Architecture and city design are some of the most important factors to generating happiness and fostering connectivity in a community, according to this year’s UCSB Reads book author.

“We don’t need to build new cities,” said Charles Montgomery, “We need to do better with cities that have good bones like Santa Barbara.”

On the UC Santa Barbara campus, community members and students alike filled the Campbell Hall auditorium to hear Montgomery, author of “Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design,” give a presentation about how city planning dictates residents’ well-being.

This year marks the 17th annual UCSB Reads winner, where UCSB students, faculty, staff, and partners in the community vote to recognize one book that speaks to a complex topic and can be incorporated into the school’s curriculum.

Montgomery is an urbanist from Canada and has been working for around 10 years on building cities that focus on increasing happiness.

“All of us have a hit of oxytocin after having a positive encounter,” Montgomery said. “Even introverts feel a bit better after.”

To stress this point, Montgomery got the audience to participate in a short game. Participants had to speak with someone they didn’t know, but act as though they were long-time friends who haven’t reconnected since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many participants noted feeling better afterwards. Montgomery stressed that in order to create more happiness, cities need to be built to enable more social interaction.

Montgomery cited an experiment he conducted where people were given a wristband that tracked their location and their amount of arousal. According to him, people were happiest and spent the most time in jumbled tenement blocks.

Street corners with slow turns and more store-front businesses give people “reasons to slow down and talk to each other,” Montgomery said. “This is why your State Street is such a treasure.”

Montgomery pointed out that there is still much that needs to be done in Santa Barbara. He asks if it’s more important to build parking structures for cars or houses for the people in the community.

In order to create change, Montgomery suggests asking for policy changes and speaking to local planning commissions, which make decisions on planning policy and specific project proposals.

“(Communities) are malleable, like putty in our hands,” Montgomery said.

Read more about the UCSB Reads program here.

The UCSB Library is accepting suggestions for the 2024 UCSB Reads book here.