By visitor contributor Alison Grover. She lately wrote about bike parking.
I lately had the pleasure of studying, Completely satisfied Metropolis: Reworking Our Lives Via City Design by Charles Montgomery (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2014). I savored virtually each one in every of its 313 pages. Learn this guide should you care concerning the design of our constructed surroundings.
The writer, Charles Montgomery is an award-winning author, researcher, and urbanist from Vancouver, British Columbia. He attracts on his experiences dwelling in Vancouver in addition to his travels. Though this guide was printed over ten years in the past, the concepts offered stay salient and priceless.
Completely satisfied Metropolis is a set of analysis and anecdotes illustrating what it means to dwell in a metropolis that’s conducive to human happiness. All through the guide, we find out about city design, psychology, and neuroscience, attending to the guts of what produces joyful metropolis residents. In a nutshell: it’s all about our social connections.
One perception that resonated with me was a spotlight on Mark Lakeman and The Metropolis Restore Mission, a Portland-based placemaking group. You’ve in all probability both heard of them or seen their work in colourful, painted intersections round city. These had been began as a response to Portland’s city grid, the place, “in most neighborhoods, the streets themselves grew to become the one shared public house…[the grid] has a profound impact on the individuals who should inhabit it: it estranges them from the method of shaping their very own world” (p. 305). Many instances, I’ve questioned why sidewalks are virtually the one public areas in my southeast Portland neighborhood. The place is our gathering house? Parks, avenue plazas, and meals truck pods supply casual, convivial public house; however we’d like extra, particularly on the east aspect, with a view to get to know our neighbors and construct possession of our communities.
Montgomery illustrates each the social isolation of dwelling in dispersed suburbs, and conversely, the stress induced by extremely high-density house type dwelling. He means that the happiest density lies someplace in between. A great medium density would have sufficient individuals to assist providers, transit, and walkability, whereas conserving constructing heights under a few tales.
This guide reads extra like a novel somewhat than a guide on city design. Montgomery doesn’t merely bombard us with analysis insights from the fields of design and psychology. Moderately, he delivers data on the human scale for an pleasing studying expertise in the identical manner that human scale cities make for pleasing lives. Because the reader, you develop into invested in peoples’ tales whereas gaining perception from the experiences of a super-commuter in Northern California, a co-housing group in Vancouver, BC, and cramped house residents in New York Metropolis, to call just a few.
All through the guide, Montgomery builds belief by going additional than quoting city planners, architects, politicians, and psychology specialists. He’s biking alongside Jan Gehl in Copenhagen. He’s chasing Enrique Penalosa round Bogota on a mountain bike. He’s chatting with Eric Britton whereas navigating Paris site visitors on a motorcycle. His writing is well-researched and well-rounded.
Total, I’d suggest this guide to these concerned about convivial public areas, walkable communities, assembly one’s neighbors, combatting social isolation, and democratizing housing and transportation. I hope you achieve as a lot from it as I did. Completely satisfied studying!
Alison Grover has a grasp’s diploma in Panorama Structure and has been biking in Oregon since 2017.
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