COVID-19 hit Canada's main streets hard, with closures devastating small businesses. Immediate action is needed, but inclusive planning is crucial for safer, stronger, and more inclusive long-term improvements.

Mexico City boasts two of the world's largest urban parks: Chapultepec and San Juan de Aragon. These expansive parks feature green spaces, lush forests, and various amenities including playgrounds and skate parks, providing residents with ample opportunities for recreation and relaxation.

Happy Cities partnered with Superior, CO, to foster community unity through art and public spaces. "Inspired by Nature: Superior’s Creative Placemaking Master Plan" celebrates local identity and values.

Happy Cities collaborated with the City of Rotterdam to address mobility and public space needs in the Bloemhof neighborhood, focusing on marginalized groups. Through extensive on-site and remote engagement, we worked directly with residents to develop practical walkability solutions.

Public space in Vancouver isn't universally accessible; residents encounter barriers based on identity factors like race, gender, sexual orientation, age, income, and ability. Overlapping identities compound these challenges, affecting access, comfort, and safety in city spaces.

In fall 2018, Vancouver enlisted Happy Cities to evaluate its Pavement-to-Plaza initiative. Over 700 residents were surveyed in September 2018 at transformed plaza sites and control areas. The survey assessed subjective well-being factors like social connection, trust, care for place, and sense of belonging using academically-validated measures.

The way we commute can indeed influence our generosity, and sharing personal burdens with strangers in the city can have surprising effects.

This question served as inspiration for our experiment in Vancouver, Canada, where we measured the impact of colorful or lush interventions on people's well-being.

This question fueled an experiment conducted by Happy Cities and collaborators, forming our winning entry for the Shore to Core research competition. Organized by the Van Alen Institute and West Palm Beach Community Redevelopment Agency, the competition tasked participants with exploring the impact of urban spaces on human well-being and reimagining social well-being in waterfront cities.

In summer 2016, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) initiated a transformative project to envision Vancouver's Granville Island in 2040. Despite its storied success as a hub where arts, industry, and surprises intersect, a refresh was necessary to ensure its continued relevance for the future.

British Land, the UK’s largest real estate investment trust, is committed to improving wellbeing through its development and placemaking practices. We helped the company to pursue this aspiration through a collaborative program of research, recommendations, site audits and workshops.

During Love Night, Charles Montgomery assembled an interdisciplinary team to reconfigure urban spaces, aiming to encourage participants to exhibit greater trust and openness towards strangers.

The driving question behind this ambitious collaboration at the Museum of Vancouver, spearheaded by Happy Cities principal Charles Montgomery, alongside four other community partners and hundreds of participants…

The BMW Guggenheim Lab, a blend of urban think tank and community center, traversed the globe to spark fresh perspectives on urban living. Happy Cities principal Charles Montgomery contributed as an original team member in New York City and continued his involvement in Berlin.

Historical studies indicate that street edge design can influence human behavior, attracting or repelling people. But can design ultimately shape how we interact with one another?

We advocate that evidence on design's impact on happiness empowers designers, planners, and citizens to co-create better communities. Teaming up with Laboratorio para la Ciudad, an urban innovation lab, we applied this approach in a complex, contested district in Mexico City.