Why Our Greatest Source of Joy and Happiness are the Vibrant, Walkable Public Spaces Around Us
As an urban designer, I am passionate about creating walkable, sustainable communities by way of physical place-making. Based on my experience, people form attachments to places they love and contribute to the viability of those places by reinvesting in them over time. Inspired by Ingrid Fetell Lee's TED2018 Where Joy Hides and How to Find It, I want to understand why and how people form attachments to the places they love. It must be a feeling of joy and cumulatively happiness. As Ingrid describes, joy is an intense, momentary instance of positive emotion. It makes us want to smile, laugh or jump up and down. In contrast, happiness is feeling good over time. We all have an instinct to find joy in the physical world, an instinct which is directly connected to our mental health. Ingrid goes on to illustrate that joy hides in plain sight and that physical, tangible elements can trigger intangible joy.
Many of my friends, like me, choose to live in, visit, and spend time in cities. They know they love walkable urban environments, but they find it difficult to express what exactly makes the experience special. In reality, there are many layers of physical attributes, design, sensations and activity that contribute to a great place. Research shows that we find joy in external environments that reflect complexity similar to our own intricate personalities. Therefore, design can be a powerful means to generate happiness.
The aim of this blog is to to provide a qualitative analysis of joyful elements in public spaces. Because of the layers of complexity, each post will focus on evaluating one joyful component based on the following themes, distilled by The Aesthetics of Joy: energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration and renewal; while always keeping in mind that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A collection of stories, photographs and drawings will express the themes. The posts will also examine how drawing style and color can affect our happiness.
