The city: A happiness project?

Montgomery's new book - Happy City - provides an antidote to dispersed cities

During a hectic month of business travel with little time for blogging I  read the recent book by Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design.

Montgomery says "If we are to escape the effects of dispersal, then dense places have got to meet our psychological needs better than sprawl."

That idea resonated during an afternoon walk in the prairie city of Brandon, Manitoba where I worked this week. Brandon is one of those mid-western cities with wide streets and sprawl suburbs. Yet even here I found an interesting (and dense) lower income multi-family townhouse project that Montgomery would appreciate.

Play areas inside the lower income multi-family housing. Good visibility, easy access

There is a tendency to think of low income, multi-family housing as crime-ridden. Yet this attractive, well designed multi-family complex had plenty of social mojo. Kids enjoyed a playground in clear view of nearby windows, walkways and grounds were clean, and dozens of people enjoyed their small front yards, barbecues, and common garden areas.

Interior courtyard, green and clean

Police told me there were few calls for service here even though it housed 300 residents in a hundred units, very high density compared to the nearby sprawl.

Nearby, as Montgomery might predict, a traditional suburb was vacant, graffitied, and sparse. In my hour-long walk there I uncovered only a few people, mostly working on cars. Few streets had sidewalks and I saw no one on their front lawns.

A few blocks away in a traditional suburb - Millennial messages

The New York Times says about Happy City, "It was only a matter of time before someone figured out that if there were new things to say about happiness and a new interest in the evolution of urban life, the two subjects could be linked together." Montgomery has chapters on How to be Closer, Convivialities, and Redesigning for Freedom. They fit what I saw here.

Adjacent streets - no sidewalks, fencing to isolate the road

Oshawa & Whitby Part 1: The Jekyll & Hyde story

Good news! While crime rates in some large urban places have turned upwards, it is not so for smaller cities. Case in point: The region of Durham near Toronto, Canada where crime rates have declined for the past few years.

Bad news! Crime and disorder is not distributed evenly. Two similar sized cities in Durham - Whitby and Oshawa - border each other along Lake Ontario. I've spent the past few weeks working here and driving them. You would barely know they are in the same country, much less region. They look completely different!

Downtown Whitby is charming, has a wide range of shoppers, stores, and landscaped streets. It looks appealing, well used and historic at the same time.

Downtown Whitby

Oshawa storefronts look unsightly, some are vacant. Strip malls blight blocks. Other blocks host drug addicts and the indigent. One recent newspaper account describes it as "little more than a hollowed-out downtown surrounded by sprawl."

Downtown Oshawa

It is not pretty.

Last summer, at the start of the Recession, Oshawa downtown was in a state of transition - a new courthouse, a restored historic theatre, and a new university satellite. It seemed things were finally on the mend. Today, not so much. With hard times falling on employers, it's difficult to know if that recovery is dead. Local youth told me they don't go downtown for fear of druggies and crime.

Jane Jacobs once told us we ignore streets at our peril. Someone has been ignoring downtown Oshawa for a long time.

Rehabilitating such areas is a monumental job. But seeing these two very different downtowns...I wonder? How is it that Oshawa and Whitby share the same regional government, the same regional police agency and a similar geography, yet live such a Jekyll and Hyde life?