Happy City 

• This book takes a deep dive into exploring how we can build cities that are conducive to our happiness. It gives lots of real-life stories and examples.
• This book also gives a historical overview of how we got to where we are today. (Did you know that the Romans started cottagecore way before it became an Internet trend?)
• Lastly, this book also shares useful resources for learning about YOUR city, such as H+T Index and Municode.

The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness. The good city should be measured not only by its distractions and amenities but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work, and meaning.

We enjoy hovering in the zone somewhere between strangers and intimates. We want the opportunity to watch and be watched, even if we have no intention of ever actually making contact with one another.

It is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house because the house is exactly the same size every time we come in the front door. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery, with different people honking at us, different intersections jammed with accidents, different problems with weather, and so on.

Crowding is a problem of perception, and it is a problem of design that can be addressed, at least in part, by understanding the subtle physics of sociability. ... First of all, it is critical to understand that human density and crowding are not the same thing. The first is a physical state. The second is psychological and subjective.

As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it, there is no thought so burdensome that you cannot walk away from it.

Simply getting more information about the journey can speed the clock back up again. Take the express bus station on Boulevard du Montparnasse, just a couple of blocks from Britton’s apartment. There’s a covered seating area, but also a prominent screen at the entrance, showing exactly when the next two express buses will arrive. This subtle change in infrastructure is a powerful psychological intervention. Just having access to real-time arrival data causes riders to feel calmer and more in control. After arrival countdown clocks were mounted in the London Underground, people told surveyors that the wait time felt shorter by a quarter. The clocks also make people feel safer traveling at night, partly by giving them more confidence in the system.

Bogotá’s TransMilenio bus system claimed the best road space in the city from private automobiles and used high-quality finishes in its stations. The intent was not just to cut travel times but also to boost the status of public transit riders.

...your streets are not inclusive until you can imagine an eight-year-old or an eighty-year-old walking safely and independently.

If you're now hooked on urban design...

Cyprus