The best books to understand urban design for human health & happiness

A richly illustrated presentation of a foundational figure, Olmsted believed that parks were integral to physical and mental health and he designed the park to give citizens immediate and visceral contact with nature. His genius was to meld art and psychology on functional lines to produce settings of extraordinary beauty. After his initial masterpiece, Central Park, his vision broadened as he planned his projects in a more comprehensive manner. Riverside, Illinois was an exemplary suburb that harmonized with nature, while Boston’s Emerald Necklace’s array of parks linked by greenways and pedestrian paths was a prototype park system and cultural statement. Its interconnected network of transcendental oases allowed escape from the strident, accelerated movement of a profit-propelled society. Like Henry David Thoreau sauntering through the Concord countryside, urban dwellers could move through the city to their own tune. A timeless vision, it is why Olmsted still inspires the good life of the American city.

Mixing philosophic insight with the study of history, biology, and social science, Mumford’s penetrating analysis laid bare the prospects and pitfalls of American culture as no writer had done before. The Great Depression revealed the inability to build stable well-balanced communities that Mumford traced to a pioneer heritage predicated on exploiting resources. Setting humanity’s potential within nature’s prescribed limits, The Culture of Cities articulated the next stage in human evolution: balancing "ecological relations" and “consumer desires.” He envisioned a regional city that harmonized the “urban, rural, and primeval landscapes” that prefigured sustainability: “people in all their ecological relations” inhabiting “the compact and coherent form of the actual environment.” The goal, he concluded, was to sustain “the richest types of human culture and the fullest span of human life.”

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a sacred text that documents how urban renewal turned complex interwoven neighborhoods into dyspeptic enclaves. For Jacobs, diversity was a city’s lifeblood and harmonizing a mix of people, uses, buildings, incomes, and transportation options defined urban planning. This maxim centered the effort to integrate what were previously deemed separate uses—housing, retail, bus service, and parking—to create livable urban cores designed to the elixir of the “sidewalk ballet.” The pedestrian-scaled neighborhood produced the informal face-to-face contacts that generates, Jacobs wrote, the "small change" that forms “social capital," defined by mutual concern, sense of belonging, and helpfulness. Today we know that the wealth of social capital is priceless, as its life-enhancing qualities defines longer life expectancies.

This accomplished journalist documents how the behavioral sciences help us “see our city streets, hearts, and mobility systems as emotional infrastructure that can make or break the health or happiness of our citizens.” Like Mumford, he traces the Good Life Aristotle ascribed to the city to the agora of Classical Greece, a place where market demands and civic virtue intertwined. Such spaces foster the face-to-face relationships that define happiness, and the Happy City is invested in the sidewalk ballet. It is also a green city that builds on Olmsted’s insights. Networks of small greens and native landscaping provide the ecological function and mental refreshment for pedestrians that is vital to a carbon-free lifestyle. A score of examples illustrate this “new freedom to choose how to move and how to live.” Grounded in history and science, this is not only a feel-good book, but a primer to meet the existential challenge of climate change.

“Our cities and towns have been on a high carbon diet—and our metropolitan regions have become obese,” Peter Calthorpe states. Plying a generation of path-breaking work, he reveals how shifting to urbanism, “compact and walkable development,” can mitigate climate change and secure health and happiness. The metrics he presents are essential reading. Three types of neighborhoods—urban, compact, and sprawl—are assessed for their impact on land consumption, energy use, infrastructure, and utility cost, vehicle miles traveled, and greenhouse gas emissions. The information delivers a clear message: technology will not save us, but a lifestyle change will. It is “not radical,” Calthorpe writes, “but simply a shift from large lot single family homes” to the “streetcar suburbs” that once flourished in American cities. This seemingly simple solution is a vast undertaking, but the blueprint is fresh, and the next step requires, as Olmsted averred, “the best application of the arts of civilization to which mankind has yet attained.”