The happy city experiment | Charles Montgomery | TEDxVancouver

so I'm here to talk to you about how to make happier cities and I want to begin by telling you a quick story so back in 2011 I was invited by the Guggenheim Museum to help create an urban laboratory in this empty lot in Manhattan we had three months to play and the curators kept saying laboratory laboratory so I thought okay if it's a lab let's conduct some experiments so the first experiment was called love night and I asked can we transform this basically empty lot into a machine that will get New Yorkers to like and trust each other more for one night now I'm a small-town guy and this was the heart of the urban jungle the Lower East Side was gritty it was dirty it was crowded it was noisy and it was a place of conflict between rich and poor how was I going to get them to like and trust each other more I realized early on that I may need some help so I called up what I call a team of superhero experimentalist so first I called some psychologists and they said oh it's pretty simple what you need to do is serve hot chocolate because their research showed that just holding something warm causes people to feel more warmly about the people around them it's as though the a stimulus works as a metaphor that changes our feelings so I said great you guys are in then I called up an artist named Ryan Brennan now Ryan is really into interactions in public he creates these interventions this one is just a poster called stranger on stranger and it has a very simple premise two people put their hands strangers put their hands up on the poster and they're not allowed to remove their hands until they're no longer strangers great Ryan was in he brought a bunch of these similar interventions okay I'm a small-town guy and this is New York City so I went to every party I could to meet these cool New Yorkers and at one party a woman introduced herself as a professor in fashionable technology I said I have no idea what that is but it's so cool can you come to my experiment she said of course and she had her students create garments that were heat sensitive so basically you put these shirts on and when you touch each other you literally touch each other's hearts and change them so cool they were in there were a bunch more but I'm just going to tell you about one more partner I called in my friend Paul Zak he's a neuro economist so Paul is interested in this molecule oxytocin now oxytocin is the trust molecule it's released every time we have a trust-building encounter with friends or even strangers even in public it gives us the warm and fuzzies it feels great and I said great Paul what's your intervention and he said hugs he was in California right and I said Paul this is New York City it's I don't know if the hugging is going to work but he refused to come unless I let him do the hug intervention so great I said you're in we gathered these and other interventions together we got the room ready the night came we opened the gates and we waited for New Yorkers to come now before telling you what happened I should probably tell you why we were doing this I was working on my book at the time happy city which as you may guess looks at the intersection between happiness and urban design can we build happier cities and in the course of my research I found that the most important ingredient of human happiness isn't money or even sex or ice cream is social connections so the happy city is a social city above all now how important are social connections well the economist John Haley well compared life satisfaction which is a measure of happy this with reported trust in neighbors in cities across Canada and what he found was a very strong correlation basically the more people said they trusted their neighbors the happier people in that city said they were and you're probably noticing that Canada's big rich cities are all lagging down at the bottom of the trust and the happiness scales now this is not to say that money doesn't matter it really does it's just to say that social trust matters even more people who are socially connected are more resilient they get through hard times more easily they get over illness more quickly they live longer an average of 15 years longer than people who are disconnected they're more productive at work in fact social trust social connections correlate really strongly with economic growth so if we care about having a happy resilient healthy and wealthy Society we really should care about building social connections and I use that word building on purpose because I also discovered that the systems and forms of our cities influence how we feel and how we treat each other so our roads our buildings our neighborhoods our parks our sidewalks these are emotional infrastructure now what are the city effects of design look like well this is some really bad news actually for the past 30 to 40 years almost all the places we built look like this communities where you work over here you live over there you play over here you shop over there and you spend the rest of your time driving your kids in between places completely Auto dependent well we've lived in such places long enough that we know this if you live in a community like this an auto dependent community on the edge of a big North American city you're less likely to know and your neighbors then people who live in closer in connected walkable neighborhoods but you're also less likely to participate in team sports do other community activities have people over for dinner volunteer or even vote so this is a real problem I was interested in if we understand there's a relationship between urban form and trust what are we going to do about it well we know that more of us need to live closer together in the future if we're going to deal with issues like climate change resource scarcity population growth but here's an issue for those of you who are feeling very smug if you are downtown latte-sipping elite when we when I acknowledge some difficulties in the exurbs the one place where people record levels of social trust just as low as on the exurbs is in the residential tower where people report feeling both crowded and lonely at the very same time not everybody but on the whole well we're left with this Connor what are we going to do how are we going to build denser places that are also happier you know academic researchers do fascinating work in this realm but it almost never reaches the people who plan and build public spaces buildings neighborhoods and cities yeah let's get angry angry city so I thought wouldn't it be interesting to take some of the lessons that scientists are learning and convert them into its participatory experiments that help give people a visceral understanding of the science this will give us new ways of not just seeing but feeling these places so we started conducting experiments here's an example at an event at the Guggenheim I set up an environmental immersion booth on the left hand side volunteers one by one we're immersed in a concrete urban environment this is London's Southbank actually they thought this was cool in the 60s cement fairly harsh and they listened to sounds of cars honking and other urban noises in the right hand booth we immersed people in a Savannah like environment and they got to listen to bird songs and after eight minutes when they finished we said cheese thank you so much for for missing out on the party and participating here's ten dollars for your time we really appreciate it and oh by the way we're raising money for a really good cause today would you like to donate any of that ten dollars back to our good cause and what do you know people who are immersed in nature we're much more likely to donate to the good cause they were more generous now I know if your actual scientist out there you're thinking this does look a little bit like a high school science experiment and yeah it does but what you need to understand is what we learn is being reflected in lab research and in the field by actual scientists so that was not a joke so so this doesn't mean we all need to move to cabins in the woods what it means is that we need to weave more nature into cities into the connected dense urban environment more chances to touch nature to garden together to hang out in nature and even micro doses help so we were also interested in doing our own experiments in the field so I did hook up with a real scientist named Colin Ellard Colin is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Waterloo we wanted to understand the emotional effect that city spaces had on people so we created this emotional tour of the Lower East Side in Manhattan Colin hook people up with skin conductance cuffs that would measure their level of arousal as they walk through the city not sexual arousal just excitement in a moment he also hacked blackberries so people could punch in their relative happiness in the moment we learned a lot of interesting things one I want to share with you is this people said they were much happier here in front of this jumbled up messy old block of New York style tenements than they were here excuse me in front of a pristine new mixed-use block with a trendy supermarket on the ground floor so what's the difference here not there here in the happier environment lots of doors windows opening small shops services lots going on here in the less happy environment totally blank frosted glass a door at either end of the building now we know from the architect Yan Gail's work that people walk more quickly in front of these spaces so those spaces are not just less happy they're less social and they're less safe but do these spaces actually also have a behavioral effect do they change the way we treat other people I was curious about this so I hooked up with an NGO in Seattle called future wise and we sent out a bunch of volunteers through Seattle two poses lost tourists looking like those deer-in-the-headlights people that you should rob or something anyway and what we found was remarkable again we found people were much more likely to help out our lost tourists in front of varied active lively Street edges than they were in front of blank environments well so this is suggest we've got a real problem because as we begin to rien habit city cores which is happening around North America we are big boxing our downtown's suburban retailers are coming in and taking up entire blocks and killing the street edge it doesn't have to be that way in fact here in Vancouver when Home Depot a great retailer wanted to come into the central city planner said yes of course you can come in developer you need to put the Home Depot on the second floor line the street edge with nine businesses keep the street lively so not only does the street become more lively it becomes safer more healthy more walkable and if our Seattle experiments we're right maybe even a little bit kinder and PS the developer told me later they make much more per square foot on those small units at the front of the building so it's a win-win for everyone okay now as I acknowledged earlier I'm not a scientist but all of this work reflects research and results from that actual scientists are doing in the field and in labs and that includes our experiment love night in New York City so as I told you we open the gates after filling our empty lot with psychological interventions and we waited hoping New Yorkers would come and guess what they did they came by the hundreds and not only did they come they played along they wore the heat-sensitive t-shirts they drank and shared the hot chocolate they did the other interventions and most of all they hugged first they hugged Paul because he insisted there he is he loves it then they started hugging their friends then they hug their strangers then there was more hugging and by the end of the night it was this giant crazy huggy cuddle puddle thing and I have to say the curators at the Guggenheim were not I don't know if they were thrilled by this this was in a high art but we felt great by the end of the night and maybe it was that oxytocin rush but that good feeling is not why I'm telling you this story I'm telling you the story because we also learned something else in that evening and here it is through the three-month course of this lab we had been testing people by using a game called urban ology now urban ology ask people about what kind of city they wanted what kind of society they wanted in group settings questions like this do you think people who work the night shift should get a higher minimum wage and over the course of the lab three months overwhelmingly people said hell no this is New York tough it out but on this night the answer was turned on its head ninety percent of people said yes of course let's pay them more they voted for a greener slower more sustainable more cooperative City a fairer City even though they knew it would cost them more for stuff and they'd probably have to pay higher taxes so it seemed to me as though this short experience of conviviality among strangers actually caused people cause us to think more altruistic alee more cooperatively now when you think about it this is just the kind of attitude shift we need if we're going to deal with the pressing challenges of this urban century poverty inequity climate change you know all these are issues that demand a common response the demand cooperation and we can't hope to solve them if we society are disconnected isolated or indifferent you know there's many reasons for our disconnection and we need to pursue many solutions but the fact is every time we have a trust-building encounter with friends or even strangers even in public it triggers feelings and actions that are more altruistic now I'm not saying we all need to go out and start hugging everybody on the street really but we have a mountain of evidence to suggest that design the way we design our cities their systems and their spaces and places has a strong effect on how we regard and treat other people of course we need to do more research of course i and you should do more experiments but we also need to build differently based on what we already know we need to demand that our planners our architects and even our developers take into account the emotional effect of the things they build if they do yeah if they do if we all do then we can have cities that are healthier more resilient happier wealthier we can have cities that draws together not push us draw us together rather than pushing us apart we can have cities that bring out the best in us and that my friends is one way to get to happier city and I hope we can build it together thank you thank you thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 152,417

Rating: 4.899086 out of 5

Keywords: Culture, United States, ted x, Architecture, English, TEDxTalks, Urban Planning, ted talks, tedx talks, ted talk, Sociology, Social Science, Lifestyle, Relationships/Romance, ted, tedx, tedx talk

Id: 7WiQUzOnA5w

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 24 2014