Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery Page B

administrative assistant at the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, fifty miles west.
    That’s how she found herself crawling out of bed at five each morning, dropping her toddler, Justin, at day care, then hitting the highway for two hours, up over the Diablo Range, down through the Castro Valley, across the shallow south end of San Francisco Bay, up to the 280, through the hills above Redwood City, and down into Menlo Park. When she could, she’d catch a ride with her grandmother, Nancy, who also worked for the foundation. Otherwise, she’d go solo in her Chevy Malibu. Two hours in, two hours home. She was living the long-distance life, just like her mother and father, her grandmother, and her husband, too. It was exhausting, but she endured it for the sake of her son.
    One day the phone rang at Kim’s office. It was the day-care center back in Tracy. Her little boy had turned beet red. He was as hot as a kettle, and he was vomiting the contents of his stomach all over the playroom. Kim panicked. Her child was dying, she thought, and he was fifty miles away . She sprinted downstairs to her Chevy and hit the highway. Her heart pounded as if it were going to break right through her chest. She had no idea how fast she was traveling, but no speed seemed fast enough.
    Hot tears were streaming down her face when she heard the sound of a police siren and pulled over on Eleventh Avenue in Tracy. She didn’t have the energy to explain her haste to the officer. She just let him write the ticket and kept her eyes on the road ahead, waiting for him to let her go.
    By the time Kim burst through the doors of her son’s day-care center, his vomit had been mopped up and his fever had settled. She picked him up, wiped the sweaty hair back on his forehead, held him. The boy was on the mend. But that night Kim told her husband that she could not, would not, live as her parents had lived. They vowed to find a way to unstretch their lives.
    Kim Holbrook has not been alone in reconsidering her relationship with the city. In the past decade the tide of dispersal has slacked. Central cities from Manhattan to Vancouver to Mexico City have seen an influx of new residents willing to give proximity another shot. But escaping from the effects of dispersal is not as easy as you might think. The system that stretched Kim’s life actually flows through architecture, public spaces, infrastructure budgets, laws, and mobility networks, infecting every part of every metropolis in the United States, Canada, and, increasingly, cities all around the world.
    If we are going to escape the effects of dispersal, we need to understand it as a system of building, planning, and thinking. We need to consider how it was born in the first place.

 
    4. How We Got Here
    The modern city is probably the most unlovely and artificial site this planet affords. The ultimate solution is to abandon it … We shall solve the City Problem by leaving the city.
    –Henry Ford, 1922
    The city we saw from the Repo Tour bus is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is not organic. It is not an accident. It was not fashioned by the desires of citizens operating in a free market. It was shaped by powerful financial incentives, massive public investment, and strict rules defining how land and roads can be developed and used. But these are merely tools, put to work in the service of ideas about urban happiness that were born during an age of acute urban trauma. To understand the dispersed city, it helps to take a quick detour into cities that were so full of factory smoke, ugliness, crime, and deprivation that they seemed to threaten the very societies that created them.
    Andrew Mearns, a reformist clergyman, produced this report after a trudge into the slums of industrial revolution London in 1883: “Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we