Are you happy? I know, I know it’s a tough question. It’s too subjective and too abstract. I mean what does it even mean? We say it depends on the person and it comes and goes based on so many different factors. However, we all deserve and are invested in the pursuit of happiness. This we can at least agree to, right?
Don’t worry I’m not going to turn this show into a therapy session. At the end of the day we are planners and what we are interested in is cities. And this is exactly what Dimitris Lambriadis and Yohan Wadia were interested in as well: How to design and plan a happy city. For them, it all started when they discovered Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index a national survey that aimed to measure the happiness levels of its citizens providing an innovative approach to measuring welfare. However, what the world quickly realized is that happiness is not only largely subjective but also largely contextual.
Now, why is this important? You see, according to some estimates, today, there are more than 4 billion people living in cities … and tens of millions more pouring in every year. Fundamentally we are adding the equivalent of eight New York Cities to the world every single year. With such an unprecedented amount of new environments being added to the mix every year, planners need a clear gauge to measure how an urban environment and its inhabitants are performing and GDP is far from being enough as it paints a very rough picture focusing solely on economic factors to measure wellbeing.
So aside from happiness and productivity, I believe that this opens up one of the most pressing questions of our time. How do we measure the success of a city?
