Happiness and Prosperity
Somewhere along the way, city builders have forgotten the purpose of cities. Their ideas for the proper way to build the city have come unmoored from the reasons humans come together in cities in the first place. Cities are where humans go to find prosperity and social connection beyond their clan. Cities are where humans go to find happiness.
This dual purpose of creating happiness and prosperity should be the guiding principle for any decision on how we build and organize our cities. Too often, city planning documents are completely divorced from these guiding principles. The more technical the document, the less they reflect back on these foundational reasons humans come together in cities.
Fundamentally, humans are pack animals. Just as my dogs come upstairs when the humans in the house head to bed so they can sleep with their pack, humans have a fundamental need to be close to their pack. However, instead of a pack, humans call it community. To be happy, humans need to be a part of a community and feel a sense of belonging. This is missing in too many people’s lives because of the way we’ve built our cities. Creating community, and by extension happiness, is a fundamental reason humans come together in cities.
This need for community stems from the simple fact that we can’t live independently. We require a society around us to help us sustain our lives. We need others to help us grow food and build shelters, to keep us safe from predators and care for us when we’re ill. It is these basic needs that have ingrained in us the need to belong to a community. Without that belonging, humans become stressed, unhappy, and unfulfilled.
Relying upon one another to produce goods we can’t make ourselves, and perform services we don’t have the skill or time for, lead to trade and barter. We, as individuals, did what we were good at and what others needed, in exchange for others doing what they were good at for us. This exchange of skills and time is the fundamental organizing principle of humanity, and it’s what brought rise to cities.
Two different aspects of trade lead to the formation and location of cities. First, it is much easier to trade with somebody nearby. There is less wasted time if you can trade with someone just a few minutes away, rather than needing to travel a day or more to make a trade. Simply put, people could be more prosperous if they lived close to each other.
However, not everything can be made everywhere. Most places didn’t have a ready source of all of the natural resources they needed, so they had to trade with other places further away. So trade routes developed, generally using the fastest transportation available at the time. This led to the founding of cities in the most resource rich areas, and at the intersection of trade routes. So many ancient cities are located along rivers and natural harbors for this reason, boats were the fastest way to travel for centuries.
The examples of cities located in these areas are countless. London is located on the Thames, providing access to continental Europe and the Atlantic. Paris is located on the Seine, which provided access to coastal Europe and the Atlantic. It’s why Istanbul is located along the intersection of the sea route connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and the land route from Europe to the Middle East. Similarly, Jerusalem is located where the trade routes out of Europe split on their way to Africa and Asia.
More recently, we’ve seen cities grow along new routes of travel based on new transportation technologies. Sacramento, Salt Lake, and Omaha all grew exponentially due to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, and have remained active cities even as many similar places prior to the railroad’s completion turned to ghost towns. As the car grew in popularity, we saw towns sprout up along Route 66 and other early highways, only to be forgotten once the Interstate System was built.
Humans come together to form cities because it makes trade easier, and therefore increases prosperity. It is this creation of prosperity that is the second fundamental reason humans come together in cities.
Every decision a city makes needs to start from the premise of whether the decision will improve the happiness and prosperity of the city’s residents. Every policy and document approved by a city needs to answer how it contributes to the residents happiness and prosperity.