Happiness is good community design

originally published in the Spartanburg Journal, December 2010

Dare I say it?  “It’s cold, y’all.”  This Arctic weather that hit our fair region the past couple of weeks has been the topic of nearly all casual conversations.  I generally get the question, “Do you still ride to work in this weather?”

You bet I do!  In fact, it is this kind of weather—the extremes of heat and cold—that focuses my intent to “be out in it,” the excuse I use for my outdoor activity.  We all know what 65 degrees and sunny feels like, but how about 13 degrees and sunny?

This week, I rousted out my winter gloves, and the skull cap I wear under my helmet.  Now I take a good ten minutes to get dressed and ready to leave.  Though it’s perhaps simple and unclear to say, these days riding to work make me happy.

Happiness is a shifty target, and defining it mostly takes the form of listing what it is that makes us happy.  But it has popped up in more and more writings about the ideas of community and community design.  One blog I read quoted Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, during whose terms the murder rate in Bogota dropped 40%.   “There are a few things we can agree on about happiness,” Penalosa says. “You need to fulfill your potential as a human being. You need to walk. You need to be with other people. Most of all, you need to not feel inferior.” 

Abe Goldberg, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina-Upstate, has correlated happiness with community involvement.  Goldberg illustrates what the data shows with a story about someone feeling depressed, whose doctor tells her, “You need to get out more, and be with people.”  But, Goldberg points out, our building patterns for the last forty or so years have created communities where being with people is more and more difficult, with houses in subdivisions featuring the garage in front and the porch in back.  Most of our streets, even in residential subdivisions, are not conducive to walking and biking, and our community feeling is weakened as a result.  We have essentially built against our own happiness.

Today, in 20 degree weather, I rode to work.  A man walking spoke to me, and we agreed that it was a good thing it wasn’t always this cold.  Another cyclist, who was on his way to take the bus to work, joked that he still had to get to work even when it’s cold.  I joked that a frozen beard is surely better than a frozen chin.

And the “feeling inferior” part of Penalosa’s definition?  Street design has for many years focused solely on automobile travel, at the expense of other forms of transportation.  We tend to look at self-propulsion as a punishment for driving while intoxicated, or for poverty—pedestrians and cyclists are suspect, and we provide few ways for them to get around safely.  In neighborhoods without sidewalks, where pedestrians are forced into the streets if they want to walk, we are told we can be here only on the automobilists’ terms.  Nothing says inferior like not being welcome.

Hazel Borys, the managing director of the community design firm Placemakers, points to a biological element to this phenomenon: “Oxytocin, the trust hormone, goes up with eye contact. We get a whole lot more of it while walking. Which is just the beginning of balm to the spirit fostered in walkable neighbourhoods.” 

There are many reasons to support a more inclusive transportation system: economic development, transportation equality, community health.  Perhaps it is the combination of all that, in one of those “sum is greater than the parts” equations, that results in our happiness.  That feeling of happiness warms the bones cold from a vigorous commute.