Charles Montgomery

“A brilliant, entertaining, and vital book. Charles Montgomery deftly leads us from our misplaced focus on money, cars, and stuff to consider what makes us truly happy. Then everything changes—the way we live, work, and play in humanity’s major habitat, the city.”—David Suzuki, host of CBC’s The Nature of Things and cofounder of the David Suzuki Foundation, on Happy City

Charles Montgomery is an award-winning author, design thinker and leader of experiments to improve wellbeing in communities around the world. His highly-anticipated latest book, The Trust Experiments, reveals how we can use design to heal this decade’s social trust crisis and forge stronger communities. His previous book, Happy City, examines the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness.

Charles founded the interdisciplinary team Happy Cities, which helps city-builders on four continents achieve healthier, happier, more inclusive societies. His collaborators have included the World Health Organization, the Guggenheim Museum, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and governments in Vancouver, Auckland, Mexico City, Denver and Dubai. Charles is a fellow of the Centre for Conscious Design, and, in 2023, Planetizen magazine named him one of the 100 most influential urbanists in the world.

Charles’s forthcoming book, The Trust Experiments, is “an ambitious and hopeful guide to one of the defining problems of our age,” writes Jay Van Bavel, director of New York University’s Center for Conflict & Cooperation. “Humans are wired to form tribes, but we are also remarkably capable of trusting strangers. Charles Montgomery shows how the right environments can tip that balance toward cooperation. With fascinating studies and vivid stories, he explains how the spaces and systems we create can either isolate us or help strangers become neighbors.” Johann Hari (Stolen Focus) writes, “This beautiful, tender, intelligent book is an essential guide to how we find our way back to each other—and to trust.”

Charles’s previous award-winning book, Happy City, a brilliant, eye-opening exploration about how the places we live can make us happier, sparked a global movement for better cities. The New York Times Book Review wrote: “Happy City is not only readable but stimulating. It raises issues most of us have avoided for too long. Do we live in neighborhoods that make us happy? That is not a silly question. Montgomery encourages us to ask it without embarrassment, and to think intelligently about the answer.”

Charles has advised and inspired planners, designers, and decision-makers across the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, Australia and Mexico. Charles also creates experiments that challenge us to see our communities—and ourselves—in entirely new ways. His Home for the Games initiative led hundreds of people to open their homes to strangers during the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Working with the BMW Guggenheim Lab and the citizens of New York City, he transformed an empty lot into a machine to maximize feelings of altruism. Whether it is empowering people to re-imagine a city street using hundreds of huge building blocks, or challenging them to hug total strangers, each experiment is driven by insights in the science of human wellbeing. Charles’s work nudges us out of our comfort zone to find a hopeful new vision of human connection.

After launching the world’s first Happy Neighbourhood Audit in Mexico City, Charles has channeled research into practical design solutions for strengthening social connections and trust. He and his team have co-created housing to maximize local friendships. They have designed super-social neighborhoods. They have created new methods for predicting social interactions in public spaces and parks. (The Canadian Institute of Planners awarded Happy City with the 2020 Healthy Communities Planning Award for Planning Excellence for its “Pavement-to-Plaza Wellbeing Assessment” studies.) Ultimately, Charles’s work led him to redesign his own social environment. He helped create, and now lives in, Vancouver’s first vertical cohousing community.

Charles’s writings on urban planning, design, psychology, and culture have appeared in magazines and journals on three continents. Among his awards is a Citation of Merit from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society for outstanding contribution towards public understanding of climate change science. His first book, The Last Heathen, won the 2005 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction and vigorous praise from reviewers in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere.