Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (18 page)

The form is so popular—and so profitable for developers—it has spawned a noun:
Vancouverism
. Its shapes have been copied from San Diego and Dallas to Dubai, but the city’s followers never quite seem to capture Vancouver’s magic. This may be because they lack the city’s cinematic natural backdrop. It may also be because few cities push the benefits of density back to the public realm as aggressively as Vancouver does.

Unlike their counterparts in many other cities, Vancouver’s municipal planners enjoy broad discretionary power when considering new development. They use that power to squeeze massive community benefits from developers in exchange for the right to build higher. Want to stack a few more stories of condos on your tower? Sure, but only if you repay the city with a public park, a plaza, a day-care center, or land for affordable social housing. In this way, Vancouver manages to claw back as much as 80 percent of the new property value created by upzoning. There is no density without a lifestyle dividend for the community. The result is that as the city gets denser, its residents enjoy more public green space. In Vancouver’s downtown neighborhoods you are never more than a few minutes’ walk to a park or the spectacular seawall that wraps the entire peninsula.

Small Doses

There is no denying the benefits of an expansive nature view or a big green space. But merely adding up a city’s sum total of park space tells us little about each resident’s nature diet. I surveyed dozens of New Yorkers at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Lower Manhattan and found that none of them had been to Central Park during the previous week. They may have been glad the park was there, but they did not benefit from it, because they did not actually see or touch it. This is not to condemn the spectacular park or blame Manhattanites for not trying harder to get to the Sheep Meadow. But it does suggest a problem of scale and access. One big park won’t do.

“We can’t just build Central Park and say, ‘Well, we’re done,’” Kuo insisted. “Nature has to be part of your life. It has to be part of your daily habitat and routine.” In order for New Yorkers to soak up the benefits of nature, it has to be integrated right into the urban fabric.

Our informal experiments at the lab offered some instructive good news for people who can’t live on the edge of grand urban parks: even tiny splashes of nature created a psychological ripple effect.

The unhappiest stop on our emotional tour was the bare brick facade of a social housing project. Just a dozen-odd steps away was a restaurant whose facade was constructed of the same cheap bricks as the social housing. The only difference was that someone had painted the restaurant wall an earthy brown and installed two planters whose rambunctious vines grew high overhead. Our volunteers reported feeling nearly a point higher on a four-point happiness scale here than outside the barren facade down the street—which is to say, they experienced a huge spike in good feelings. Although it would be hard to rule out other factors, from the tone of conversations overheard at each location, to the aroma of pizza that occasionally escaped through the restaurant’s doors, feedback from our participants suggested that the green intervention made a big difference.

We were even more surprised by what happened to the people we led out onto the median of Allen Street, a loud and congested arterial road nearby. The median was buffered by a low fence and a bike lane on either side, but it was otherwise stranded in a sea of cars. Taxis honked. Engines roared. Several homeless men had taken refuge there, presumably because nobody else had claimed it. That island sat amid much of the stimulus that drives many people nuts, yet our volunteers recorded feeling both very aroused and very happy there.

Curious about this, I wandered through that space at the end of a particularly hectic day. The location afforded a panoramic view north across the intersection with Houston Street, past a jumble of walls and facades, up First Avenue toward Midtown. It was a great place to observe the city—which may be why out-of-towners reported being much happier than New Yorkers out there on the median. But as I let the site wash over me, its nature dividend was obvious. The entire promenade was lined with mature maples. Even when you were not paying conscious attention to them, their leaves rustled and cast dancing shadows across the path. I sat there, not so much watching those trees as feeling them, and I was calmed and grateful.

Green Interventions

The explosion of research into the benefits of nature suggests that green space in cities shouldn’t be considered an optional luxury. As Kuo insists, it is a crucial part of a healthy human habitat. Daily exposure is essential. If you don’t see it or touch it, then nature can’t do you much good. Proximity matters. But every little bit of nature helps.

This means we need to build nature into the urban system, and into our lives, at all scales. Yes, cities need big, immersive destination parks. But they also need medium-sized parks and community gardens within walking distance of every home. They also need pocket parks and green strips and potted plants and living, green walls. As Gil Peñalosa once put it: cities need green in sizes S, M, L, and XL. Otherwise the human ecosystem is incomplete.

When cities and citizens alter their priorities, the biophilic directive is achievable even where real estate is at a premium. The modern example was set in 2005 by Lee Myung-bak, a daring mayor of Seoul, Korea, who demolished five miles of elevated downtown freeway to restore daylight to the ancient waterway that ran beneath it. Liberated from the concrete shadows, the Cheonggyecheon River now flows through a thousand-acre ribbon of meadows, reeds, landscaped nooks, and mini-marshes. The summer this area opened, seven million people came to stroll, lie on the grass, or dangle their feet in the stream’s shallow pools. Birds, fish, and insects not seen in years appeared, too. “Before, you only heard the traffic, but now you can hear the water,” a retired driver enthused the next year. With new bus services, cars that once clogged the freeway disappeared and the city found a new biophilic soul. Soon after, the freeway-demolishing mayor was elected president of his country.

Underperforming or unused transportation infrastructures are fine terrain for biophilic retrofits. The High Line, the decommissioned elevated rail line converted into a nineteen-block linear park on Manhattan’s West Side, is most famous for the bird’s-eye glimpses it offers into offices, private living rooms, and down to the street from viewing platforms that turn evening traffic into rivers of light. But much closer are hundreds of species of flora, from chokecherries and willows to creeping raspberries and autumn moor grass, much of which had already begun to colonize the abandoned platform before its conversion. The High Line’s natural caress draws visitors into a playful intimacy. On one warm day I joined a group of strangers who had removed their shoes and splashed in a toe-deep pond amid the wispy moor grass.

Since this park opened, urbanists in every city have clamored for their own High Line, but every city is unique, and so are the opportunities. The City of Los Angeles, for example, is working to turn thirty-two miles of the desolate, concrete-lined Los Angeles River into an “emerald necklace” of parks and paths.

Cities have more room for nature than we might think. The architecture firm partly responsible for the High Line, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, demonstrated this again a few dozen blocks north, in their renovation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where they created a green hillside by adding a new restaurant building to the Lincoln campus. A sloping, off-kilter roof (hyperbolic paraboloid is the technical name for the form) planted with green grass rears up from the plaza, inviting passersby to collapse on its vertical meadow. Zoom in on Google Earth, and you’ll see students from the nearby Juilliard School splayed messily across the lawn.

New research takes the proximity argument further. Extreme intimacy—not just looking at nature, but actually touching or working with plants and dirt—is good for us in ways we never imagined. Biologists have found that the bacteria found naturally in soil boosts seratonin and reduces anxiety in lab mice, and they suspect that it has the same effect when breathed in or ingested by humans. This alchemic discovery is fascinating, but we already know that the act of gardening heightens the biophilic benefits of nature, in part because gardening demands more focus than simply observing nature.

But gardening is also a social act, especially in dense cities. In the summer of 2012, I met up with a group of elderly women on a lawn in the heart of Berolina, a massive Soviet housing cooperative in the former East Berlin. Berolina had all the alienating geometries of high modernism: long housing blocks (one of which stretched an astonishing 437 yards) stood guard over broad green spaces that saw little use. Some of the buildings had been retrofitted with balconies in the 1990s, and the common space between them was adorned with token landscaping. But those lawns retained an empty sterility. Nobody used them.

Many of the women gathered on the lawn that morning had lived at Berolina for more than forty years. That day, for the first time, they laid claim to the common space between the towers. Corrine Rose, a psychologist and BMW Guggenheim Lab team member, had convinced them to work with agronomists at Berlin’s Humboldt University to build a small community garden. By the time I got there, the women had pulled on Day-Glo garden gloves and were pouring bags of black soil into raised planters.

“Come on, get to work!” one ruddy ex-Communist with wild white hair barked at me with a smile. We planted basil, thyme, bay leaf, peppers, and lettuce. Everyone got a bit dirty, and everyone had a grand time. The ruddy woman, with Corrine as her translator, told me that several beds had been reserved for them to plant with children from the local elementary school. In September, they would all dig together. Her joy was palpable. The garden was not merely a biophilic intervention. It was a social machine.

This was something we missed when designing our experiment in New York City: we suspected that just looking at urban nature would cheer people up. We should have been testing the effects of actually working with it. But the evidence is out there: people who do “green” volunteer work stay healthier and happier over time than people who do other kinds of volunteer work.
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Every time a slice of urban land is transformed into a community garden, the salubrious effects flow through the brains and bodies of the people who work it and those who just pass by.

Meanwhile all these green insertions double as environmental system interventions. Plants and water work as urban air conditioners. (During Korea’s sweltering summers, temperatures along Seoul’s reborn Cheonggyecheon River are now about 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit lower than in surrounding neighborhoods.) Vegetation cleans the air of toxic particulates. It makes oxygen. It captures and stores carbon. City efforts to manage storm water by creating bioswales (or semi-wild curbside water catchment zones) can also create micro-wildernesses that shrink the city’s ecological footprint while easing the urban mind.

So we know that nature in cities makes us happier and healthier. We know it makes us friendlier and kinder. We know it helps us build essential bonds with other people and the places in which we live. If we infuse cities with natural diversity, complexity, and, most of all, opportunities to feel, touch, and work with nature, we can win the biophilic challenge. Quite simply, biological density must be the prerequisite for architectural density.

Closer, Part II: The Social Machine

There is no denying the thrill and sense of possibility that comes with life amid the human densities of Manhattan, with its generous and seething sidewalks. On one short walk to work I witnessed a dog walker tangled in the leashes of his charges, a Guadalajaran man cutting flowers for sale, a pair of shrieking gossips in hot pants, a shawarma vendor carving from a spit of lamb while pinching his cell phone between shoulder and chin, and a procession of uniformed children snaking along hand in hand. There were ancient ladies marching with groceries. I felt the naive enthusiasm of everyone new to New York: I wanted to know everyone. I asked for, and got, help. I caught strangers’ eyes, collecting nods, conspiratorial smiles, and brush-offs. The city was so alive, so full of electric potential. In his nineteenth-century masterpiece “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Walt Whitman described the sense of communion he experienced in his accidental brushes with thousands of strangers on these streets of Manhattan:

… What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach;

… What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face,

Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

For Whitman, it was as though in all that shared seeing, jostling, and touching, the crowded city was somehow creating a common soul. You can still feel it today if you walk its streets long enough.

But anyone living in hyperdensity will tell you that it is not possible to live only amid the crowd. I learned that quickly in my East Village apartment.

The place was on the second floor of an old tenement on East Thirteenth Street. The kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom were arranged in a space the size and dimensions of two on-street parking places. The view consisted of a brick wall punctuated by grimy windows fixed with air conditioners and rusting fire escapes. The first time I opened the window, I drew in a lungful of air scented with what might have been mold and rancid cooking oil. Below me was a dark “yard” strewn with broken furniture and building material. The only green in sight was a forlorn potted palm sitting on a dusty patio beneath me. I leaned out to find the sky. There it was, six stories above, a stingy band of pale blue.

After a day of continuous stimulation in Manhattan, one craves solitude. But the tenement was stingy in this respect. The city found its way inside from my very first night. Shortly after turning out the light, I heard laughter on the street. Then singing. Then, as the hours wore on, the singing devolved into sustained, college-grade hollering, then quarreling, and, finally, the choking gurgle of what could only have been full-force vomiting—right beneath my window. I must have slept, because at 4:00 a.m. I was awoken by the sound of smashing glass and a roaring truck engine. Garbage pickup. At 5:00 a.m. the car horns began. Not tooting cheerily, but blasting in long sets of frustration and ire.