HOPEFUL TREND

I'm a city boy. I presently live in a town with fewer than two hundred thousand inhabitants, but before moving here, other than my college years, I lived in cities of over 200,000. I was born in New York City and lived there for the first ten years of my life. My folks moved me to Miami, but I made frequent trips to New York since many of the years after that move, one or both of my parents needed to move back and so I would visit quite a bit. Of course, Miami grew enormously through the years. It's a significantly different city today than the town I first moved to in the late fifties. There are great things about living in a big city and there are challenges. I currently choose not to live in Miami because of those challenges but, as was the case with New York, I do cherish my frequent trips down there. I will continue to make them. But the question remains, why not live there? It happens that many are deciding to do just that; that is, to live in big cities. Big cities have their restaurants, their entertainment (especially the theater in New York), their museums, their architecture, their people-watching. But there is also the traffic, the disagreeable interactions with hurried and gruff people, and the indifference one encounters all too often.

The media has been reporting that a lot of young people are choosing to live in cities as opposed to the suburbs. Perhaps the attraction is the more cosmopolitan lifestyle that movies and TV shows glamorize. One supposes they are seeking their vision of happiness. Among certain scholars – social researchers – the focus has been directed to that elusive dependent variable we call happiness. In a recently published book, the journalist, Charles Montgomery, reports on the work of these academics. Leading the way have been behavioral economists. Since many of them have a background in psychology, these researchers have delved into studying everyday decisions. I will admit that I haven't read Montgomery's book, Happy City, but according to a New York Times' review,¹ the book points out that most people are not very good at making decisions that result in maximizing their well-being. I would argue that people set out to make decisions that do maximize their well-being, but they get sidetracked by influences that in retrospect lead to irrational choices. The review offers this example: a young couple, upon seeing a beautiful four/two or two and a half house in the suburbs with the big yard in the pleasant neighborhood, fall in love with an image of the ideal American family lifestyle the house promises them. They lose sight that the house can be a one or two hour drive from work – which means the round trip is twice that, or put another way, leaving the house before daylight and coming home exhausted and frustrated with the long commute. “Montgomery cites studies reporting that the farther people have to commute, the less happy they are, not just with the driving but with the quality of their lives altogether.”

The purpose of the book is not only to sell shorter commutes, but also to report on studies that have identified those elements that could be designed into city environments to increase levels of happiness; for example, and I do relate to this, the presence of greenery interspersed throughout urban areas. I was gratified the review made a point of stating that they were not recommending more Central Parks – a la New York – but smaller patches that do not take a special trip to a faraway place in order to see and visit. These would be patches that one would encounter in normal movement within all parts of the city. I know that when I lived in New York, a real ballgame on a real diamond called for a walk of what I would now consider about three miles. Hence, stick ball, stoop ball, and a host of games on the street in front of my apartment building were our mode of play. Safe? No way, but despite the occasional broken window, it was a great way to spend a summer day.

The book also features the importance of casual friendships that neighborhoods offer. In a city block, in the course of just normally walking around, the activity lends itself to making these kinds of encounters – the same people over and over again, day in and day out. While you wouldn't go on vacations or have dinners with these people, they were the cast of characters that made up the backdrop of one's life. They made you feel like you belong to something; that was, you belong to a viable neighborhood. They also reported to your parents when you were up to no good. Now I know a lot of what I am describing is my personal recollections of what I experienced in those years I lived in New York. But with the type of study Montgomery is reporting, perhaps city planners can pick up on these types of features and begin to include those physical elements that would create these types of communal qualities. Work of psychologists and social psychologists indicate that we absorb the emotional metaphors that our experiences suggest.² Apparently, it is just this type of planning we are seeing in many, if not most, of our cities today. This is a counter-development to what was fashionable at the end of the last century. Those designs were characterized by blank walls in downtown areas. Ironically, that trend countered the more people-friendly environs of an earlier time: today, more so, “public spaces, built for conviviality and conversation, [serve as] an antidote to the empty, windswept plazas that became staples of life in the center of New York and other major cities in the 1960s and 1970s.”³ Happily, the more communal options are being put in place in many of our urban areas.

For civics teachers, there is no more a civic issue than this: what will our local environments be like? It is surely a federalist issue. This area of concern offers us an issue where the average citizen can have meaningful input. This is a local concern and therefore one that, while attracting the concern of vested interests – just considering the value of urban real estate – a participating electorate can put direct pressure on city officials to do the communal thing. It seems that currently, on this front, the communal forces are winning across the land.

1Ehrenhalt, A. (2014). Greener pastures. The New York Times, Book Review section, January 5, p. 25.

2Schnall, S. (2013). A sense of cleanliness. In J. Brockman (Ed.) Thinking: The new science of decision-making, problem solving, and prediction, (pp. 215-224).

3Op cit., Ehrenhalt, p. 5.