The Happy City

While Paris turns its streets into bike lanes, Seoul tears down a highway to make room for parks and streams. Call it a revolutionary way to find your happy place.

It is rush hour in central Paris. Late July. Michelle Ueberschlag, a Swiss-born fashion designer, has stripped down to her bikini and settled into her deck chair, smack dab in the middle of the Pompidou expressway.

She squints out past the guardrail at the Seine. With its churning grey eddies, the river is certainly no substitute for the Mediterranean. Why spend the afternoon here?

“Life is easier,” she says with a chuckle.

This is a perfectly reasonable answer, especially right here, near the centre line of a freeway that, at this moment, is not a freeway in a city that has changed its mind about what streets are for.

For one thing, Parisians have buried the Pompidou with sand, pricked it with parasols and rendered it utterly undrivable with beer gardens, bocce-ball courts and potted palm trees. This is not a road anymore, at least not during the summer. It’s a beach playground, all the way from the Louvre to the cast iron arches of the Pont de Sully. They call it Paris Plage.

The fashion designer is right. Life is easier here on the beach. But her assessment might just as well be made of most of central Paris. All through the city, pavement has been wrested away from private cars and converted into sandboxes, plazas, dance floors and bike paths. Paris has joined a global movement that seeks to change not just streets but the very soul of urban spaces. Its adherents believe that cities can become engines not just of economic growth. But of happiness.

The charge is being led by some of the world’s toughest towns, places like Bogotá, where happiness theory led one mayor to transform roads into parks and pedestrian “freeways,” and Mexico City, whose mayor is investing in urban beaches and bikeways in order to change the citizens’ gloomy outlook. Now the movement is spilling over to wealthier cities too. Seoul has ripped out a downtown freeway to make room for parks and streams. London has put the squeeze on cars with its now famous congestion charge.

These measures are often sold as emergency actions to tackle global warming. In fact, changing the way we design and use public space can change the way we move, the way we treat other people and ultimately the way we feel. Now you might think that Paris had long ago figured out the art of urban joy. But in recent years, residents have become so sick of noise, pollution and congestion that they have thrown their support behind a radical plan by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë to reclaim their streets. By 2012, suburban cars will be banned entirely from the city’s core.

I have come to test the psychological effects of the latest of the mayor’s schemes. Last year, Delanoë flooded the city core with more than 20,000 bikes, all virtually free to borrow. I swipe my card into a metallic kiosk, silently unlocking one of a dozen bicycles stationed alongside it. This vélo libre (free bike) – Vélib’ for short – will be my personal metro. I can drop it off at any of more than 1,000 kiosks around the city core.

I toss my briefcase into the front basket, then commit what would once have been a suicidal act: I roll out into the Paris traffic. Taxis bounce past me along Rue de Rivoli like go-karts. Delivery trucks and motorbikes jostle frenetically. Bus engines suck at the warm air. I have steeled myself for the pathological aggression of Paris’ drivers. But I soon realize that there are other cyclists in this stream, dozens of us, in fact. Our collective mass has a calming effect on the traffic. I feel intensely awake but not in danger. In this chaos, we are all looking to each other for clues. We make eye contact.

This is just one example of the alchemy occurring on Paris’ streets, explains sociologist Bruno Marzloff when I meet him in the 8th arrondissement. “We are learning a new way of sharing the city,” Marzloff tells me as we wander the back streets. Sockless in loafers, he moves through the throngs with studied precision. “Look at what happens on a crowded sidewalk; everyone must be aware or we smash into each other. We must choreograph our movements. The result is a kind of dance.”

This choreography is now spilling over into Paris’ traffic lanes, says Marzloff. With cars and bikes and buses mixed together, nobody can be sure what will be on the road ahead of them. Everyone is becoming more awake to the rhythm of asymmetrical flow. The clincher? Making the road seem more dangerous by injecting thousands of bikes into traffic may actually be making it safer. Bike accident statistics have flatlined, even as the number of cyclists has jumped in Paris by nearly 50 percent in the last six years.

Marzloff and I encounter four empty Vélib’ stations in half an hour. “We’re just at the beginning,” Marzloff tells me. “What will happen when we have 200,000 people using Vélib’ every day?”

Parisians are indeed moving differently, but this new dance is only one symptom of a more fundamental transformation. Changing the way we use city streets may make us happier. That’s because such changes tinker with psychology that has guided us since the Stone Age.

It all comes down to trust. According to evolutionary psychology, our cave-dwelling ancestors fared much better against long-toothed beasts and other enemies when they worked together. Over the millennia, humans evolved mechanisms to push us toward trust. Researchers have found that our brains still release feel-good neurotransmitters when we co-operate with others – even with strangers.