-e97c-6578-b2f8-ff0000a7ddb6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Download the report</a></div>
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Healthy Communities

Research & experiments

Urban policy & strategic planning

Global happiness policy report: Happy cities in a smart world

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In the summer of 2016, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) embarked on a powerful re-imagining of Vancouver’s Granville Island to 2040. The Island has been an incredible Canadian success story, a place where arts and industry and surprises collide. But the island needed a refresh to maintain and enhance its relevance for the future. Happy Cities collaborated with an interdisciplinary team led by HCMA to create an updated and compelling vision for the iconic island. We co-created guiding principles to lead this work, and engaged stakeholders in an immersive process to take inspiration from new thinking on cities and placemaking and generate and test their own transformative ideas for Granville Island.

Inclusive Engagement

Joyful Spaces

Community master plans

Deep engagement

Education

Strategy & visioning

Granville Island 2040

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British Land, the UK’s largest real estate investment trust, is committed to improving wellbeing through its development and placemaking practices. We helped the company to pursue this aspiration through a collaborative program of research, recommendations, site audits and workshops.



In the first phase of work, we proposed a set of wellbeing principles based on extensive research in public health, neuroscience, behavioural economics and environmental psychology, as well as evidence from placemaking successes around the world. The report, Wellbeing Principles for British Land, offers seven principles, a broad set of goals, strategies, concrete actions, and metrics for measuring success.



In late 2015, Happy Cities engaged senior British Land staff in a series of workshops intended to empower participants to critically analyse the potential for pursuing wellbeing goals through property development, site management and community engagement. During collaborative work sessions, participants reflected on opportunities for action in their own areas of responsibility. Finally, we conducted a guided site audit at one of British Land’s mixed-use property assets. The audit provided an opportunity to test the proposed wellbeing principles against opportunities and challenges on the ground. This work enabled British Land decision makers to better understand how to weave wellbeing goals into the company’s existing and emerging policies. The work continues.

Charles Montgomery

Founder

Charles Montgomery is an award-winning author, urbanist and leader of interventions to improve wellbeing in cities around the world.

Projects Charles has worked on

Global happiness policy report: Happy cities in a smart world

Granville Island 2040

Wellbeing principles for British Land

Stories posted by Charles

Charles talks towers and sociability on the TV show 26 Minutes

How can we make Vancouver happier?

A night of social experimentation at the Guggenheim