Venugopal R

“The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness. The good city should be measured not only by its distractions and amenities, but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work and meaning.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“Framed this way, the happiness function would have served our prehistoric ancestors really well. Hunter-gatherers more oriented to dissatisfaction, those who compulsively looked ahead in order to kill more game or collect more berries than they did yesterday, were more likely to make it through lean times and thus pass on their genes. In this model, happiness is not a condition at all. It is an urge genes employ to get an organism working harder and hoarding more stuff. The human brain has not changed much in the ten thousand years since we began to farm. We have been hardwired for active dissatisfaction.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“The problem is, we consistently make decisions that suggest we are not so good at distinguishing between ephemeral and lasting pleasures. We keep getting it wrong.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“The sad part is that a place’s popularity can actually destroy the elements that contribute to happiness. The more we flock to high-status cities for the good life – money, opportunity, novelty – the more crowded, expensive, polluted and congested those places become.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design