Happy City (The Game) and the Happy City

Having spent fall semester teaching from Happy City by Charles Montgomery, I can not imagine a more appropriate Christmas present than Happy City, a new game for ages 10 and up from Gamewright. Thanks to my wife Jane--who has also used Happy City in a class--for this astutely-chosen gift!

Happy City has no relationship to Montgomery's book. He is not mentioned in the game materials or on the website, so I assume the coincidental titles are exactly that... coincidental. Even so it practically begs for comparison, which I am about to undertake. Keep in mind, though, this card game is aimed at children; if you're cruising the Internet looking for someone slagging a children's card game, you should definitely check out Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series on YouTube. You will not find that tone here.

On the other hand, the book Happy City, while accessibly-written, is a book for adults who have a tolerance for complexity and counterintuitive research findings. It would be hard for the most brilliant designer to translate Montgomery's argument into a game for the whole family intended to be played in under 30 minutes.

Playing Happy City

Happy City is a game for 2-5 players. Play goes in order of how recently each player has in their actual life traveled to another city. Each player starts with a mildly-profitable store, and from that attempts to build a city with high population and high citizen happiness. Each building is represented by a card; the game ends after one player's city has ten cards. The winner is the one with the highest overall score, determined by multiplying the population score and the happiness score. 

Source: gamewright.com/product/happy-city

The key to building your happy city is to maintain a positive flow of income, so that you can buy the features that will bring in people and/or make them happy and/or add to the city's income. The buildings come in several categories. Players are encouraged to draw from a mix of categories, though they may not use more than one of the same kind of card. Some examples:

• Happy Market: 1 coin of income (paid at the beginning of each round of turns)
• house: cost 1 coin, 1 population point
• apartment complex: cost 3 coins, 2 population points
• high-rise: cost 6 coins, 3 population points
• library: cost 2 coins, 1 happiness point
• repair shop: cost 5 coins, 1 population point, 2 coins of income
• restaurant: cost 5 coins, 1 happiness point, 2 coins of income
• casino: cost 7 coins, 2 happiness points, 2 coins of income
• ski resort: cost 8 coins, 3 happiness points
• steelworks: cost 1 coin, -1 (yes, -1) happiness point, 1 coin of income

I'd give our library at least two happiness points!

In time, with the right mix of card/building types, players can pick from a selection of bonus building cards (e.g. Superhero Central, Happywood Studios, Unicorn Ranch), which amp up both population and happiness scores. An expert version of the game has more bonus buildings and more complicated scoring.

Evaluation

Happy City does a very good job of modeling a number of factors related to city development. The primary importance of income, making it a prerequisite to any actual building, is a good way to put fiscal realities at the forefront of our considerations. The folks at Strong Towns will be gratified that all income in the game is locally-generated. We are not relying on federal or state grants to grow our cities.

Calculating the final score by multiplying happiness by population is a good way to model the interaction of those two factors. A small number of people experiencing a lot of happiness is an enclave or an exclusive club. A large number of people experiencing low happiness are existing in a place, not citizens of it. A large number of people experiencing a lot of happiness is a happy city.

Casino, Las Vegas NV

A third good point is, even though the city is developing in a centrally planned non-organic way, at least the planner/player is responding to values that have been established externally (presumably, in the economic market or political arena) rather than by themselves. Players are not Robert Owen or Le Corbusier or Marshal Tito constructing our own utopias, but working with preferences expressed by others. Last time I played, I added a casino to my city, not because I believe they're in any way productive, but because I needed the income and the happiness points. (For the record, I think the game vastly overrates casinos and sports stadiums on both counts.) 

Besides all this, you can't really sprawl or do exclusionary zoning with only ten cards.

The biggest difference between Happy City and Happy City is how each understands happiness. The game's  high happiness scores for leisure and entertainment facilities suggests the authors equate happiness with personal fun and pleasure. Montgomery's book goes into considerable detail in questioning that sort of premise, describing in chapter 2 a more long-term feeling of well-being, and later arguing that extrinsic motivators like fun things to buy or visit are overrated by people as sources of happiness. It's intrinsic motivators like health and social connection that endure and contribute to feelings of well-being. As Mitchell Reardon, a senior planner at Montgomery's firm, told the Shared Space podcast in March 2021: 

We are social creatures, yet for decades city planning has sought to divide us. We're just trying to knit this back together, and COVID has really underlined how critical that connection is.

Shared streets, like at Washington's Wharf,
are essential to experiencing that place

Urbanists like Montgomery spend less time on the commercial and industrial features of a town than on whether or not they're connected. In Walkable City [Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011], three of Jeff Speck's four components of walkability deal with the experience of the walk--does it feel safe? comfortable? interesting?--and only one with the walk's destination. Jane Jacobs spends the first three chapters of her landmark The Rise and Fall of Great American Cities [Modern Library, (1961) 2011] talking about sidewalks. In part two, she articulates the prerequisites for urban success--mixed primary uses, small blocks, some older buildings, and concentrated population--none of which have to do with what specifically goes on those blocks or in those buildings. Toronto-based 880 Cities, which aims to  make cities "great" for 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds, focuses their efforts on "your community's streets and public spaces." And so on.

Street musician on pedestrian-only Knez Mihailova, Belgrade

Montgomery devotes the middle third of his book to assembling neuroscience research and lived experience on how happiness can be designed. Creating spaces for informal gathering, often out of infrastructure previously devoted to cars, attracts people and helps build social connection and trust (Montgomery 2013, ch. 7). He quotes Jan Gehl: What is most attractive, what attracts people to stop and linger and look, will invariably be other people. Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities (p. 150). In a society where so many people drive to work yet experience daily unhappiness doing so (pp. 179-181), anything to enhance the opportunities to cycle or walk will improve the city's happiness. So will anything to help those on public transit, "the most miserable commuters of all" (p. 193). Finally, opportunities for refuge and experience of nature will relieve stress and restore our souls (ch. 6).

Boyson Trail, Marion IA

These aren't simple push-button interventions, either. They require a lot of trial and revision, and attention to different people's lived experiences in different places. That makes sense; after all, cities are "problems of organized complexity" (Jacobs [1961] 2011, ch. 22). It follows that any attempt to model all the complexity at the level of a two-dimensional board game is going to fall short, so let us not cavil at Happy City, which after all is a fun and quick play, and which gets a lot of the city right.

Just let's don't confuse amenities with happiness.

SOURCE: Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013.

SEE ALSO: 

"Big Amenity and the Problem of Uncertainty," 2 July 2016

James Brasuell, "City-Building Video Games for Planners," Planetizen, 25 December 2022 [if video games are more your thing than card games]

Book review: "Happy City"

Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013.

Montgomery's argument for urbanism begins with the typical tales of woes created by the suburban model of development (see the list of costs, p. 47), but Part II of the book rolls out a fascinating new dimension: analysis of urban design using psychology research into human happiness. Montgomery's clear writing makes the research findings accessible to the layperson. The book offers practical solutions to policy problems, as well as encouragement for individuals who want to make a difference.

There are various definitions of happiness around, from Socrates to Charlie Brown to the Ray Conniff Singers, but in this discussion it refers to the aspects of a good life, including joy, health, freedom, resilience, fairness and connection (ch. 2). Montgomery writes, "The city that acknowledges and celebrates our common fate, that opens doors to empathy and cooperation, will help us tackle the great challenges of this century" (p. 43), including strenuous commuting, difficult parenting, and the loss of connection to other people. He also includes the volatile housing market and high energy costs, which may be more reflective of the 2013 publication date than they are of today's conditions, but who knows whether and how soon they'll return?

Montgomery eschews scolding, and urges us to eschew it, too. (So does Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns, who said on a recent podcast that he used to get angry about the lack of progress in his hometown, but now focuses on what can be achieved, and finds more people are listening to him as a result.) Montgomery's psychology-based take is we as a species are predisposed to be dissatisfied with our lives, which leads us to make non-rational choices about housing, highways, risk assessment, and so forth (ch. 5). So while well-designed cities might be the answer to a lot of problems, to get people there we have to make them funner.

Four ways to get down this East Capitol Street... does genuine choice make people happier?

Just a few of the many research-driven insights from this rich-but-highly-readable work:

• People want the right mix of natural features and contact with neighbors. Different people want different mixes, so we need to offer a variety (something the suburban model of development is not good at--ch. 6)
• We can use design to encourage human contact, including by slowing or eliminating auto traffic (ch. 7). Architect Jan Gehl, who designed much of contemporary Copenhagen: "We found that if you make more road space, you get more cars. If you make more bike lanes, you get more bikes. If you make more space for people, you get more people and of course then you get public life" (p. 151).
• The vast majority of commuters drive, but a lot of them don't like it. While driving on a clear road creates feelings of mastery, driving in traffic is hard mentally and physically. Walking and cycling are the most pleasurable forms of commuting (ch. 8), and "immobility is to the human body what rust is to the classic car" (p. 183).
• Public transit is the least pleasurable form of commuting, because "decades of under-investment mean that the typical transit journey is crowded, slow, uncertain or uncomfortable" (p. 193). Stressors include the anxiety of waiting for a bus or train, feeling unsafe, getting stuck on the bus in traffic... and the low status of bus riders. Feelings of low status impacts one's happiness and health, as well as overall social conditions. "This is terrible news for the United States," he adds in a footnote (p. 238). All these stressors are addressable, and he lists some methods that have been tried in places like Copenhagen, Bogota and New York City (chs. 9-10). "People make different choices when they are truly free to choose," he argues (p. 217), pointing to the revolutionary changes in Danish habits over the last four decades.

Real-time information on arrivals can ease the anxiety of waiting for a train or bus;
both Washington and Cedar Rapids allow tracking by phone app

I'm in Washington, D.C., for a little while longer, but my permanent home is in Cedar Rapids. I wonder how much Montgomery's arguments translate to a small midwestern city? Does this, from a section entitled "The Lonely Everywhere," resonate?:

Let's say that you and I want to meet for an ice-cream cone at the end of our workday before heading home for dinner. First we both must chart the geographic area each of us can reach in that time. Then we must see if our territories intersect. Then we need to figure out if the journey to and from a rendezvous point in that zone leaves enough time to make the meeting worthwhile. Each of us has an envelope of possibility on the space-time continuum. The more our envelopes intersect, the easier it is for us to actually see each other in person (p. 57).

Cedar Rapids is not Atlanta, though sometimes it seems as though we aspire to be. We're certainly not New York or Copenhagen. Housing is cheap, open land is cheap, and as long as energy is also cheap there's not much to stand in the way of sprawl. Most of the attractions--museums, the ballpark, NewBo City Market, Legion Arts--are easy to get to, and free parking is plentiful.

The vast majority of Cedar Rapidians drive to get anywhere; despite city efforts to build sidewalks and design safe routes for cyclists, non-car transportation is really difficult. The hardy few bike, the handicapped take the bus, and pretty much everyone else drives. I can walk nearly a mile to work and not see another person walking. Still, while big city residents might laugh at what we call traffic, from curbside Cedar Rapids drivers seem to demonstrate more anxiety than mastery. There isn't much choice for housing, either: single family homes on large lots, expensive condominiums or ragged rentals. Montgomery may not be writing for cities like ours, but we should probably be paying attention to him anyway.

SEE ALSO: "The Happy City" website: https://thehappycity.com/