Montgomery’s own journey began when he met Bogotá’s visionary Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, who in 2000 began to transform his troubled city into a happy city, and who has continued to inspire mayors and planners the world over. On the journey we encounter urban space planner Jan Gehl, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, political scientist Robert Putnam, neuroeconomist Paul Zak, transportation planners Lawrence Frank and Jeffrey Tumlin, psychology professor Robert Thayer, the Project for Public Space’s Fred Kent, and a host of others.
Montgomery examines the guiding principles of Modern architecture and planning, and the problems of zoning codes that led to suburban sprawl. He reviews the social implications of density and high-rise, and effects of urban design on conviviality, and arrives at the same conclusion as urbanist, Patrick Condon, that in American cities it was the streetcar suburb that provided the best scale for happy living – “almost everything you needed was a five-minute walk or a brief streetcar ride away.”
It is gratifying that these concerns are attracting such broad attention. In 1982,Henry L. Lennard, a social psychologist and medical sociologist and I formed an organization called the Center for Urban Well-Being. Henry was a world-renowned expert on social interaction. In an earlier book, he had written: “Human beings are characterized by their strivings for, and dependence upon interaction with other human beings. Such interaction is an end in itself, and interactional deprivation leads to anguish, loneliness, and depression. Interaction defines the humanness of the self.”
We formed our organization (later renamed International Making Cities Livable -IMCL) to bring to the attention of elected officials and city-making professionals the absolute necessity of understanding the effects urban design and planning decisions had on the quality of citizens’ everyday lives, and to clarify how to create urban settings that help to develop social interaction and community. As we emphasized in our first book together, Public Life in Urban Places, “City dwellers everywhere seem to have a desire, indeed a basic need, for the diversity, sociability, and community made possible by being in public.”
As Mumford said, the decision that we face globally is whether to devote ourselves to the development of our own deepest humanity, or to surrender to the almost automatic forces we have set in motion and yield place to our de-humanized alter ego, ‘Post-historic Man’. “That second choice will bring with it a progressive loss of feeling, emotion, creative audacity, and finally consciousness.”
Montgomery places himself squarely on the side of improving quality of life: “… cities must be regarded as more than engines of wealth” he emphasizes; “they must be viewed as systems that should be shaped to improve human well-being.”