Enabling Happy Cities (E20)

Happiness for Cynics podcast

In the second of this two-part series on happy cities, this week we explore the enablers of happy cities. We look at the research from the Global Happiness Council’s annual Global Happiness and Wellbeing Policy Report and discuss some great examples from around the world of cities which are getting it right.

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast happiness for cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and speaker, focused on change and resilience [background laughter most of the way through] and we’ve already lost Pete today. 

P: [Laughing] My tummy was rumbling, on cue. [Still laughing.] We should have had pancakes first. 

M: [Laugh] It’s our treat for after we’ve recorded. 

P: So sorry. Hi, I’m Peter Furness, a mover and shaker, Covid[19] time baker, opportunity seeker and maker. Each week we will bring you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology known as happiness.  

M: You can find us at marieskelton.com, which is a site about how to find balance, happiness and resilience in your life. We talk about a lot of the same research we cover here on the podcast, including some really practical tips for bringing joy and happiness into your life. 

P: Bubbles for everyone.  

[Laughter] 

P: So on to today’s episode, which is part two of our series on Happy Cities.  

[Happy Intro Music] 

M: Okay, so welcome to today’s episode, which is part two on our series of Happy Cities. But before we get into that, Pete you had a really lovely interaction with one of our listeners.  

P: I did. It was really, really lovely, so we’ll call him James.  

M: Sure. 

P: So James and I had a very brief interaction and basically, I’ll just read that. I’ll just read what he said:  

We mentioned podcasts and he mentioned that he was podcast listener. And I said ‘oh I do a podcast called Happiness for Cynics.’  

James: ‘Cool. I listened to the 1st 2 episodes of your podcast today. I think it was just what I needed to hear. Thank you for putting me on to it.’  

P: ‘Oh, that’s bloody lovely.’  

James: ‘No, thank you.’  

P: And he goes on to say.  

James: ‘Thanks, Pete. I’m naturally cynical, but also believe that it’s up to me to be happy and only I can choose my reactions to things. I still have bad days, and I have to remind myself that that’s okay. But overall, I think I’m mostly optimistic. I’m going to try get to more episodes of your podcast today.  

M: That’s so lovely to hear, it really is.  

P: It was really reassuring that what we do actually is reaching [people].  

M: Yes, and I think that’s the whole premise of the podcast. It took a major trauma for me to reassess my life. I don’t want everyone have to have a major trauma in their life in order to discover that this stuff actually works. 

P: Well I just knew.  

M: of course… 

P: I just bought in from the beginning. 

M: Uh, huh.  

P: Does that make me better than you?  

M: What evs… Happy Cities, Pete.  

[Laughter] 

P: So let’s just recap what we went through on the last episode, Part one was all about the design. Just to recap. We had six major points: 

1. Urban design in place making so a city plan and design …of connected space;  
2. The next was access to Nature;  
3. Third was Mobility, how we move around, how we get around a city and having access to the parts of the city;  
4. Sustainability and Partnership. Sustainable change and putting things in place that make a city more changeable for the next few generations;  
5. Culture, Arts and what a city’s culture is; and
6. The Quality of Services that are accessible to all the population of that city.  

M: You flew through those Pete. 

P: Yes cause I hogged the podcast last week so I’m trying to be really, really good this week. 

M: [Laugh] so, they were all the design elements of Happy Cities.  

This week we’re going to talk more about Enablers of Happy Cities. And enablers are the intangible policy outcomes. So there’s two types of policy outcomes those requiring active engagement from citizens and those that are sensed passively, so they just kind of happen or don’t. As we mentioned in the last episode Australia really is a lucky country when you look at it –  

P: Is it still? 

M: It still is, we are not dealing with slums with huge poverty or famine, war; The infrastructure that we have here, the opportunity that we have here is still, it’s not perfect. I can see you’re looking me! 

P: No, no, no, I’m asking the question. 

M: It’s not perfect. It is not perfect. But we are so much further advanced than so many other countries. We are one of the lucky countries. 

P: And sometimes we may forget that. 

M: Oh, absolutely. 

P: Because I think there’s a lot of things that are different about Australian lifestyle… when you put it in a global context, we’re doing all right. 

M: And back when, even we’ve come in leaps and bounds. The quality of life that we have compared to our parents or our grandparents is it’s so much better. It is not simpler and it comes with its own challenges, but yes, but I’d argue better. Anyway, again, we’ve gone off track, so Australia is lucky. Well, just not perfect, not the best. But we are lucky and so what I want to do is quickly go through the first 4 areas that just aren’t as relevant for our society and then we can spend a bit more time deep diving into the other. 

So first one is Safety and Security.  

And you mentioned American psychologist Abraham Maslow. We mentioned it a few episodes ago, but also he’s famous for coming up with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And it’s a way of showing that some needs more important to humans than others. And he displays this by using a pyramid with things like air, food and water at the bottom. I think we can all agree air, food and water are absolutely critical.  

P: Absolutely. It’s a necessity. 

M: The second layer is about Safety and Security, and that comes before things like love and belonging, friends and family and esteem, respect and definitely before self- actualisation. 

P: [laugh] before we get into the fluffy stuff. 

M: Yeah, but in short, people don’t care so much about a vibrant nightlife when it’s not safe to walk the streets. 

P: Yep 

M: So I think that we’re pretty lucky and as a female in this country. I feel very safe to walk nearly any streets in this country. I can’t think of any that I don’t feel safe walking at night, right? So we’re going to move on, safety and security really important for a happy city. We’ll go tick in Australia. 

The next one is Affordability.  

Shelter is another item on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it’s in the first tier. Alright, you can’t feel safe if you don’t have a home. And you can’t feel secure if you’re constantly worried about losing that home.  

P: True.  

M: So if you’re sleeping in the streets, it’s a very vulnerable position to be in.  

P: Yeah, definitely. 

M: That’s for the small percentage of our population that are homeless but also going back to what we mentioned before. For the 20, 30, 40% of Australians who are low income earners, there is a true week to week struggle to pay your bills and not be evicted from your home, whether it’s a mortgage that you’re paying or just rent, right. And so I would argue that affordability, traditionally 20 years ago, wasn’t so much of an issue. But it’s starting to creep into, well it has crept into our concerns in our country of late.  

P: Oh, for sure, especially in cities like Sydney. Absolutely. The affordability of rent is huge.  

M: All right, we will move on  

Tolerance and Inclusivity.  

So this is about equity, tolerance and justice for all, and some of you might have started noticing that we’re using the word equity rather than equality lately and I really love that we’re evolving our understanding of equality and now focusing instead of equality on equity. And so equality is all about everyone having the same opportunity. And that’s really noble and a great first step. And I will say that a lot of countries and various groups are still fighting for that equal right.

We’re still not there as a society, but the next evolution of that argument or thinking is equity. And that acknowledges that everyone’s different has different needs, and therefore you shouldn’t provide one product or service to everyone. You should aim to provide a tailored product or service to people so that they end up in the same place. And there’s a great video online where they’re talking about white privilege and they get everyone to start at the beginning of a race. 

P: Yeah, I’ve seen this. 

M: Yeah, there’s a great video there, but another way of looking at it is if you have a really tall kid and a really short kid, and they both want to peek over the fence to watch the baseball game and you give them both a box to stand and the tall kid will see over the fence and will watch the game and be really happy. The short kid is still staring smack bang at the fence posts and can’t see a thing, so it’s about giving each of them a box to stand on. But the box for the short kid needs to be taller so they can both see the baseball game.  

P: Right, that’s a great analogy. That’s what equity is about, right? It’s about different solutions based on your needs rather than one solution for all. And I love that that’s the next evolution and that’s what people are starting to talk about here with tolerance and inclusivity. And then the last one is 

Trust.  

Last one I’m going to talk about then I’ll hand to you Pete. [Laugh] It’s definitely not the last one. So, the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] defines trust as a person’s belief that another person or institution will act consistently with their expectations of positive behaviour. And corporates have failed dismally at this in recent years. There is such a lack of trust now between people and large organisations, to the point that organisations are now just as bad as politicians in our minds. 

P: Oh! Yeah. I’ll give you that. 

M: And we used to trust banks with our money, we used to trust big corporations to give us jobs and security. That is no longer the case. And the really interesting part off that quote is that it’s about our expectations of positive behaviour and expectations change over time. And I think what we’ve seen with corporate is that they haven’t kept up with our changing expectations, right? 

P: [Tentative] OK. 

M: And the second thing there is as far as Happy Cities goes, trust is about government’s doing what we think they should do and not being caught out. So no corruption is the big one. But the second thing is opening up your doors, and this is a change management 101 principle co-create and we’re going to come to a few examples that you’ll talk about soon Pete, where governments have opened their doors up and worked with their citizens to co-create solutions and get such better results in the end. But you also get trust and that’s a big one. 

P: Yep, it’s transparency to see what people are doing, what the processes are which gives you empowerment as an individual.  

M: Absolutely. All right, so I’m going to hand to you for the next one. I think you’re going to start with  

Health and Life Balance.  

P: Health and Life, this is right up my alley. A holistic view of city life and activities promoting balance, physical and mental health. We need both for making sure that Happy Cities occur and I want to use a couple of examples here. One is in Bogota, in South America. Ciclovia it’s called, [Chi-clo-veea] I’m not sure about the accent there. Reclaiming the streets and opening them up to millions of cyclists of all walks and abilities, much like running festivals in Sydney. It’s about people custodians of the city, creating the capacity for the population to engage within the streets. 

So what something like Ciclovia does is it lets families, it lets children, it lets senior citizens come out and enjoy car free areas. Now this movement is actually this event actually sparked a movement in other countries around the world where regularly closing down city streets just for cyclists became a huge way for the communities to come out and interact, so that created a sense of meaning and belonging and sociality. It ticks all these lovely little boxes for us. Also looking at things in terms of work hours.

Now, very topical at the moment is the 4 to 5 working week, four weeks in five weeks or the four day working week on. We’ll come back to that at another time, but it has a huge involvement on being allowed people to manage their own time. This creates more balance because you can choose when you’re going to go and pick the kids up from day care or when you’re going to fit in your three mile walk that you might have to do just to get your own exercise and that creates huge health benefits along with your productivity, which we know since the year 2000 in Scandinavian countries, it goes up, 20%, 30% increase in productivity, downgrading of health services, less sick leave all these benefits from allowing people to manage their time better. It’s a huge marker for happy cities.  

M: Yep 

P: Okay, moving along. So 

Sociality

…is that how you say this word?  

M: Yep 

P: Sociality? Sociality? People need people. Battling loneliness. We need other people, we know that having those social interactions really helps with their levels of happiness. There’s a city in Western Denmark that actually initiated counselling services for parents and parents of teenagers if they were having trouble and also for divorced couples. Now this was a free service that they offered and what they found was not only did divorces drop by 17% but they were clocking issues of teenage angst and issue from becoming problems later on and by providing those, those services free of charge, people were less engaged in conflict. They, they were able to manage their lifestyles a little bit better, which makes a huge difference to happiness.  

M: I think this also goes back to what we’ve mentioned multiple times. It’s about understanding yourself. And I think it’s giving teenagers and parents an opportunity to know themselves better and to talk through their emotions in a far more proactive and positive way and therefore it’s created stronger social ties within the family unit. 

P: Which makes the happiness.  

M: Such a great, great initiative. 

P: That and the adopt a grandma. 

M: Oh, I love this one! 

P: [Laugh] So the Dragør, is that how you would say it? in east of Copenhagen in Denmark has the ‘bonus grandma’ or ‘adopt a grandma scheme’. So there’s these ladies who are sitting around in their nursing homes and so forth. They may not have families around them, and people who need a little bit of help can adopt a grandma. Who doesn’t want an extra grandma? I mean, my grandma’s gone. She’s been gone for 10 years, actually. So, it’s great to have that sort of person around if you’ve got kids and you need a bit of help or you need that that maternal figure. 

M: Yep, in particular in today’s day and age, when you have two people out earning an income and people are more likely to move away from their parents. And it’s, it’s really tough to balance full time work and raising kids nowadays, yes, and maintain your sanity and happiness. 

P: [Laughter] Definitely, so we’ll move on to  

Economy and Skills  

A primary reason for people to move to a city is the economic opportunity that this allows. There’s a wonderful example in Vancouver in Canada, of the Vancouver Binners.  

M: I’m going to jump into that, maybe so what was happening was that people were taking their recyclables to the recycling centre to get their five cents or 10 cents per bottle. But these were generally homeless people or people that had been looked down upon by others in society as being a nuisance. And so they called them binners and they weren’t great to have around your neighbourhood. They looked bad. They might have smelled. You know, that’s the general consensus that society had of these people. 

But some great organisation had a look at the good they were doing, saving all of that plastic from going into landfill and said, ‘How do we change people’s perception of these people as a pest to instead show the good that they’re doing for our society and also help them to do it more efficiently and better so that we can again have less plastics going into a landfill.’ Such a great little initiative. 

P: Yeah, utilising the labour force.  

M: Absolutely. So these people were seen as a pest were doing such a service. So really cute little story there. 

P: It reminds me of a story actually, when you came back from Thailand after your accident, Marie and you made the comment to me about you were in hospital and you had like a team of ladies washing you. 

M: Oh, they were fabulous. 

P: [Laugh] You made the point that it was utilising the labour force. So these women who may not have had training and skills and all that sort of stuff. It was washing patients in the hospital and they were utilising that cheap labour force, giving them an occupation, giving them purpose, giving the meaning tick, tick, tick for the happiness counter. 

M: Yep, yep absolutely. 

P: Roman Deguchi is the director off the ‘Inner West Neighbour Aid’ garden in Concord, west of Sydney. And I came across this on an episode of Gardening Australia. 

M: Of course you did. 

P: Because that’s what you do when you’re in isolation. You watch Gardening Australia. It was about utilising the talent within the community and bringing the local community together in a garden setting. Now, one of the first things they did was they had paths that go through the garden and these were all wide enough for wheelchairs. Now, I know this is something that’s close to your experience Marie, as well. 

M: Uh, huh. Yeah  

P: You don’t realise how inaccessible the city is until you’re in a wheelchair and you’ve got to get around. So that was one of the first things that they did. And they also found that there was a disconnection between the elder community and the youth community and this garden brought it together. They brought school kids in to start doing the planting and stuff, and they were bringing elderly people in to direct them and say, look we can’t get down on our knees but you can, plant that over here and do that and there was contact between the generations. 

M: All right, last one;  

Meaning and Belonging. 

P: Ooh, this is a big one, a shared meaning and belonging and a sense of purpose that involves a community.  

M: I think a lot of the things you talked about have covered meaning and purpose. So I think it’s enough on this one to almost say it is really important to create spaces and activities that give people meaning and belonging. But the great thing about the items on this list they’re not mutually exclusive. And you can create a lot of places and activities that give not only meaning and belong belonging, but also economy and skills and sociality and health and life balance. 

P: Yeah definitely, they tick many boxes. 

M: Yeah, All right, well, we should probably wrap that up so. 

P: [Laugh] Way too much information.  

M: So, in conclusion, Happy Cities. Firstly, it’s a choice. It’s about opting in, definitely. And then the other part of this is about the effectiveness of empowering people to take responsibility and get involved in their cities. 

P: The processes. 

M: Exactly. 

P: How do you get people involved?  

M: Yeah, and it’s not just because you want to see the outcome be good or right for your society. It’s because the process of going through it is beneficial to you and your happiness. So getting involved in that garden isn’t just about there being a nice garden in your neighbourhood. It’s about planting herbs with the local kids and the benefits that you get from that.  

P: Exactly.  

M: All right. Okay, well, thank you for joining us. And, as always, you can find us at marieskelton.com, where you can ask us a question, recommended topic or suggest someone to interview, and we hope you’ll join us again next week and over the coming weeks, we’ve got a couple of really great interviews lined up, which will revisit the topic of Happy Cities. And we’ve got some experts who are going to cover various elements.  

P: Very exciting. 

M: What makes space and the places that we move in happy for us? What makes us happy when you’re in them? So I hope you’ll join us for that.  

P: No worries folks, buy into happiness. 

[Happy exit Music] 

Related content: Read Moving On article Podcast: Wellbeing and Your Environment (E21), listen to our Podcast: Designing Happy Cities (E19)

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