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Michael Mitchell: Cities of Hope and Happiness
2021-03-04 ICCSD

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Author: Michael Curtis Mitchell (US)

CEO, Founder of MCM Group International

Cities of Hope and Happiness (I) 

01

From tentative beginnings nearly 9,000 years ago, human settlements have been journeys of hope overcoming anxiety. Even in their most rudimentary proto forms they were undertaken with the purpose of creating a more secure life, reducing human fear and uncertainty. Tied to the cycle of life, early communities reflected the human need for plentiful crops, fertile seasons, personal safety, harmonious social order and “connectedness” to the greater. 

Picturing our place in the world through this expectant lens formed the basis for many of our foundation myths, cultivating and ultimately ensuring our sense of belonging to a place. In China these thoughts of how we viewed our sense of “connectedness” to a place was expressed 5,200 years ago through the founding myth of the Xia Dynasty.

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schematic partition Xia empire

Yu the Great, who it is said received the geometric basis of China’s urban planning – the nine in one square plan. Yu’s plan represented a reflection of heavenly patterns mirrored on earth, signaling mankind’s role in the celestial order, giving his earthly city a permanence that can overcome the transitory nature of life. Other contemporaries of Yu were expressing similar visions of urban life.  

King Menes represented another founding persona, responsible for uniting Egypt and creating Memphis as the capital. Although an early river settlement during the predynastic period had already existed for 2,000 years, Menses overlaid a formal religious plan for the city, thus anointing its “connectedness” to the greater; thereby creating what may be called a sense of belonging - of “identity”, perhaps even, a primordial sense of “home”. 

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ruins of Memphis

02

These efforts at overlaying an idealized connectedness and identity to a place has coursed throughout the 5,000-year history of urban planning – all based upon a hopeful quest to minimize our fears and uncertainty, strengthen our security, and understand our place in the cosmos, ultimately signaling the transition to distinctly defined cultural identities.  Beginning with the goal of accommodating these deep-seated needs, planning of community spaces continually expanded its vision over the ensuing millennia to encompass the ever-growing complexity of human interactions and settlements. 

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home, family and animal domestication

This complexity was compounded by the establishment of highly infectious diseases in human communities as a result of animal husbandry. Settling in communities was accompanied by the need to fight the scourges of smallpox, tuberculosis and other diseases that jumped from their domesticated animals. This confluence of the identity of home, family and animal domestication as a root of urban developmentcan be clearly recognized in the Chinese character for home and family, “jia”, which is a pictograph of a pig inside a house. 

03

As the great Greek playwright and satirist Aristophanes said nearly 2500 years ago, urban planning confronts us with rational management of space, money, work and sexual relationships. This was perhaps a satirical reaction to another contemporary Greek, Hippodamus, who championed formal orthogonally planned cities, and often referred to as the “father” of urban planning in western cultures. Laying out his home city of Miletus in a grid plan comprised of houses on blocks created by streets and side streets crossing at right angles, with public buildings in the city center, inspired other detractors as well – some of them highly regarded. 

As technological advances in warfare became increasing decisive Aristotle objected to highly rationalized orthogonally planned cities. Aristotle believed that every city should preserve irregularly planned passageways to increase the difficulty and slow the advance of invaders. Further he cautioned that now that “catapults and other engines for siege of cities have attained such a high degree of precision,” the design of city walls is of particular import in city planning.

04

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Leonardo Da Vinci

As urban complexity continually intensified over the millennium to accommodate mankind’s increasing socio-economic interactions, and as new and devastating fears emerged, ever higher orders of planning were envisioned. When the bubonic plaque struck Milan in 1484, killing a full third of the city’s population, Leonardo da Vinci was inspired to redesign the city to ward off future catastrophes. 

Built with narrow, highly crowded Medieval residential neighborhoods, Milan was ripe for the pandemic explosion. Emphasizing two basic aesthetics, cleanliness and efficiency, da Vinciimagined the city with a network of canals that would support commerce and sanitation along with a three-tiered vertical division of the built environment for movement - carts and horses on the lowest level, pedestrian traffic on the second and residential on the third. He proposed separating transport modalities and living spaces to address relieving the residents of Milan from the terrible emotional scares and psychological fears borne by the plaque.

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city canal of Milan

05

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IIdefonis Cerda

By the nineteenth century, mankind’s technological and scientific progress had increased the complexity of the city to the point that a more comprehensive approach to city planning than even that envisioned by da Vinci was required. In 1867 the Spanish born IIdefonis Cerda, wrote the seminal work ‘General Theory of Urbanization.’’ Coining the term urbanization, which he defined as “the set of principles that should be applied so that buildings and their conglomerations, as opposed to constricting, distorting and corrupting the physical, moral and intellectual faculties of social humans, can help promote their development and vitality thereby improving individual well-being, the sum total of which constitutes public prosperity.” 

Cerda moves the planning of cities from a profession designed to ameliorate fears and defending against the vagaries of life, toward an aspirational view that cities can and should be designed to provide the necessary nourishment of the human spirit to achieve personal and societal happiness. Cerda’s idealized principles were tested in his planning of Barcelona’s Eixample neighborhood but were soon subsumed, as most utopian efforts are, under political pressure to maximize economic return on the land. Planned with low-rise urban blocks with open interior parks connecting each city block, his buildings soon became four sided more traditional residential structures. 

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Cerda's planning of Barcelona’s Eixample neighborhood

Cerda would likely never use the word “happy” as a goal of urban planning, but he certainly expressed the belief that the framework of the city was the fertile ground necessary to cultivate a well-lived life. His expansive view of urban planning went well beyond reductionist views that assessed only infrastructure, density, scale, economic return and the like to express a vision of planning that was intended to meet the needs of the “whole” man. From microcosm to macrocosm he wrote that to plan he “needed to examine everything that had been written on architecture from Vitruvius to Leonce Renaud; everything on law from Solomon to Benthan; everything on the study of society from Plato to Prohon; everything on sanitation from Hippocrates to the present day; everything on statistics from Moses to present; on geography…; on political economy…;on morals and religion…; on philosophy…; etc.”  Cerda grasped this wide-ranging view of urban life by emphasizing the need for scientific rigor based upon data collection and statistics to inform whether plans meet their intended outcomes.

During Cerda’s life, only three cities in the world had a population over 1 million – London, Paris and Beijing. Today the world has 35 urban-mega centers with populations between 10 to 35 million inhabitants. China alone has 102 urban areas with populations over 1 million. Complexity in these urban centers has reached levels unfathomable to ancestral planners. Although the fears that stalked mankind as they settled in urban enclaves are more pacified, new potentially more dangerous consequences of contemporary life have arisen. 

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growth in urban population

Each significant growth in urban population, density and material consumption produces dramatic increases in complexity, with corresponding increases in risk. In a most fundamental way contemporary urban life is now faced with existential macro questions around sustainability and with micro question centered on how we want to live. Despite Cerda’s plan’s failure city planning remained charged with delivering hope and happiness over fear and anxiety.

06

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Le Corbusier

The early 20th century urban planners continued the quest to make the world’s cities healthier and happier. In 1933, the prominent French architect and planner Le Corbusier is a prime example, following after Cerda with his own treatise for the ideal city. Echoing Cerda, he wrote in his “Radiant City” that the modern city should be designed to benefit its citizens “on both the spiritual and material planes”. 

Le Corbusier was deeply influenced, however, by the hallmarks of the industrial age – specialized functions, efficiency, simple Euclidean regularity – as he aptly said, “a house is a machine to live in.” Hoping to end the slum like conditions of the working poor that had flocked to industrial urban centers and provide them with cleaner air and more verdant surroundings, he proposed a strict segregation of residential, commercial and industrial zones. His plan called for high-rise towers built in great rectilinear blocks surrounded by open green space.

Unfortunately, Le Corbusier’s bias for industrial efficiency helped doom the hopes for the Radiant City. Among his most enthusiastic supporters was the city government of Glasgow, Scotland. In a well-intentioned bid to rid the city of their expansive slums, city planners and elected officials wholeheartedly adopted Le Corbusier’s plans after visiting an example of his completed Radiant City concept in Marseilles in 1954. Shortly thereafter his ten 20-storey concrete towers filled the Sighthill Estates neighborhood, housing 7,000 people and becoming the highest concentration of high-rise towers in Britain outside of London.

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Sighthill Estates

Fifty years later the towers began to be demolished signifying an epic failure to a once heralded vision. They had become infamous for violence, drugs and social anomie. What went wrong? In a somewhat simplified conclusion, the inhabitants identity was stripped away. Planners may shape districts and cities, but the urban environment in turn shapes each of us. When the tenements were vacated, one of the residents summed up the move to the Sighthill Estates, “these were communities which had a social fabric, if you like, which were then broken up by these processes.” The tenement dwellers lost their sense of place and identity and with it their dignity.

07

After World War II this process of urban renewal became fully internationalized. In the United States three urban renewal movements took shape. 

One was a result of the post-war boom which created opportunities to develop modestly priced homes in the suburbs giving inner city residents the possibility to escape dense industrial and residential neighborhoods. 

Another was inner city renewal which was encouraged by massive federal grants to rebuild downtowns across America in an attempt to maintain their economic viability.I witnessed first-hand the destruction of the 19th century brick buildings in my hometown of Portland, Oregon in order to realize the latest urban planning answer to designing better cities. The plan called for ringing the central business district with parking garages that allowed for convenient parking access for suburbanites visiting downtown to work, shop, and enjoy entertainment.

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Pruitt-Igoe

The third type of urban planning strategy to save the economic value of the central business district was to use urban renewal strategies to replace old housing stock by creating a residential redevelopment ring around the city core. One of America’s most famous examples of this strategy was also inspired by Le Corbusier and designed by Minoru Yamasaki. In 1956 St Louis approved the creation of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex consisting of 33 towers, each 11 storeys high. Less than 20 years later, with the buildings nearly empty because of a breakdown in social order, the government destroyed the project. The cause of its failure, similar to the residents of Sighthill Estates - the project evoked no feelings of identity and control for the residents.  

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Some of these pictures are from :https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs

Cities of Hope and Happiness (II)

Since Le Corbusier, and the planners that were influenced by his perspective, we have learned much more about the interplay between plans, buildings, the urban environment and their impact on people's lives.

Although the pursuit of happiness may seem utopian to more pragmatically inclined planners focused on revitalizing neighborhoods, optimizing transport and infrastructure efficiencies, and addressing the latest round of gentrification sweeping cities, happiness has always lurked in the background of every thoughtful plan; shielded perhaps, but present in sentiments about quality of life, healthy environments, and clean, affordable residential communities. But understanding the dimensions of happiness have been nearly impossible in the past to assess along with the role that urban living played. The literature is replete with the negative impacts of urban living – higher stress, mental illness, isolation – but only recently have we begun to unwrap the societal drivers to happy living.

What is it? How do you measure it? Beginning in 2011, the UN General Assembly brought the issue to the forefront by adopting resolution 65/309 “Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development.” The next year the first World Happiness Report was published – “Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm”, which served as the text for the UN High Level Meeting held that year chaired by UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon. 

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https://worldhappiness.report/

The World Happiness Report is now published annually surveying the degree to which citizens of 156 nations perceive themselves to be happy.  This year’s report, 2020, marks the first-time cities around the world are ranked, with the analysis peering into how the urban environment affects our individual happiness. Ranking number one for 2020 is Helsinki, Finland, followed in order by Aarhus, Denmark; Wellington, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Bergen, Norway; Oslo, Norway; Tel Aviv, Israel; Stockholm, Sweden and Brisbane, Australia.  The largest population among the group was number ten, Brisbane with 2.5 million, with the mean population of the entire group being 419,000. 

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Helsinki, Finland 

This correlation between happiness and city size also holds true for innovation. Many of the happiest populations are also the most creative. We encounter many of the most creative cities in the world such as Helsinki, Stockholm, and Tel Aviv from the list above, while in the United States cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland and Austin are listed among both the happiest as well as the most creative of American cities. Their urban populations are all considerably under one million, with many near half that population.  As humanity continues to be attracted to urban centers, planners need to pay considerably greater attention to the factors that make people both happy and innovative. These dynamics will become increasingly more central to urban planning in response to cities’ ever-growing crisis of complexity.

As the honored chronicler of human behavior, Shakespeare, reminds “a city is but its people.” The prodigious triumphant of human settlements are not the structures and supporting infrastructure but the means they afford to make living better, by reducing fear and anxiety while increasing pleasure and happiness, through deepening our capacity to manage the continual increase in complexity. Cities, if nothing else, have been physical manifestations of hope in the future. They are built for centuries, with timelines envisioned well-beyond the span of single lifetimes. To maintain that drive for social and civic innovation in the face of the overriding complexity that our future now presents; most notably the daunting task of making resilient, sustainable cities, requires an ever-expanding set of tools to address.

Once again it is useful to be reminded of Cerda imploring us to study the human condition, to encompass as wide an understanding of human motivations and needs as possible before undertaking such a solemn task as the planning of how people should live. Though the underlying challenges of contemporary urban planning are not new, the level of complexity is. When in the past, externalities like cultural upheaval, climate change, or disease forced us to abandon our cities, or rebuild them again and again, or move elsewhere, today there is no further place to go. Our only hope is that our tools must rise to a new level of challenge. They must, in many ways be transformative.

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data collection network

As if our “just-in-time” culture anticipated the need to create tools to help us plan and manage contemporary cities, our tools are becoming “smart”. They offer a profound opportunity to help us meet the challenges we face. Cities, and to a larger extent private enterprises, have made massive investments in building data collection networks that have the capacity to make our lives more efficient, comfortable and resilient. But how we use them will determine if they can make us fulfilled and happy. 

So where do we start? What do we need to do to develop resilient, sustainable, creative cities. And to what purpose if their inhabitants aren’t happy. Designing sustainable cities, in the broadest sense of the term, begins with understanding and appreciating what comprises personal well-being. 

The Global Happiness Report highlights the many elements that lead to happiness. Stressing the intimate relationship between Happy City and Smart City, the report emphasizes the role that data-driven planning can play in creating a happy and sustainable city. One of the examples the report presents is Dubai’s tool for “Smart Happiness Project Evaluation”(SHAPE).  Their objective is to correlate the happiness of residents utilizing several smart city measurements. This gives the city a data-driven tool to prioritize which projects will generate the highest degree of personal well-being. The Global Happiness Report indicates that the keys to community happiness revolve around minimizing inequality, reinforcing social cohesion, providing quality education and opportunity, affordable housing, access to natural surroundings and a sense of security and safety.   

The digital revolution has matured to the point where the beneficial amenities of urban living no longer need to be anchored in major metropolitan cities. Meaningful employment, modern healthcare, quality education, leading research and innovation can all be offered in smaller satellite centers that can better balance lifestyle against economic cost and sustainability. Smart satellite cities can resist the homogenization impacts of global culture, typified by Starbucks and McDonald’s, and retain one of the key reasons for human settlements in the first place, personal and cultural identity.Designing communities that anchor us in a sense of place, while allowing us to digitally pick and choose among the greater world, allows us to preserve the best of our individual and cultural identities while accessing all the rest.

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smart satellite cities

Urban planners, along with all community leaders, should make every effort to produce practical solutions that can meet the requirements defined in the Happiness Report.  These suggestions can be detailed into pragmatic design guidelines that include: 

Innovation

Smart cities have the data resources to be laboratories of innovation. For the first time in history planners can now evaluate the psychological responses to colors, shapes, spaces, various environments to quantify their impact on our well-being. 

Data

Planners now have the smart data resources and computer processing power (AI assistance) to create more idealized urban plans built not from the parameters of the physical site but from the needs of the people that will occupy it. 

Sustainability

Planners have a responsibility to incorporate as many elements as possible to reduce greenhouse gas footprints; ranging from designing landscapes for the purpose of carbon sequestration, to rainwater capture and to implementation of low-impact building codes. 

Resilience

Increased urban complexity has reached the risk threshold where resilience planning to reduce anxiety, increased security, and planning for unforeseen disruptions such as pandemics is a requirement. 

Mindset

Planners should incorporate psychological understanding and needs as a fundamental part of their project analysis and design. 

Stimulation

One of mankind’s key needs is stimulation. We need to create urban environments that offer a wide range of experiential possibilities. 

Digitalization

Planners need to move as many urban lifestyle desires online as possible to reduce destructive material and energy consumption. 

Stress

Reducing as much environmental stress as possible through noise reduction strategies, decreasing local source pollution, and lessening the impact of cars through minimizing the land dedicated to their use in urban spaces, are essential components of planning for well-being. 

Connectedness

Structuring spaces to promote a sense of community, social interaction and a connection to the earth through “growing” spaces promotes healthy living. 

Identity

Expressions of symbolic meaning, shared values, and common goals need to be considered in every plan. 

Scale

Human-scale mid-range urban density offers a variety of mutually interacting benefits from walkability, diverse mix of uses and an optimum energy efficiency for the delivery of infrastructure services. 

In a most profound way, mankind’s 9,000-year journey, from an agrarian society to an urban-based information (digital) society, appears to be nearly complete. The benefits and risks resulting from this process are now quite apparent. Humanity is near a tipping point where the decisions we now make regarding the way we live in cities will determine their and perhaps our ultimate fates. Our tools have risen to the occasion; from domestication, to plow, to AI, we have evolved our capabilities to enable us to shape our own destiny. It is up to us. The only question is whether we will follow Cerda’s hope that cities can and should be designed to nourish the human spirit.

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