City, equality, happiness

City, Equality, Happiness. It proposes that a good city seeks to devise and build forms of equality to ensure that no citizen feels inferior or excluded. Inequality is the main obstacle to happiness since it is produced by the market economy, adopted almost worldwide, from which large income differences come. Better cities foster the realization of human potential and civilized life.

The book reminds us that almost all the world's large cities are growing and that hundreds of them in the developing world will multiply several times their size over the coming decades. Since the city was originally designed to improve the way of living, this immediate future represents a unique opportunity to achieve better and happier ways of living. Urban quality is the most critical factor in contemporary economic competitiveness, which depends, more than on capital, on people who are exceptionally good at what they do, and who can choose where they live. This work addresses in detail some of the essential aspects to make a better city: the land where they are built, urban regulations, multimodal transportation, public space and platforms, water and parks, cycle routes, among many other aspects. And it concludes with a brief reference to the leadership required to build a city that promotes equality and happiness.

In this book Enrique Peñalosa summarizes all his urban planning knowledge with which he advises the great capitals of the world and reveals his main and original ideas to develop a better city.

Different authorities around the world who received the manuscript have given positive opinions about the book. Among them, Saskia Sassen, author of The Global City, from Columbia University, writes the following: “With this book, Enrique Peñalosa invites us to rethink a whole series of urban conditions. This text is an invitation to recognize that we have entered a new era. And although in complex systems, such as the big city, it is not easy to identify change, Peñalosa manages to detect it and propose large and small possibilities and innovations. This is a book that must be read.”

We are convinced that every mayor of cities in Colombia and in developing countries should have it as a guide and reference book and that its teachings and examples will also be very useful to its inhabitants to know what should be demanded of their rulers, in particular. city ​​terms.