Pavement-to-Plaza Wellbeing Assessment
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Can transforming underused roads into places for people improve resident wellbeing? During fall 2018, the City of Vancouver hired Happy City to assess its Pavement-to-Plaza program and find out. In September 2018, we surveyed over 700 Vancouverites at three places where road space had been replaced by plazas, as well as at three control sites. Participants answered our short, academically-validated subjective wellbeing assessment about the influences of the interventions on… Continue reading
Small scale interventions have become a popular way to enhance public life in cities. How do they influence our feelings and behaviour? This question inspired Happy City to create an experiment in Vancouver, Canada to measure the effect that colourful or lush interventions have on people’s wellbeing. In particular, the experiment sought to understand how urban design influences people’s sense of trust in strangers, their feelings of happiness and their… 
‘Rather than building out-of-town shopping malls, the 15-minute city would feature “hyper proximity,” with accessib… 