Happy City Paperback by Charles Montgomery

Product Details

• Publisher: Anchor Canada (2014-09-29)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 384 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780385669146
• Item Weight: 385.56 grams
• Dimensions: 8.98 x 6.06 x 0.93 cm

"Happy City is not only readable but stimulating. It raises issues most of us have avoided for too long. Do we live in neighbourhoods that make us happy? That is not a silly question. Montgomery encourages us to ask it without embarrassment, and to think intelligently about the answer." --The New York Times
     More of us than ever are moving to inner cities, mixed-use suburbs, and densely constructed towns. Our surroundings have certainly changed--but is city living cheering us up, or are we as gloomy on our walks to the subway as we were on our long predawn commutes? And if that's the case, how can we turn things around? In breezy, vivid prose, Montgomery reports from such exciting and dysfunctional places as Bogotá, once a dangerous, car-obsessed city, now a bike-loving model of civic excellence; California's San Joaquin Valley in the apocalyptic aftermath of the housing crisis; and a suburb of Vancouver, where a power company gathers energy from sewage to provide its citizens with heat and hot water. Full of cutting-edge insights from behavioral economists and leading urban thinkers, Happy City offers a completely new way to examine city life, showing us how small innovations can radically improve our experiences. Practical, genial, and fiercely open-minded, Montgomery has written a brilliant book about what today's cities are getting right--and how tomorrow's cities can do even better.

About the Author

CHARLES MONTGOMERY is a writer and photojournalist. Born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, he spent his formative years on a farm on Vancouver Island, and was educated at the University of Victoria and Langara College. Whether covering conflict in the Andean foothills or exploring the mental life of cities, Charles has won accolades for his ambitious reportage, taut storytelling and iconoclastic essays. His first book, The Last Heathen: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia, won the 2005 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction. It was published internationally as The Shark God in 2006. Charles contributed to Way Out There, Explore Magazine's anthology of the best Canadian adventure writing. Since 2001, he has won four Western Magazine Awards, a National Magazine Award and the 2003 American Society of Travel Writer's Lowell Thomas Silver Award for best North American travel story.