Happiness and Culture

By Stephanie Byttebier

Abstract

As Charles Montgomery points out in his book Happy City, the life and design of cities, since their earliest existence, have been intricately connected with the search for human happiness–what it means, what it looks like, how we can build the idea of happiness for society. The goal of much urban planning has been, over the centuries, to conform the city to prevailing ideas and ideals of happiness, even if the city, as a *lived* space, has not always been experienced as a happy place. Take, for example, ancient Rome: while “civic pride drove heroic feats of engineering and architecture,” Roman emperors also used public architecture and spectacle to placate the rebellious lower classes, whose actual living quarters were “pathetically under-designed, narrow, and scarce.” Today, we remember the Coliseum, the Spanish Steps, the Forum. But the Roman slums were just as much a reality as were monuments, aqueducts, and highways.
Closer to our own age, the tension between the lofty ideals determining much urban planning and the actual conditions of urban living has been publicly played out through many media, but the medium perhaps most instrumental in influencing public perception about urban problems and promise alike is the map. Through an exploration of a variety of historical and contemporary maps, this presentation will trace the connection between the rhetoric and epistemology of maps on the one hand and ideas of urban (un)happiness on the other. How do maps, especially in our technological and digital age, bend our understanding of cities as lived spaces? What kinds of assumptions do we make when taking on the cartographic mindset and how are these (in)compatible with ideas of cities as places where humans strive for communal and individual happiness? And finally, what kind of mapping might be better suited to the representation of urban life in our challenging times?