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explore in this book, our preferences—the things we buy, the places we choose to live—do not always maximize our happiness in the long run. Second, sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed .
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    How are we to judge the happy prescriptions of the city builders and citizens who came before us and now work among us? Does the detached suburban home really make its owners more independent and free? Did the democratic gathering spaces of ancient Athens really help lead the Greeks any closer to eudaimonia ? Do perfectly straight highways produce more feelings of freedom than narrow, winding roads? Can beautiful architecture lead us to a shared sense of optimism? Which of the high-minded schemes of the great city builders have actually produced more of the pleasurable feelings Jeremy Bentham called “hedons”? Does Enrique Peñalosa—or anyone else who promises happier design—have a leg to stand on?
    These questions take us all the way back to Socrates: What is happiness, really? Now is a great time to take another stab at defining it, because during the decades that the suburban project accelerated, a network of psychologists, brain scientists, and economists devoted themselves to the study of the subject that intrigued the Greeks, stumped the Enlightenment scholars, and provided fodder for those who design cities to this day.
    A Science of Happiness
    In the early 1990s the University of Wisconsin psychologist Richard Davidson attempted to isolate the sources of positive and negative feelings in the human brain. Doctors have long noticed that people with damage to the front left side of their brain (the left prefrontal cortex) sometimes, and quite suddenly, lose their sense of enjoyment in life. In this, Davidson saw a clue to the neuroscience of happiness. He attached electroencephalogram (EEG) monitor caps—which measure electrical activity—to the scalps of volunteers and then showed them short film clips designed to elicit either happiness and amusement or disgust. He found that the happy clips—say, of smiling babies—produced more activity in the left prefrontal region of his volunteers’ brains, while images of deformed infants activated the right prefrontal region. Those brains were offering up a map of feelings.
    Later, Davidson surveyed his volunteers on their feelings and then slid them, one by one, into a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. (fMRI machines map activity in the brain by tracking levels of blood oxygenation, which are revealed in varying levels of magnetism.) He found that people who claimed to be happy tended to have more blood flowing to that left prefrontal region than to the right side. In another study, researchers got people to rate and record their mood every twenty minutes during the workday and give blood samples every two hours. The worse people rated their own moods, the higher the concentrations of cortisol (the hormone most associated with stress and anxiety) were in their blood.
    These and scores of similar experiments in the past couple of decades have produced an insight that might seem intuitive, but which we had no way of proving until recently: if you want to gauge how happy people are, just ask them. * Most people who tell researchers they are happy are not only telling the truth but are right.
    This may not seem surprising. After all, most of us are pretty sure if we are happy or not. But these revelations refuted the classic tenet of economics: the assumption that only our purchasing decisions can truly reveal what makes us happy. Now economists and psychologists can use surveys to see how huge numbers of people are feeling, taking us one step closer to fulfilling Bentham’s dream of figuring out what it is that makes