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The Politics of Happiness

Photo by: Susan Ives

By Susan Ives

Although you'd never know by reading the mainstream press, Bogotá, Colombia, is undergoing something of a renaissance. More common are reports of a nation beset by war, political instability, and widespread poverty. Yet Enrique Peñalosa has good news to report. Peñalosa, 47, who served as mayor of Bogotá from 1998 to 2001, gained international acclaim for redesigning the city's transportation system and placing parks and public spaces at the top of his political agenda.

During Peñalosa's tenure, Bogotá added thousands of playgrounds, parks, libraries, and public plazas for the benefit of its citizenry and rededicated some of the city's major thoroughfares to bicycles, pedestrians, and mass transit. Peñalosa was honored in 2000 with the Stockholm Challenge Award for initiating Bogotá's "car-free day"--the largest and most successful event of its kind in the world--which led the United Nations to hold workshops for other mayors interested in wresting their cities from the thrall of the automobile.

Peñalosa, who attended Duke University on a soccer scholarship and holds a degree in history, credits getting people out of their cars and into parks and public spaces with a newfound sense of community and civility among Bogotanos. According to The New York Times, Bogotá is now statistically safer than Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Washington, D.C., or Baltimore. But whatever benefits they may bring to urban life, parks, says Peñalosa, are an end in themselves. "Parks are the butterflies of cities," he says. "They're there just to make people happy."

Peñalosa is currently a visiting scholar in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. He is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences on transportation, urban studies, and issues affecting Third World cities. We recently spoke at a parks caucus sponsored by the San Francisco Neighborhood Parks Council.

With so many challenges facing Third World cities, why do you place such importance on parks and open space?

Perhaps the biggest challenge to world security is environmental and social sustainability in the world's fastest-growing cities. The population of cities in the Third World is growing by more than 80 million inhabitants per year, which means there will be some two billion people living there within the next 25 to 30 years. In dense cities such as Bogotá, Sao Paolo, Jakarta, and Mexico City, there are practically no places where they can come into contact with nature, safely play outside, or meet others in society as equals. And we have seen firsthand how living in poor conditions can lead to social problems, including extremism and even terrorism. We need food and housing for survival, but there are even higher types of needs, needs related to happiness. If you look at it that way, parks become as necessary to a city's health--physical and spiritual--as the water supply.

If you could wave a magic wand and create the perfect city, what would that city be like?

We really have to admit that over the past hundred years we have been building cities much more for mobility than for people's well-being. Every year thousands of children are killed by cars. Isn't it time we build cities that are more child-friendly? Over the last 30 years, we've been able to magnify environmental consciousness all over the world. As a result, we know a lot about the ideal environment for a happy whale or a happy mountain gorilla. We're far less clear about what constitutes an ideal environment for a happy human being. One common measure for how clean a mountain stream is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It's the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we would have a successful city for all people.

Given the rapid growth of Third World cities, is this possible?

Many Third World cities today are really only half built. Many are still surrounded by undeveloped land that will be overtaken by the city very soon. We still have the opportunity to learn from the successes and mistakes of other cities around the world. We need to think about how to create cities that produce more convivial, creative, and happy human beings. Where is the urban expert who decided that cities had to be structured around cars? Why not begin to think differently? Why not dream of a city where half the streets would be for pedestrians, where the heart of the city would be a giant avenue lined with benches and trees, a meeting place for the community, where people go to jog, ride bicycles, talk, kiss, eat in cafes? A city doesn't have to be a bunch of roads for cars with some buildings around them.

As mayor, you made it your platform to transform the city's transportation system.

When I got to city hall, I was a handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300 million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. It may seem crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren't even paved. But we chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We're telling people, "You are important--not because you're rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human." If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.

How was your idea of putting pedestrians needs ahead of cars received?

I was nearly impeached when I said that cars shouldn't be allowed to park on the sidewalks. My opponents were business owners who said there was enough space on the sidewalks for cars to park and for people to still walk by. In Bogotá only 25 to 30 percent of the households have cars. Yet we use public money to build roads for the cars that so few people can afford, while the majority walk or use public transit. Democracy isn't just about casting a vote. It's about public good over private. If we can ban cars, isn't the majority better off?

What steps were you able to take?

We began to experiment by instituting a car-free day on a weekday. In a city of about 7 million people, just about everybody managed to get to work by walking, bicycling, bus, even on horseback--and everybody was better off. There was less air pollution, less time sitting in traffic, more time for people to be productive and enjoy themselves. Every Sunday we close 120 kilometers of roads to motor vehicles for seven hours. A million and a half people of all ages and incomes come out to ride bicycles, jog, and simply gather with others in community. We took a vote, and 83 percent of the public told us they wanted to have car-free days more often. Getting people out of their cars is a means of social integration. You have the upper-income person sitting next to the cleaning lady on the bus. This may be something you take for granted in your country. But in the Third World, society isn't so integrated. This is extremely powerful and revolutionary.

Why did you make creating new parks a priority during your administration?

Parks have a very powerful role to play as equalizers of society. We almost always meet under conditions of social hierarchy. At work, some people are bosses, and others are employees; at restaurants, some people are serving and others are being served. Parks are the gathering place for community. They create a sense of belonging. Everybody is welcome regardless of age, background, income, or disabilities. This creates a different type of society.

Today we see images of the beautiful earth taken from a spaceship and we think of it as our planet. But in fact, there are very few places on the planet that people have access to. Most of the land is privatized and public spaces are very, very scarce. The fact is, upper-income people have always had access to nature and recreation. They go to country houses, golf clubs, restaurants, hunting preserves. What do the poor, especially in the Third World, have as an alternative to television? All poor people have are public spaces--so this is not a luxury. It is the minimum a democratic society can provide to begin to compensate for the inequalities that exist in society.

How have public spaces helped change Bogotá?

For one thing, we've seen a reduction in crime. And people have a different attitude toward their city. In the worst recession we've ever had, people were asked to pay a 10 percent voluntary tax to support various city services, including parks. More than 40,000 people did so, which I think speaks to the greater sense of community people feel.

As a political officeholder in a developing country, how would you define success?

The gap in the economic growth rate between rich and small countries is becoming greater. For example, if we in the Third World were to work very, very hard, maybe in 150 years we will have the income that you have in the United States today. But that doesn't mean we would catch up because by then you will be that much further ahead of us. So if we measure our success or failure as a society in terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the end of time. Given our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success, and that could be in terms of happiness. It may be in how much time children spend with their grand- parents, or the ways in which we are able to enjoy our friendships, or how many times people smile during the week. A city is successful not when it's rich but when its people are happy. Public space is one way to lead us to a society that is not only more equal but also much happier.

Susan Ives is vice president and director of communications at the Trust for Public Land.

Posted 10/30/02