Healthly and Equitable Density

A recent post on CEOs for Cities from Stantec senior principle David Dixon entitled "To Make Your Community Healthier, Make It Denser" contains a number of meaty statistics about the connections between health, cars, equality, and cities... fueling the reality that density saves lives:

•  1999: The Centers for Disease Control reported that inactivity and poor diet caused 300,000 deaths in the United States, second only to tobacco (CDC)
•  2008: University of Utah researchers found that men who lived in walkable neighborhoods weighed 10 pounds less than men in low-density neighborhoods (NRDC)
•  2014: Cities with more compact street networks have lower levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease (Journal of Transport & Health)
• Per-capita auto fatalities rise roughly 400 percent along a continuum of density from typical urban to typical suburban (Accident Analysis & Prevention)
• The United States has three to five times the amount of traffic fatalities relative to other developed countries; auto fatalities represent the #1 cause of accidental deaths in the U.S. (Source)
•  Ten percent of U.S. households control 75 percent of all U.S. wealth - the wealthy are consuming the walkable neighborhoods at a voracious rate. 
• For the first time in this country's history, more poor people live in suburbs than in cities (Source) 

"The payback from density extends beyond physical health. Walkable neighborhoods promote economic health by attracting knowledge workers and investment and promote environmental health by creating an inviting alternative to sprawl... [Yet] as we employ density to create healthy neighborhoods, we also need to employ it to create equity."

 

The Pursuit of Happiness

In an attempt to find a topic of conversation for today from the long list of websites I've bookmarked, a series of events lead me to an unusual article that is personally intriguing, but even more so, exceptionally relevant for this blog. 

An article from Boundless (an award-winning ministry of Focus on the Family) entitled "The Happiness Trap" focuses on the relationship between parenting and happiness, but I think the whole article gets at something broader and quite possibly more important when it comes to happiness. The article is by itself interesting, but I will dissect it below according to how it fits in with this blog as well as my interests.

What does the word "happiness" mean? How do we describe it? Is it an accurate word to use to describe the emotional state of an individuals' emotional state or life, or even a country or society's state of being? This is what I'm getting at: everyone is "happy" sometimes, and "sad" sometimes. So in the grand scheme of things, happiness and the state of being happy doesn't really say anything about how someone is living; furthermore, the virtue and good fortune in our lives.

Eudaimonia is the Greek word that is sometimes translated into the English word "happiness," but there is more to this word. The Greek word refers to an objective state of being: "a combination of living well (virtue) and doing well (good fortune)." The English word "happy", is very much subjective and short-term feeling, precisely what makes it challenging to define, but also nearly impossible to be able to describe an individual's life or an entire society as this. If you could chose, what would you want for society; a short term emotion of joy or long-term virtue, good fortune, and quality living.

I believe that quality living (meaning virtue, as well as good fortune) directly impacts and leads to the maximum amount of what we know as "happiness"; maximum amounts of feelings of "joy." This can ultimately enable us to be generally happy people, allowing us to spread this feeling to others and have positive interactions and effects on people. But it starts with a life of quality.

On a different but related note, one of the most backwards notions of the American culture and society is the recurring theme that money and abundance creates happiness. People can acknowledge that this is myth, yet the culture we live in unfortunately makes the pursuit of wealth and abundance on the individual scale sometimes hard to escape. The infamous words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" have truly lost their meaning, or through the years have been misconstrued to the average American. Do we really have the maximum "freedom" to "pursue" a "happy" state of mind?

Happiness is not something that can be pursued. Living well and doing well is. We must help create a society that promotes the state of living virtuous and well in order to create actions of doing well in commitment to a collective betterment of all people. Then, and only then will we have a society that we can call "happy."

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"What's true of the western tradition is also true of the eastern tradition: In the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that happiness lies not in some subjective state, much less seeking after our own satisfaction, but rather from a whole-hearted pursuit of goodness and harmony (sattva) and practice of spiritual disciplines (yoga)."

Eudaimonia defined by Google: (also known as Eudaemonism) a Greek word, which refers to a state of having a good indwelling spirit or being in a contented state of being healthy, happy and prosperous. In moral philosophy, eudaimonia is used to refer to the right actions as those that result in the well-being of an individual.

Check out this Opinion Article from the New York Times about "Loving People, Not Pleasure" and the association between money and happiness.

Good Transit and Well Being

The journal Transportation published relevant and interesting research done by professor Jason Cao from the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The article "The association between light rail transit and satisfactions with travel and life: evidence from Twin Cities" was published March 2013. The research looks at the light rail line that runs from downtown Minneapolis to the airport and Mall of America. The Hiawatha Light Rail/METRO Blue Line opened in 2004 and has been followed up by the METRO Green Line running from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul via University Avenue that opened up last June 2014.
CityLab did an article based on Cao's study entitled "Living Near Good Transit May Make You Happier". 

Cao wanted to find out if the new transit line was contributing to the well-being of nearby residents. A survey was sent out to 4 communities with varying access to transit. The findings: "People in the Hiawatha corridor had higher ratings on questions related to the quality of their lives compared to people in the other four corridors." Cao's idea is that no matter the reason, more life satisfactions comes from a higher level of mobility that the light rail provides.

In conclusion, these publications back up a claim that I have always have felt to be true. Since experiencing my first round of a great public transit system in Germany in 2001, and the second round in Copenhagen in 2012, and then most recently this past fall, once again in Munich, Germany, it has always seemed that a quality transit system somehow just makes life better. I felt it personally, but I also felt it among the communities I was living in. It's almost impossible to describe unless you've felt it for yourself, but it seems right that accessibility, equity, mobility, etc., all improve around good transit, and that in turn puts people more at ease in some way. Once you really stop to think about it, it makes sense. I may have sounded crazy to have come out and said this on my own, and since I'm not currently conducting any official research, I was thrilled to have found CityLab's and Cao's publications that prove that quality transit can help influence a high quality of life. 

The METRO Green Line generated at least $2.5 billion worth of economic development within half a mile of the new transit system

Original Jason Cao study (access to full article is not available)

Access and Outcomes: Transportation, Location, and Subjective Well-Being - Eric Andrew Morris UCLA Dissertation 

LBJ "The Great Society" Speech, 1964

Below I paraphrase my favorite quotes from Lyndon B Johnson's speech at the University of Michigan:

• The purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a nation.
• For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
• The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
• But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
• The three places where we begin to build the Great Society: in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms. Fifty years from now, there will be 400 million Americans, four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, and highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled.
• Aristotle said, "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today. 
• The catalog of ills is long, there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic.
  Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. 
• Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference. 
• Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.
• New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come not only to live, but to live the good life.
• Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?
• There are those timid souls that say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, and your labor, and your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
• Let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say, "It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life."

This speech was given 50 years ago. Take a look at the last half century. As a society, have we been moving towards and building upon such ideals that allow a positive culture to flourish?

Source: PBS 

President Clinton Lecture on Public Service

First Lecture by President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University in May 2013.

Below I paraphrase parts of the lecture (it's long!) that resonate with me and fit well with the themes of this blog:

• Twenty-first century citizenship requires us to do some public good as a private citizen - around the corner, or around the world, in public office, or out. Compose a life where service is important. It is important because the world is so interdependent and full of opportunities.
• The world we are living in is clearly unsustainable. There is too much inequality and too much instability.
• Public service work has four requirements. One, you should be obsessively interested in people, especially people who are different from you. You should want to understand them and understand how they perceive the world and understand what they need and what their dreams are. Two, you should care about principles - about the end of all this. What is the purpose of service? What's the role of government, what are the roles of the NGOs, how do you organize this in your mind, why are you doing this? Three, what are the policies that you believe will advance these purposes? And four, what are the politics of the situations? How are you going to turn your good intentions into real changes? People, purpose, policies, and politics. To me, the most important thing is the first.
• This might be my favorite quote of this lecture. I am deeply motivated by people and purpose and these words substantiate my passion for serving people in the realm of urban design. And of course the policies and politics are also important when it comes to planning cities.  
• Most people get in real trouble and abuse power when they forget that the purpose of their power is not to impose their will on others but to let other people be empowered to live their own lives better, or as I always say, to have better stories.
• Don't belittle people who know less than you do or have less than you do... what we have in common in our soul is important.
• Americans are not hearing enough stories from other people, from people are are different from themselves. And it's a big mistake... We have one remaining bigotry in America: we just don't want to be around anybody that disagrees with us. People are organizing massive living patterns in this country around being with somebody that agrees with them.
• The purpose of service is to help other people. Not to make you feel good about yourself, although you will. Not to impose everything you think should be done on other people. But to create a world where we can all live together, because it’s so interdependent. If we don’t, the consequences to us, to our families, to our future will be adverse and severe.
• Every place in the world where they’re trying to cooperate, they’re doing pretty well. Every place in the world that elevate our differences over our common humanity. Where we can no longer hear what people who are different from us are saying, where our ears our closed and minds are more closed – there is trouble. 
• I believe that it’s very important that every person in your generation have a worldview. We need a common understanding of what is the nature of the modern world. What are it’s biggest challenges, opportunities. What evidence do we have about how best we can deal with them.