Home > Work > Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
21 " Enrique Peñalosa with a big and simple idea: that urban design should be used to make people happier. "
― , Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
22 " Scant few neighborhoods in North America feature places that draw people together regularly for anything other than buying stuff. "
23 " The conclusion: killer drivers are so common in sprawl that the carnage they create far exceeds the damage done by killers who use other weapons. In fact, someone who walks out her door on the edges of sprawl suburbia is much more likely to die at the hands of a stranger than someone moving through most American central cities or inner suburbs. The only difference is that most of suburbia’s killers didn’t mean it. "
24 " Globally, traffic injuries are the greatest killer of ten- to twenty-four-year-olds.* A rational actor would be terrified of suburban roads. A rational policy maker would wage war, not on other nations, but on traffic deaths. "
25 " The logical response to these converging crises would be to alter our individual and collective behavior in order to stave off disaster. It demands using less energy and raw materials. It means moving more efficiently and moving shorter distances. It means living closer together and sharing more spaces, walls, and vehicles. It means collecting experiences rather than objects. "
26 " The garden was not merely a biophilic intervention. It was a social machine. "
27 " having one friend or family member to confide in had the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income. Economists love to turn relationships into numbers. "
28 " The curious part was this: most students said that they knew that social life would be more important to their happiness than architecture, yet they still put greater weight on physical features. This is the standard mis-weighing of extrinsic and intrinsic values: we may tell each other that experiences are more important than things, but we constantly make choices as though we didn’t believe "
29 " Part of the problem is that sprawl’s wide streets and big lots take up so much space that cities can’t afford to build fire stations close by, so it takes fire trucks longer to reach each blaze.) "
30 " land zoning that excludes apartments and affordable housing from neighborhoods also constitutes a form of segregation. "
31 " six-story mixed-use building produced more than thirteen times the tax revenue and twelve times the jobs per acre of land than the Walmart on the edge of town. "
32 " living in low-density sprawl puts residents at greater risk of arthritis, chronic lung disease, digestive problems, headaches, and urinary tract infections. "
33 " result from living in communities that force people to drive. Just living in a sprawling city has the effect of four years of aging. "