Designing Happy Cities with Mitchell Reardon

Can our cities be designed to make us happier? What is the role of public space in fostering a more civil society? Can street design foster trust – or even romance?

Mitchell Reardon, a senior urban planner, lecturer, and leader at Happy Cities. Happy Cities is an interdisciplinary firm working at the intersection of urban design, policy, engagement and human wellbeing. They turn evidence into action for happier, healthier and more inclusive communities.

Mitchell’s experiments, projects and research have helped clients achieve high standards in health, wellbeing and sociability in cities around the world, including Vancouver, Wuhan, Mexico City and Stockholm. Mitchell co-founded Metropolitan Collective, a group of tactical urbanists who have transformed unloved and overlooked spaces in Vancouver and beyond. He is a board member for the Vancouver Public Space Network.

Mitchell received his Masters of Science in Urban and Regional Planning at Stockholm University in Sweden. His work and insights have been published or broadcast on Next City, CBC News, StarMetro, CBC Radio and more.

Transcript from our interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Erin: Can you take us in the way back machine and share your earliest memories of realizing that the built environment existed and the impact it can have on people?

Mitchell: I think probably, my earliest understanding of this would probably riding my bicycle with my sister when we were like 8 or 10 years old and just at the age that you ride on your own and being directed that you can ride on this street but not on that street based on how busy it was. Some streets were safer than others largely because of the presence of some fast-moving cars.

Erin: Tell us about your current role with Happy City, and your personal path to become an urban designer and the work you do at Happy City? What made you want to be an urban designer and do this work?

Mitchell: It was first really through snowboarding that I started to think about cities deeply. At 16, I had a great fortune of travelling around quite a lot, so we go to different cities and we look at different environments to find features to write.

From there, I took my time through taking bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications and I thought I can get into marketing and be a great professor. At the same time, one of my close friends and roommate was studying Human Geography and we had a chat and it’s so interesting so I decided to try on it and the first urban planning course was the worst course I got – it was so theoretical, it had no application, we didn’t really like the discussion.

There were about 4 of us in the class and we walk home together where we go to fascinating places and looked around what was going on like the grocery stores, some of our neighbors who live in social houses, some who live in mansions, so it was just very interesting. From there, I think I learned definitely more than the streets than in the classroom.

This plaza at 14th and Main Street is part of the City of Vancouver’s Pavement-to-Plaza Program. (Credit: Alison Boulier)

Erin: I recently listened to a recent interview you gave, and you say, “COVID has underlined that we are social creatures” … Why is designing for social wellbeing is important? 

Mitchell: In the last 70 or 80 years, we’ve been designing for speed, efficiency, and economic return, and it hasn’t worked out for that many people. So, we need to find different ways and as you were saying, we are social creatures and yet, for decades, planning has sought to divide us so we’re trying to knit us back together and COVID has really underlined just a critical connection in that.

Erin: Is the public realm important in creating more connected, happier citizens? How so?

Mitchell: There’s a design side where we need to design something that can access the spaces ensuring for those who are using a wheelchair or those pushing walkers to get into that space. There’s also how that space is programmed or monitored or surveyed, like everything you see here has really underlined that the use of space is not equal among all people.

So, this is not only a design question, it’s understanding how we can make spaces that work for everybody to feel comfortable or that work better for groups who typically feel uncomfortable, it’s going to be really critical. I think that at the fundamental level, having the ability to share a space to people who don’t share the same space as you, it’s a super important thing in itself.

The triangulation of things can be difficult like interacting with stranger on the street, especially with the current pandemic context. But having any interactive activity is going to make it a lot easier – these are some of the fundamental pieces that some cities play for social connection. And the last pieces, you can have big and small spaces that all have value, especially, intensifying cities. Having these small spaces that help people who live in buildings next to each other or in the same building interact is really important.

Erin: What is one of the best examples you’ve seen of designing for connection?

Mitchell: Happy City has been really curious about how environments and communities interact with each other. So, for the first example, a few years ago, we were in Seattle, conducting an experiment. In the capitol hill neighborhood, we took 2 streets with pretty different built of environment, really curious to understand how having a lot of small shops and cafes influence the people feel compared to having a long blank wall. So, the same neighborhood, very similar arrangements and we had volunteers to go out and pretend to be lost and the goal is just to be so lost that people will go pity on you to help.

Step 1: You stand there with a map, maybe it’s upside down and you just look so helpless that somebody stops
Step 2: You ask for their help or borrow their phone to call your friend
Step 3: You’re still so lost and you ask them to just take you to where you’re supposed to go.

In the experiment, nobody was willing to lend their cellphones because they might steal that. And then, about 10% said that they’re willing to go with them to the park or where they’re headed to. But the really striking thing was one of the lost volunteers was taken to the park to meet their friend and asked them on a date. So, not only it was supporting sociability, but it was also supporting romance in the environment.

Happy Cities Research

Happy Cities looks at comparable spaces and runs research on built environment attributes that can foster trust, connection, and happiness.

Erin: And what is the other one?

Mitchell: There’s also the programming and processes into it. We were working in Europe last year in the major city and in the suburbs. Our client told us that the walkway is really low in the neighborhood and they’d like us to put interventions and some nice activations to encourage people to walk.

There was a large share of people from North Africa, Turkey, and Middle East in the neighborhood and not too long-term European residents. We’re really fortunate to spend a lot of time in the neighborhood and in the community office for a few weeks just to get a sense of what was going on and we started to build those initial connections.

In talking with people, we discovered that they are not walking because there’s no nice activations on the walkway, but they don’t walk because whenever they hang out on the street, people call the police on them.

Through these conversations, we realized that they don’t need an activation or like some paints on the streets. What they need are programs that are actually going to align to do things that might take you off the street, might have covered spaces. We spent a lot of time building bridges between the community and the client to come up with a whole process of what the community needs.

In the end, convincing people not to do design was enough to start building trust in the neighborhood where there are not a lot of trust with the authorities.

Erin: One thing Happy City does especially well is measure the impacts of your interventions. Why do you think this is so important? How do you convince people to invest in it?

Mitchell: At Happy City, engagement is central to our design process. Understanding who’s in the community, what kind of good work has already been done, those are where we spend the most time.

We rely on our previous work and stories to justify this. We identify the aspirations of the client and some of the key stakeholders and try to frame it within those parameters. Not that we like to emphasize negative things but highlighting these risks of not doing this approach is really important. There’s just a very long-term way that we cannot focus on the outcome as the sole way of measuring the success of the project in terms of what a design piece looks like. We need to think about how this is impacting people and if it’s working in the people around there.

“There’s just a very long-term way that we cannot focus on the outcome as the sole way of measuring the success of the project in terms of what a design piece looks like. We need to think about how this is impacting people and if it’s working in the people around there.”

Erin: COVID -19 has changed a lot for social connection and for design, focusing on more distance, more use of outdoor spaces. And there have been a number of design interventions across the globe, but your teams work at Happy City really sticks out to me in how you really measured the impact of those interventions. Have you seen this pandemic change how people think about their built environment?

Mitchell: There’s been a sort of gradual awakening to the importance and value of public space, like understanding that streets can be used more than just parking cars. That’s been a positive piece that emerged here and how these spaces have been utilized by people. There’s much deeper awareness of the fact that a space can work very differently based on your gender, race, or level of accessibility.

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Erin: What is one thing you wish more people knew around the designing for social connection that we would use to inform our design decisions?

Mitchell: It’s not about a flashy render or cool projects or objects at the end. It’s all the stuff that went to it that seems easy but wasn’t.

Also, I think it’s a really important time to be understanding each other and make the space for people to show what they mean when they say something. It’s really easy to make assumptions and now is the time that needs a significant amount of empathy, have spaces that allow us to be empathetic as well. We need to just give people a little more understanding that we might have recently because the only way we can knit society together is if we accept that there are differences and try and find ways to bring them back together.

 “We need to just give people a little more understanding that we might have recently because the only way we can knit society together is if we accept that there are differences and try and find ways to bring them back together.”

Find out more about Happy City through their website (www.happycity.com), social media accounts, and through LinkedIn.