UDI Vancouver Lunch - Charles Montgomery

What if our cities themselves had the power to make or break our happiness? Charles Montgomery explains how cities influence how we feel, behave, and treat other people in ways most of us never realize. Everything from the length of your commute to the depth of your front yard can have an unseen effect on your mind, emotions, and social life.

By understanding the effect that design has on our emotions and decisions, we can all share this empowering new vision of city life.

Referencing global and local examples, join us as Charles shares his insights and research findings: 

• How city design can build more social connections and create more happiness
• Explore where Metro Vancouver goes wrong and how we can fix it
• The psychology of bad urban planning decisions and how to overcome this

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BIO

Charles Montgomery is an award-winning author, urbanist and leader of a consultancy building more happiness into cities. His award-winning book, Happy City, examines the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness. Collaborating with the Guggenheim Museum, Futurewise, the Government of Mexico City and other entities, Montgomery has created experiments and design methods that help participants alter their relationships with their cities, and with each other. He has mapped the emotional effects of public space, and tested the relationship between architecture and human kindness. Montgomery and his team have advised and lectured planners, students, and decision-makers in Canada, the USA, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the UK. Montgomery’s writings on urban planning, psychology, culture and history have appeared in magazines and journals on three continents.

Among his numerous awards is a Citation of Merit from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society for outstanding contribution towards understanding of climate change science. He lives in Vancouver and Mexico City.

Learn more at www.thehappycity.com. 
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His latest book, Happy City, looks at how urban design can fix broken cities and improve lives. You can read the review in the New York Times and the "Spark Notes" from the Women of UDI Book Club from November 2015.

Watch Charles' TedTalk on YouTube.