Happy City

Excellent … Montgomery believes in the importance of smart town planning and Happy City is a compendium of its major ideas … It’s a castigating economic, social, moral and environmental argument for planning urban spaces around the thing they affect the most: people – Will Dean * Independent *A valuable book … [it says] forcefully what can’t be said too much. It is surely better, most of the time, for most people, to spend as little time as possible in cars and to increase the possibilities of encountering other people and new experiences – Rowan Moore * Observer *Admirable … past writers on this subject have mainly praised existing communities they find conducive to human well-being. Montgomery is all about creating new ones … not only readable but stimulating. It raises issues most of us have avoided for too long – Alan Ehrenhalt * New York Times *

Charles Montgomery is a journalist and urban experimentalist from Vancouver, Canada. His writings on urban planning, psychology, culture, and history have appeared in magazines and journals on three continents. He is the author of one previous book, and was an original member of the BMW Guggenheim Lab.