PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS (PART 3)
By Nora Nilsen
I have recently returned from my diagonal trip across the US, where I started in California and ended up in Vermont. My itinerary was formed by Gallup’s Well-Being Index, and I chose to visit cities that were either at the top or bottom of the happiness list. I still have a lot of information to process, so I’m holding off on any conclusions at this point in my research.
Due to some unfortunate logistics, I did not get to ease into my mission and start my research in a happy small town. Instead, I started my trip in one of the least happy cities in the US – Riverside, CA. As I was driving down the interstate, I could see heat mirages rising from the hillsides and I was dreading getting out of the air-conditioned car. My expectation of the city was that of an industrial wasteland desert city. However, when I got off the highway, I was pleasantly surprised. Tree lined streets, wooden houses and perfectly manicured lawns met me near the town centre. These streets were deserted, possibly due to the scorching heat. When I got to the pedestrian Main Street I finally found some people, and worked up the courage to conduct my first interviews. I was shy in the beginning, but it got easier with time. Everyone I talked to was friendly and helpful. To my surprise, they did not complain about their city at all, which made my task and hypothesis more difficult to work with. Further on in the trip, I met someone who previously lived in Riverside and described it as a barren place with repetitive 1950s houses where everything blended together. He said “there was nothing, just rocks and dirt.” As I travelled away from the town centre, I did indeed see these sides of Riverside too.
From my base in Los Angeles, I moved onto Santa Monica. Santa Monica is listed as part of Los Angeles in Gallup’s study, which ranks fairly averagely in measurements of happiness. The reason I decided to investigate Santa Monica is that they have set up the nation’s first municipal well-being report as the result of rising depression rates amongst local teenagers. The beach side town has obvious draws, and the people I talked to seemed very happy to be there. It has all the makings of a holiday town, while being located very close to the big city. I met one resident who had just finished his workout on the steep stairs on the hills of Santa Monica. This simple piece of architecture forms a meeting point for the community. He goes there every day, and told me he was happy he could ‘get out of this so-called city and come out here to this relaxed atmosphere. This is the life’.
In the following leg of my trip, I travelled to Boulder, Colorado. Its location at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains allows for breath-taking and scenic views. The residential houses near the city centre were not much different than those in Riverside. It is a flat, low-rise city, where zoning laws have prevented any growth on the hillsides. The pedestrianized Pearl Street mall works as a gathering point for many of Boulder’s dwellers. The main roads all frame a view of the spectacular surrounding nature, which is actively used by residents for recreation. It was a lot easier to start conversations in Boulder, since I could open by telling the person that they lived in one of the happiest towns in America. One of the people I interviewed believed that Boulder was happy because ‘people ride bicycles and drink beer.’
I did not want to leave Boulder so soon, but had to catch my flight to this year’s number one happiest city; Lincoln, Nebraska. Upon arriving at Lincoln Airport, the security guards greeted me with ‘welcome back’, indicating that few tourists visit. From the Nebraska State Capitol, I could see that Lincoln is a low-rise city engulfed in a sea of gridded agricultural fields. The Capitol tower serves as a building regulator, as no new developments are allowed to surpass it in height. I have to admit, it was not immediately clear to me what was so special about Lincoln’s town planning or its setting. My first day in Lincoln was a Sunday, and there were nearly no people to be seen. I was told that it was the day after “game day”, when the city comes to a standstill to attend the famous University of Nebraska football games. The residents explained that Sundays are empty as everyone is curing their hangover from the game, attending church or spending time with their families. I met an ex-architect who said new buildings in Lincoln were mostly generic boxes, and he got so bored that he decided to quit the design profession all together. The University of Nebraska attracts many people, but most do not stay because of the lack of jobs. Development is being used as a means to keep people there, for example, the construction of a new entertainment district. Lincoln climbed considerably on happiness lists in just one year. Residents I interviewed told me that the city has only recently started developing more public space, and cycling has taken off. It seems to be working already.
My trip concluded in Burlington, Vermont, the happiest small town in the US. I walked across the entire town in half an hour. My first stop was a visit to the University of Vermont. I met with Dr. Chris Danforth, an applied mathematician at their Computational Story Lab. His team has conducted a study of tweets to measure the happiness levels of the US population. This interview will be featured in my final Kagan submission, as it gave me a lot of insight into the interesting connections between the moods of tweets and geography. It could be interesting for me to use a method like this to combine happy-rated words with spatial and geographical words, to figure out if people are happier in correlation to words such as home, view, outdoors, sofa, etc. When asked if there was a connection between the fact that their research faculty is based in a happy city and the wish to study happiness, he said it was only a convenient coincidence. Burlington’s location on the banks of the beautiful Lake Champlain obviously has a big impact on the life satisfaction of its residents. Architectural features that were mentioned by people I spoke with included its relatively old buildings and the city’s ability to have ‘a big city feel, but a small-town friendly atmosphere’.
This trip was an incredible experience, while quite testing at times. I had the opportunity to travel to places I would otherwise never see, and the nature of my research led me to meet a lot of interesting and friendly people. I have heaps of material from my filmed interviews that I will edit into a short movie. After this qualitative field research, I will move onto more technical (and less vague) methods of finding out if there are any connections between the built environment of these cities and their happiness. My approach for this is to look at maps of each city and extract and process information into a legible format of design guidelines. I will create diagrams and 3D models of the main streets and any other areas of interest in each city in order to analyse and visualise their common factors or differences.
For instance, the size of the city blocks, population of density and road layouts might give me some pointers as to what we can do as urban planners to improve people’s lives.
CallisonRTKL
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