Jane Jacobs, the loneliness epidemic, and building places worth living in.
Recently, I came across a video of Professor Arthur Brooks discussing happiness and human well-being. In the clip, Professor Brooks makes an interesting distinction between what government policy can accomplish and what ultimately makes people happy. Public policy, he argues, “can eliminate sources of unhappiness, but happiness itself is built through the choices individuals make in their lives, particularly through love and personal relationships.” This anecdote led me to think about happiness, loneliness and community. Governments cannot legislate happiness, manufacture meaningful relationships, or guarantee that people will find fulfilment in their everyday lives. But if love, relationships, and human connection are so fundamental to happiness, what happens when the environments in which we live make those things increasingly difficult to cultivate?
So much of our daily lives are shaped by decisions we never personally made. The neighbourhoods we live within, the distance between our homes and places of work, the availability of public transportation, our safety along these routes, the affordability of housing, and the presence or absence of parks, libraries, and community spaces, etc. These conditions influence where we spend our time, whom we encounter, and how easily we can maintain relationships with the people around us. We choose to whom we show love or compassion, but we have considerably less control over the structures that determine how much time, energy, and opportunity we have to do so. Therefore, if unhappiness is influenced by the environments we inhabit, can happiness itself be politically constructed?
The death and life of our cities
Upon viewing Professor Brooks’ clip, I immediately thought of Jane Jacobs and her work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In my view, the book fundamentally challenged prevailing ideas about urban planning, development and policy. At the time, planners often approached cities as problems to be solved through large-scale modernization. This included highways, expansive housing projects, and the separation of residential, commercial, and industrial areas. However, Jane Jacobs saw things differently. Rather than evaluating cities primarily through infrastructure, development or efficiency, she considered how they functioned for the people living within them. She was particularly interested in people first, and the everyday interactions that made neighbourhoods feel alive: shopkeepers who recognized regular customers, neighbours exchanging warm greetings, children playing on sidewalks, and strangers occupying public spaces together. To Jacobs, a successful city was not simply one that moved people efficiently between destinations. It was the opposite. She paints a picture of a city that creates opportunities for people to encounter one another, develop relationships, and build informal networks of mutual support. These relationships do not necessarily develop through formal institutions or organized community initiatives. Often, she describes, they emerge naturally from the way neighbourhoods were designed. A corner shop could become a familiar meeting place. A public bench could encourage conversation. A walkable street could transform strangers into recognizable faces. Over time, these interactions contributed to a sense of happiness and belonging. They foster the feeling of togetherness.
While the book was published in 1961, there is something particularly compelling about this idea in 2026. We increasingly describe loneliness and social isolation as defining problems of contemporary life. People often speak about the importance of having a "village": a network of friends, family, neighbours, and community members who provide support through the ordinary difficulties of being human. But villages require opportunities for interaction, shared experiences, and spaces in which relationships can develop. A neighbourhood designed around highways, private vehicles, and isolated residential developments offers a different social experience from one organized around sidewalks, parks, local businesses, and accessible public spaces. Both might provide somewhere to live. But they do not necessarily provide the same opportunities to build a life.
The loneliness epidemic
In recent years, loneliness has increasingly been discussed as a public health concern. In 2023, the United States Surgeon General published an advisory describing loneliness and social isolation as an epidemic, emphasizing the importance of social connection to individual and collective health. Two years later, the World Health Organization reported that approximately one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness.
Although we cannot pinpoint one reason for this development, there are several factors that could be significant contributors to these common feelings of loneliness and unhappiness. Some of the most frequently discussed justifications are communicating through screens, working from home, and becoming addicted to scrolling through platforms like Instagram or TikTok. Activities that once required leaving the house and interacting with others can now be accomplished without speaking to one another. Groceries are ordered through apps and arrive at our doors. Coffee chats take place through screens. Entertainment is available through streaming services. Even dating is increasingly mediated by technology. These conveniences have obvious benefits, but they have also changed the frequency and nature of our everyday interactions. They have eliminated the process, and just given us the solution.
A 2025 OECD report found that face-to-face interactions with friends and family have declined across a number of countries as remote communication has increased. Meanwhile, the World Happiness Report 2025 found a strong association between sharing meals with others and greater life satisfaction. These findings attribute these changes to individual behaviour. We are encouraged to spend less time online, make plans with friends, cultivate hobbies, and invest in our relationships. All are presumably reasonable suggestions. But they also assume that people have the time, resources, and opportunities necessary to act upon them.
Consider someone who spends two hours commuting each day, struggles to afford housing, and lives in a neighbourhood where almost every activity requires access to a vehicle. Their ability to maintain relationships is shaped by more than personal motivation. A simple evening with friends might require considerable planning, money, and time. Spontaneous encounters become rare and difficult. Community participation competes with the demands of work and everyday survival. Now consider someone whose neighbourhood includes accessible public transportation, community spaces, affordable cultural activities, and opportunities to interact with others during the ordinary course of the day. The second person has not necessarily made better choices. They have been afforded a different set of possibilities. And those possibilities are, at least in part, the outcome of public decisions that have unconsciously been made for them.
What the world's happiest cities tell us
The relationship between urban design, public policy, and happiness becomes particularly relevant when looking at the world's highest-ranking cities. The 2026 Happy City Index, published by the Institute for Quality of Life, assessed cities using 64 indicators across six dimensions: Citizens, Governance, Environment, Economy, Health, and Mobility. Copenhagen ranked first, followed by Helsinki, Geneva, Uppsala, and Tokyo. Singapore ranked twenty-second, while Vancouver placed thirty-ninth and Toronto ranked 102nd. An important distinction is that the index does not simply ask residents how happy they feel. It evaluates the conditions that contribute to urban quality of life, from transportation and environmental performance to economic opportunity and governance. In other words, it measures many of the circumstances that public institutions have the ability to influence.
For example, Copenhagen has consistently performed well in international assessments of urban quality of life, particularly for its transportation infrastructure, environmental policies, and access to public amenities. Cycling is integrated into everyday transportation, while public transit, parks, cultural institutions, and community events contribute to an urban environment in which much of daily life takes place outside the home. In 2025, the BBC did a feature on the world's happiest cities. Copenhagen residents described the importance of accessible cultural experiences, including public festivals and community events as being crucially important.
The significance of these features of city life becomes clearer when considering them through Jane Jacobs's lens of community. Public events bring people together. Accessible transportation makes participation easier. Walkable neighbourhoods create opportunities for informal interaction. A city does not need to organize friendships for its residents. It can simply make it easier for those friendships to develop.
Singapore offers a different example. While its political and urban development model differs considerably from that of Copenhagen, Singapore has invested extensively in public housing and infrastructure. According to Singapore's Department of Statistics, approximately three-quarters of its residents lived in public Housing and Development Board flats in 2026. Singapore's housing system has helped shape patterns of residential development, access to services, and opportunities for long-term housing security. This approach demonstrates how decisions about something as fundamental as housing can influence the everyday conditions in which people build their lives.
Neither Copenhagen nor Singapore provides a universal blueprint for happiness. Their political institutions, cultural practices, economic circumstances, and approaches to urban development differ substantially. What makes them interesting is the extent to which public policy has shaped the conditions of everyday life.
The politics of happiness
In The Republic, Plato argues that the just city and the just individual mirror one another. Cities reflect the priorities, behaviours, and values of the people who inhabit them. The relationship also works in the opposite direction. People are shaped by the cities they inhabit. They are shaped by the opportunities available to them, the institutions they encounter, and the conditions under which they work, travel, socialize, and raise families. And many of these conditions are directly influenced by political decisions. To suggest that policy can alleviate unhappiness but has little role in producing happiness creates a distinction that becomes difficult to sustain when we examine how people actually live. A municipal budget cannot produce love, and a well-designed neighbourhood cannot guarantee meaningful relationships. But the capacity to form those relationships is influenced by housing security, economic stability, available leisure time, mobility, and access to shared spaces. These are hardly peripheral concerns of public policy. They are among its most fundamental responsibilities.
Why these issues have become so trivialized from contemporary discussions of happiness. We regularly evaluate governments according to economic performance, productivity, fiscal management, and employment growth. These measures provide valuable information, but they do not account for the human experiences that are created, or that are lacking. A city can attract investment, increase development, and expand its economy while becoming increasingly unaffordable and undesirable for the people who live there. And an economy can become more productive without necessarily making people feel more secure, connected, or fulfilled.
This tension feels particularly relevant in the current American political climate. The Trump era has intensified a tendency to discuss government through a corporate lens: efficiency, competitiveness, cost reduction, and financial return. But a city is not a corporation. Its residents are not merely consumers, taxpayers, employees, or economic units whose value is determined by their productivity. They are people attempting to build meaningful lives. The value of a library and the books it contains cannot be understood solely through the revenue it generates. A public park might not produce an obvious financial return, but it can provide opportunities for recreation, social connection, and community participation. A reliable bus route may not be profitable in the traditional sense, but it can determine whether someone can access employment, visit family, attend a community event, or maintain a friendship. These considerations belong at the centre of public decision-making, not at its margins.
Citizens are not merely passive recipients of policy. They are also participants in its creation, whether through elections, public consultation, advocacy, community organizing, or the everyday expression of collective needs. The relationship between people and government is, therefore, reciprocal. If democratic government is intended to represent and respond to the needs of the public, then the conditions that allow people to live satisfying and meaningful lives should be among its central concerns. Happiness may be deeply personal, but the opportunity to pursue it is also profoundly political.
— J
References
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https://www.linkedin.com/posts/harvard-kennedy-school-of-government_we-can-eliminate-sources-of-unhappiness-activity-7508471882237509633-AQNz
De Neve, J.-E., Dugan, A., Kaats, M., & Prati, A. (2025). Sharing meals with others: How sharing meals supports happiness and social connections. In World Happiness Report 2025. University of Oxford, Wellbeing Research Centre.
https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/sharing-meals-with-others-how-sharing-meals-supports-happiness-and-social-connections/
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https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250515-the-worlds-five-happiest-cities-for-2025
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https://www.singstat.gov.sg/publication-resources/population-trends-2026
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https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
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