What we do
Happy Cities offers services in urban planning, design, research, engagement, and communications. Our work falls under three core areas: community planning, public space, and housing.
Community planning
Neighbourhoods can be designed to make it easy for everyone to live a healthy life. We craft area plans, zoning, and policies that maximize health, happiness, and inclusion in new and existing communities. Our unique planning process combines best practice with deep engagement, ensuring that outcomes support wellbeing for diverse community members.
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We harness evidence, engagement, and design excellence to create communities that maximize human health and wellbeing.
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We craft long-term plans and zoning that enable human-scaled, resilient, mixed-use places. We balance community priorities with technical analysis and best practices to develop practical guidelines for healthy, thriving communities.
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We help cities transform suburban areas into transit-oriented, walkable places. We develop practical action plans for establishing a critical mass of street life and pedestrian-friendly development in one great place, ensuring economic viability while creating a place people can believe in
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We help clients craft policies and strategies that promote wellbeing through strategic investments in social infrastructure. We help you map community assets, assess current policy, quantify the value of social infrastructure, and create frameworks to maximize the value of social investments for equitable wellbeing outcomes.
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Our community assessment tool measures the capacity of a neighbourhood’s design to support wellbeing. We identify recommendations and design strategies to boost long-term health and happiness for diverse residents.
Public space design
Streets and public spaces can inspire human connection. Our innovative research, design guidelines, and co-creative placemaking approaches ensure that everyone feels safe and welcome in urban spaces. We combine urban design with deep engagement to co-create design solutions that bring plazas, parks, streets, and other public spaces to life.
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We work with municipalities, BIAs, and community groups to activate downtowns and main streets through strategic placemaking, programming, and policy.
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We craft public realm and community design guidelines for new and existing mixed-use communities.
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Main streets are the social and economic heart of any community, but many have suffered through years of disinvestment and car-oriented planning. We work with municipalities to help transform main streets into vibrant destinations, through active transportation recommendations, public realm design, and suburban retrofit strategies.
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From school street murals to international events, we work with cities, BIAs, community groups, and local residents to activate shared spaces and while strengthening community pride and ownership.
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We create accessibility plans and conduct audits for municipal clients, developers, and more, centering the voices of people with lived experience. Our team includes Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certified professionals.
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Our award-winning public life studies reveal how people move, feel and behave in public realms. Our innovative experiments generate unique insights and impactful stories. We use these tools to boost wellbeing, equity and place value.
Housing policy
The crises of social isolation and housing affordability can be solved together. We work with municipalities, developers, health authorities, and non-profit housing providers to enable housing that boosts social connection, health, and resilience for people of all ages, incomes, and backgrounds.
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We work with municipalities to craft actionable policies that harness the most effective strategies for enabling housing that strengthens community wellbeing and affordability. We help clients overcome design, policy, and social barriers to ensure that happier homes can become a reality.
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We leverage more than 15 years of research on how housing design and programming impact social wellbeing. We translate this evidence to help clients design and enable happier, healthier and more resilient multi-family housing. Our Building Social Connections toolkit synthesizes these learnings for a broad audience.
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We offer design principles and implementation strategies that maximize the value of your land for the community. From the visioning stage to implementation, we help clients build homes and community spaces that boost wellbeing for everyone.
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We help you maximize the value of your land for your community, offering analysis to identify a site’s highest and best uses, efficient and buildable layouts, and financial feasibility of proposed buildings. We develop site plans and offer design guidelines to maximize social connection for future residents and the wider community.
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We conduct research and engagement with residents to assess how building design influences social connection, health, and satisfaction among building users. Our post-occupancy studies generate insightful learnings and practical recommendations for cities, architects, developers, and more to improve the quality of residential, community, and commercial facilities for years to come.
Co-design workshop for Belmont Plaza, New Westminster.
The Happy Cities approach
Our work combines deep engagement with the science of wellbeing to build happier, healthier, more inclusive places. Throughout all of our core service areas, we integrate original research and meaningful engagement to identify the best solutions for a given context. We offer engagement, research, and communications services as part of our planning and design practice, while maintaining our core focus on communities, public space, and housing.
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Too many people have been left out of planning decisions for too long. We create unique engagement activities that reward people for their participation. We identify less-heard communities and meet them where they’re at. And we share the stories that matter through video, text and other media.
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We craft eye-catching graphics, clear messaging, and compelling stories that illuminate the connections between wellbeing and urban design. We help clients engage local residents in the changes happening in their communities, translating complex policy and research into formats that are easy to understand.
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We generate original research exploring how the design of public spaces, neighbourhoods, and homes impact human wellbeing. Our team is skilled in qualitative and quantitative research methods, collaborating with academic researchers and industry professionals to bridge the gap between research and practice.
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We never stop learning about how cities can improve wellbeing and equity. We share insights from our research and experimentation through presentations, workshops, and publications and help you apply these tools in your own work.