Charles Montgomery

For years, self-help experts have told us that we need to do inner work in order to improve our lives. But what if our cities themselves had the power to make or break our happiness? Drawing on brain science, psychology, and rich personal stories, Charles Montgomery explains how cities influence how we feel, behave, and treat other people in ways most of us never realize. Everything from the length of your commute to the depth of your front yard can have an unseen effect on your mind, emotions, and social life. But Montgomery uses fascinating and often funny social experiments to demonstrate that we are not helpless. We can change our lives by changing our relationship with our cities—and each other. By understanding the effect that design has on our emotions and decisions, we can all share this empowering new vision of city life.

What is the future of your city—of all cities around the world? How can the design and planning of a city affect how happy its inhabitants are? Urban experimentalist Charles Montgomery presents a message that is as surprising as it is hopeful. Doomsayers have warned that action to tackle the urgent challenges of climate change and energy scarcity will lead us into decades of hardship. But, in this talk, he looks to cities around the world that are doing it right, and he points to powerful evidence that suggests the opposite: that the green city, the low-carbon city, and the happy city are the same place. Drawing on his own experiments within cities, and using his deep understanding of history, neuroscience, psychology, and cultural studies, Montgomery presents a picture of flourishing cities, and of everyone—from governments to corporations to citizens—working together to make it happen.

Policymakers around the world are embracing human wellbeing as a legitimate and necessary goal. Jurisdictions from Bhutan to France to the United Nations have adopted happiness indices to help guide development and economic policy. Cities need to catch up.

As Charles Montgomery demonstrates in Happy City, urban systems influence the way we feel, behave, and interact with each other in ways that politicians, planners, and city builders often fail to realize. In a world of conflicting goals and complex systems, it can be easy to overlook the urban design/wellbeing connection. The good news is that happy city principles can help cities meet public health objectives as well as economic and sustainability goals at the same time.

How can you bring happiness into your own urban work? In this 90-minute workshop, participants will be introduced to a new framework for incorporating wellbeing principles into urban design and systems planning. Together we will adapt this tool to local or contextual conditions and aspirations. Using the happiness lens, participants will work in groups to examine one or more policy issues facing their community, and identify opportunities for action. Along the way, we’ll identify the cognitive errors that block good decisions on risk and reward.

There’s nothing more important for human happiness—or for the success of our societies—than our trust in one another. But the world has been spiraling out of trust. Too many people are disconnected from their neighbors. Too many people have become suspicious of strangers. Too many people have been left out of the social life of their communities.

The good news is that our cities can help heal the trust divide. Charles Montgomery has spent more than a decade using using lessons from behavioral science and psychology to help turn cities around the world into better social machines. In this visual journey, Charles shares fascinating and often funny social experiments to demonstrate that we can redesign our communities to draw people together in ways that nurture the bonds that keep us all healthy, happy and strong. By understanding the effect that design has on our emotions and decisions, we can all help shape this empowering new vision of city life.