Posted on 27-7-2003

Happiness Is A Closed Road
by Enrique Peñalosa as told to Susan Ives (Enrique Peñalosa on left of picture)

Intro.

At a time when New Zealand - a small country with few people but lots of
space - has its major cities mayored by pro-car enthusiasts of money-first
attitudes it is enlightening to read the below alternative city
`development' from a people first perspective. PlaNet TV will be following
up on its Meetings, Motorways, Money programme during the build up to the
next Auckland City elections where a car-mania grips the city's administration.
Alan Marston

We really have to admit that over the past 100 years we have been building
cities much more for mobil-ity than for people’s well-being. Every year
thousands of children are killed by cars. Isn’t it time we build cities
that are more child-friendly? Over the last 30 years, we’ve been able to
magnify environmental consciousness all over the world. As a result, we
know a lot about the ideal environment for a happy whale or a happy
mountain gorilla. We’re far less clear about what constitutes an ideal
environment for a happy human being. One common measure of how clean a
mountain stream is is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat
is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind
of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we
will have a successful city for all people.

When I was elected mayor of Bogotá and got to city hall, I was handed a
transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do
was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we
installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300
million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and
bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We
constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. It may seem
crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods
in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren’t even paved. But we
chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have
wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows
respect for human dignity. We’re telling people, “You are important—not
because you’re rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are
human.” If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that
way. This creates a different kind of society.

We began to experiment by instituting a car-free day on a weekday. In a
city of about 7 million people, just about everybody managed to get to work
by walking, bicycling, bus, even on horseback—and everybody was better off.
There was less air pollution, less time sitting in traffic, more time for
people to be productive and enjoy themselves. Every Sunday we close 120
kilometers of roads to motor vehicles for seven hours. A million and a half
people of all ages and incomes come out to ride bicycles, jog, and simply
gather with others in community.

We took a vote, and 83 percent of the public told us they wanted to have
car-free days more often. Getting people out of their cars is a means of
social integration. You have the upper-income person sitting next to the
cleaning lady on the bus.

Parks for urban peace

Parks have a very powerful role to play as equalizers of society. We almost
always meet under conditions of social hierarchy. At work, some people are
bosses and others are employees; at restaurants, some people are serving
and others are being served. Parks are the gathering place for community.
They create a sense of belonging. Everybody is welcome regardless of age,
background, income, or disabilities. This creates a different type of society.

Today we see images of the beautiful Earth taken from a spaceship, and we
think of it as our planet. But in fact, there are very few places on the
planet to which the public has access. Most of the land is privatized, and
public spaces are very, very scarce. The fact is, upper-income people have
always had access to nature and recreation. They go to country houses, golf
clubs, restaurants, hunting preserves. What do the poor, especially in the
Third World, have as an alternative to television? All poor people have are
public spaces, so this is not a luxury. They are the minimum a democratic
society can provide to begin to compensate for the inequalities that exist
in society.

Since we took these steps, we’ve seen a reduction in crime and a change in
attitude toward the city. In the worst recession we’ve ever had, people
were asked to pay a 10 percent voluntary tax to support various city
services, including parks. More than 40,000 people did so, which I think
speaks to the greater sense of community people feel.

If we in the Third World measure our success or failure as a society in
terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the
end of time. Given our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to
measure success, and that could be in terms of happiness. It may be in how
much time children spend with their grandparents, or the ways in which we
are able to enjoy our friendships, or how many times people smile during
the week. A city is successful not when it’s rich but when its people are
happy. Public space is one way to lead us to a society that is not only
more equal but also much happier.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to world security is environmental and social
sustainability in the world’s fastest-growing cities. The population of
cities in the Third World is growing by more than 80 million inhabitants
per year, which means there will be some 2 billion people living in these
cities within the next 25 to 30 years. In dense cities such as Bogotá, São
Paolo, Jakarta, and Mexico City, there have been practically no places
where people can come into contact with nature, safely play outside, or
meet others in society as equals. And we have seen firsthand how living in
poor conditions can lead to social problems, including extremism and even
terrorism. We need food and housing for survival, but there are even higher
types of needs—needs related to happiness. If you look at it that way,
parks become as necessary to a city’s health—physical and spiritual—as the
water supply.


Susan Ives is a communications consultant to organizations and businesses
in the service of a natural, healthy and just world. This article was
reprinted from Land & People, spring 2002, with permission from Trust for
Public Land. For more information about Trust for Public Land, visit
www.tpl.org. Since leaving office, Enrique Peñalosa has been a visiting
scholar at New York University and speaking at conferences about his work.