What does Happy Cities do?
Happy Cities is an urban planning, design, and research consultancy based in Vancouver and Halifax. We work with clients around the world to create happier, healthier and more inclusive communities.
We’re on a mission to create happier, healthier, more inclusive communities.
Our journey began with a question: If we understand the effect that urban design has on people’s feelings and behaviour, can we make cities happier? This question drove more than a decade of research, culminating in Charles Montgomery’s bestselling book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design.
Our team came together and founded Happy Cities, a planning, design, and research firm that would turn the lessons of that book into action. Today, we are a multi-disciplinary team of urban planners, architects, landscape designers, and engagement specialists—with people in Vancouver and Halifax. We are proud to be an award-winning B Corp and Living Wage employer.
What we do
Our team works with municipalities, health authorities, housing providers, universities, and more across the world. We conduct ground-breaking research on how to design housing, public space, and streets that nurture human health and happiness. We use clear metrics, design guidelines, and storytelling to translate this evidence into practice. And we collaborate with designers, researchers, and communities to create new tools for change—drawing from insights in psychology, neuroscience, public health, and more.
Through it all, we seek to balance insights from the science of wellbeing with wisdom from community members themselves. We know that happier cities reflect not just the evidence, but also the experiences and hopes of unique, diverse communities. And we believe that wellbeing comes not from a single, utopian vision, but from emergent complexities that make cities unique, wondrous and inviting.
Youth-focused engagement and street transformations in New Westminster, B.C. (Jared Korb / Happy Cities)
Happy Cities is a certified B Corporation and Living Wage employer
Our team works every day to support wellbeing for urban dwellers around the world, and we are deeply committed to building an organization that embodies that mission.
Territorial acknowledgment
Our team lives and works on the traditional territories of diverse Indigenous peoples and nations. We are based in two primary locations: Vancouver and Halifax. The City of Vancouver occupies the unceded territories the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. The City of Halifax is located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people.
We recognize that the urban planning profession has contributed to historic, ongoing, and systemic barriers through colonialism, and strive to be part of movements to correct these inequities. We are deeply grateful to Indigenous peoples and nations for caring for the lands and waters we live, work and learn on.