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Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban design (Doubleday $29.95)
Charles Montgomery is a zeitgeist interpreter who has an instinct for a distinctive turn-of-phrase; a social scientist who can mix a broth of serious ideas with an entertaining style. Like Douglas Coupland, he's a card-carrying internationalist who is nonetheless distinctly a product of Vancouver.
Dubbed an urban experimentalist, Montgomery, in his latest book, Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban design (Doubleday $29.95), has examined how cities have positive or negative impacts on human happiness with a particular focus on Vancouver.
Here is the remarkable paradox: he writes, "the more crowded Vancouver gets, the more people want to live there and the higher the city has risen on international surveys ranking the world's best place to live...";
"...Unlike their counterparts in many other cities, Vancouver's municipal planners enjoy broad discretionary power when considering new development.";
Montgomery's rise behind Douglas Coupland's jet stream (who rose behind Marshall McLuhan's jet stream?) borders on meteoric.
Tracing the paths and voyages taken by his great-grandfather who was the Bishop of Tasmania in 1892, Montgomery first explored the South Pacific and published an account of his journey and his exploration of how Christian missionaries affected the region in The Last Heathen: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia. (D&M 2004).
The Last Heathen received the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and was published in England by Fourth Estate as The Shark God: Encounters with Myth and Magic in the South Pacific.
Now Montgomery has again won exposure on the world stage, such as coverage in The New York Times and The Guardian, with Happy City, aptly described by one reviewer as, "an eye-opening, pleasurable, utterly necessary tour through the best and worst neighborhoods of our urbanized world.";
Montgomery has provided an intelligently rendered potpourri of personal observations, research and digested data that germinate a vision worthy of David Suzuki, who has recommended it. The upbeat promo states, "The happy city, the green city, and the low-carbon city are the same place, and we can all help build it.";
If Vancouverites think their Happy Planet mayor Gregor Robertson is a bicycle zealot, they ought to read Montgomery's comments about Bogotá 's mountain bike-riding mayor Enrique Peñalosa. He didn't declare war on drugs, we are told-no, Peñalosa declared war on cars. And people, we're told, love him for it. Evidently Gregor could use some Spanish lessons.
Along the way we get to learn stuff.
"If one was to judge by sheer wealth,"; Montgomery writes, "the last half-century should have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the U.S. and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan and Great Britain. And yet the boom decades of the late 20th century were not accompanied by a boom in well-being. The British got richer by more than 40% between 1993 and 2012, but the rate of psychiatric disorders and neuroses grew...
"...A couple of University of Zurich economists, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, compared German commuters' estimation of the time it took them to get to work with their answers to the standard wellbeing question, 'How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?'
"Their finding was seemingly straightforward: the longer the drive, the less happy people were. Before you dismiss this as numbingly obvious, keep in mind that they were testing not for drive satisfaction, but for life satisfaction. People were choosing commutes that made their entire lives worse.
"Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love."; Happy City: 95 978-0-385-66912-2
***
Born in 1968, Charles Montgomery spent much of his formative years on a Vancouver Island farm. Among his numerous awards is a Citation of Merit from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society for outstanding contribution towards public understanding of climate change science.
Influenced by the writing of Malcolm Lowry, Bruce Chatwin, Miguel de Cervantes and Paul William Roberts, Charles Montgomery has been a member of a loose affiliation of Vancouver-based literary journalists who explore contemporary issues around the world, including J.B. MacKinnon, shortlisted for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction with The Once and Future World (Random House 2013). It's MacKinnon's follow-up to his co-written The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (Random House 2007) that received the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize.
Dubbed an urban experimentalist, Montgomery, in his latest book, Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban design (Doubleday $29.95), has examined how cities have positive or negative impacts on human happiness with a particular focus on Vancouver.
Here is the remarkable paradox: he writes, "the more crowded Vancouver gets, the more people want to live there and the higher the city has risen on international surveys ranking the world's best place to live...";
"...Unlike their counterparts in many other cities, Vancouver's municipal planners enjoy broad discretionary power when considering new development.";
Montgomery's rise behind Douglas Coupland's jet stream (who rose behind Marshall McLuhan's jet stream?) borders on meteoric.
Tracing the paths and voyages taken by his great-grandfather who was the Bishop of Tasmania in 1892, Montgomery first explored the South Pacific and published an account of his journey and his exploration of how Christian missionaries affected the region in The Last Heathen: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia. (D&M 2004).
The Last Heathen received the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and was published in England by Fourth Estate as The Shark God: Encounters with Myth and Magic in the South Pacific.
Now Montgomery has again won exposure on the world stage, such as coverage in The New York Times and The Guardian, with Happy City, aptly described by one reviewer as, "an eye-opening, pleasurable, utterly necessary tour through the best and worst neighborhoods of our urbanized world.";
Montgomery has provided an intelligently rendered potpourri of personal observations, research and digested data that germinate a vision worthy of David Suzuki, who has recommended it. The upbeat promo states, "The happy city, the green city, and the low-carbon city are the same place, and we can all help build it.";
If Vancouverites think their Happy Planet mayor Gregor Robertson is a bicycle zealot, they ought to read Montgomery's comments about Bogotá 's mountain bike-riding mayor Enrique Peñalosa. He didn't declare war on drugs, we are told-no, Peñalosa declared war on cars. And people, we're told, love him for it. Evidently Gregor could use some Spanish lessons.
Along the way we get to learn stuff.
"If one was to judge by sheer wealth,"; Montgomery writes, "the last half-century should have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the U.S. and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan and Great Britain. And yet the boom decades of the late 20th century were not accompanied by a boom in well-being. The British got richer by more than 40% between 1993 and 2012, but the rate of psychiatric disorders and neuroses grew...
"...A couple of University of Zurich economists, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, compared German commuters' estimation of the time it took them to get to work with their answers to the standard wellbeing question, 'How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?'
"Their finding was seemingly straightforward: the longer the drive, the less happy people were. Before you dismiss this as numbingly obvious, keep in mind that they were testing not for drive satisfaction, but for life satisfaction. People were choosing commutes that made their entire lives worse.
"Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love."; Happy City: 95 978-0-385-66912-2
***
Born in 1968, Charles Montgomery spent much of his formative years on a Vancouver Island farm. Among his numerous awards is a Citation of Merit from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society for outstanding contribution towards public understanding of climate change science.
Influenced by the writing of Malcolm Lowry, Bruce Chatwin, Miguel de Cervantes and Paul William Roberts, Charles Montgomery has been a member of a loose affiliation of Vancouver-based literary journalists who explore contemporary issues around the world, including J.B. MacKinnon, shortlisted for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction with The Once and Future World (Random House 2013). It's MacKinnon's follow-up to his co-written The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (Random House 2007) that received the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize.
Submitted on March 7, 2014 in By David.
