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Start giftingHappy City
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreAfter decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?
Award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, and during an exhilarating journey through some of the world's most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a "sexy" lipstick-red bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris's urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have transformed their lives by hacking the design of their streets and neighborhoods.
Full of rich historical detail and new insights from psychologists and Montgomery's own urban experiments, Happy City is an essential tool for understanding and improving our own communities.
Charles Montgomery is an award-winning author, urbanist, and leader of transformative experiments, research, and conversations about wellbeing in cities. Collaborating with the Guggenheim Museum, Futurewise, Laboratorio para la Ciudad, and other entities, Charles has created experiments and design methods that help participants alter their relationships with their cities and with each other. His many honors include a Citation of Merit from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society for outstanding contribution towards the public's understanding of climate change science.
Patrick Lawlor has recorded over three hundred audiobooks in just about every genre. He has been an Audie Award finalist several times and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards. He has won a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, numerous Library Journal and Kirkus starred audio reviews, and multiple Editors' Picks, Top 10, and Year's Best lists. He is the only male audiobook narrator in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To relax in his spare time, Patrick runs marathons.