Montgomery’s book is a well-argued and wide-ranging study of how cities and neighbourhoods can be designed to improve our lives. The bugbear of the book – which focuses on the Americas – is suburban sprawl, or “the dispersed city”, which he rightly describes as “the most expensive, resource-intense, land-gobbling, polluting way of living ever built”. Echoing Richard Sennett, he argues that suburban living isolates people and reduces levels of trust, “the bedrock on which cities grow and thrive”. Car-dependency makes people unhealthy (road rage kills brain cells, apparently) and turns the city’s streets into dangerous no-go zones for pedestrians. This, combined with the privatisation of public space, is destroying our cities, whose architecture and systems should be redesigned to make their citizens happier. “Every detail in a city must reflect that human beings are sacred,” says Montgomery’s hero, Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor whose reforms of Bogotá transformed that city for the better. A refreshingly optimistic vision of the urban future.
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