Charles Montgomery remakes forcefully the urgent thesis that modern suburban life is bad for us

The pedestrianised centre of Copenhagen, example of a 'happy city', says Charles Montgomery. Photograph: Alamy

First you have to get past the title. Happy City. Ugh. Like Happy Feet: a heartwarming tale of emperor penguins – sorry, municipal leaders and town planners. Then you have to get past some gushing prose about the charismatic Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá.

After that, you begin to find a valuable book. Its argument is that sprawl, the growth of low-density, car-dependent suburbs that accounts for most new house building in many parts of the world, makes you unhappy. It isolates. It creates dissatisfaction. It drives your teenage children mad with boredom. It is bad for your health. It is bad for the planet, generating unsustainable levels of greenhouse gases.

Citing Aristotle, Montgomery defines happiness as not just the getting of pleasure, but about being an active member of society. "The most important psychological effect of the city is the way in which it moderates our relationships with other people," he says. More densely populated cities, which encourage people to travel on foot or by public transport, and offer mixtures of uses and housing types, create more opportunities for interaction, from the intimate to the casual.

The positive examples he cites include Vancouver, which has achieved a thriving, partly high-rise city, in which people of different levels of income live close together, with its streets animated by multiple activities. Jan Gehl, the Danish architect who led the pedestrianisation of Copenhagen, figures prominently. And there is the impossibly heroic Peñalosa, who radically reversed policies that favoured motor traffic, to promote cycling and buses and to invest in public buildings and spaces in the poorest parts of the city. Those dumb-ass gringos, goes the argument, spend all their money making themselves miserable, when they could be happy, vibrant street people instead.

This thesis is not new; it has been made by Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett, Richard Rogers and others for more than half a century. There is also a lineage of kicking back, of saying that people like suburbs, that includes Herbert Gans's The Levittowners of 1967, and Robert Bruegmann's 2005 book, Sprawl. Montgomery acknowledges these counter-arguments, though not perhaps as fully as he should. To describe sprawl, he unfairly chooses the very worst example he can find,Stockton, a place 60 miles from San Francisco, whose residents commonly spend four hours a day commuting and that, following the 2007 housing crash, has had the worst foreclosure rate of anywhere in the US outside Detroit.

He adduces studies that measure the amount of oxytocin or perspiration produced by different built environments – I'm no expert on such research but I suspect that it can be used to prove anything you like. But he points out, correctly, that sprawl is not some natural expression of people's desires, but something actively promoted by government and corporate policies, especially in America. His best statistics are his simplest: living in sprawl ages you by four years; there are four times as many traffic deaths on suburban roads as on city streets.

I also have a problem with the use of "happy" as the primary adjective for what cities should or can be. Such things as risk, anomie and conflict are intrinsic to cities, and without them we are indeed close to being the computer-animated penguins of the movie. Montgomery acknowledges this point, but not to the extent of changing the title of his book.

In the end, the main value of Happy City is not in saying something new, but in saying forcefully what can't be said too much. It is surely better, most of the time, for most people, to spend as little time as possible in cars and to increase the possibilities of encountering other people and new experiences. As places such as Stockton are still being built, books such as this one are still needed.

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