What is a Good Life? #182

Cities That Make Us Happier with Lior Steinberg

Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Lior Steinberg - urban planner, co-founder of Humankind and author of The Car That Wanted to Be a Bike. We explore why so many cities remain trapped in car-centric design decades after urbanist Jane Jacobs first warned against it. It is a thought-provoking conversation on how often change feels impossible until it is here.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

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1. My Weekly Reflection

It was 40°C for two days in a row here in Berlin the weekend before last. This conversation with Lior was recorded during the heatwave of that week.

Even by Irish standards, I have a strong aversion to the heat. People in my neighbourhood in Berlin, in winter, will often see me walk around in a T-shirt as temperatures approach freezing.

So, through those particular eyes, it is not very surprising that I felt I was pre-witnessing an end-of-days-type scenario.

My daughter and I went to my local ice-cream shop at one point, and even though we were under the shade of a parasol, my legs felt like they were being cooked from the heat of the concrete.

As we made our way home, I saw only a handful of pedestrians in the distance on what is usually a packed street, maybe mirages.

Indoors, our usually cool apartment didn’t dip under 30°C for that weekend. Lying around in my boxers and intermittently spraying my body with water became the norm.

Earlier that same week, when the temperatures were relatively more tolerable, in the mid-30s, I was cycling across the city. I was on the bike lane next to a busy road in the centre of Berlin. I could feel the beads of sweat roll down my back, the dryness in my mouth even though I was hydrated.

The heat pounding down from the sun, bouncing off the cars, up from the asphalt.

Then I cycled for a few seconds through a pocket of trees. The air cooled, the temperature dropped noticeably, and I could breathe more easily.

And then, after a few more rotations of my pedals, I was once more back into the concrete oven.

“There is no air-con that does such a good job. There is no technology that will make our cities cooler than planting trees.” - Lior Steinberg

It brought back to mind a vision I semi-regularly have of a major European city. To any reasonable eye, this is it; our existence here is coming to its end.

There is a red burning around us, bodies on the ground, people thirsty with no water in sight, and there is a man in a suit, holding a white board and a message above his head, urging us not to lose hope, to remain calm:

GDP is at 5%

If that day does come, it will be tragic, and absurd, that perhaps we could have just planted more trees and not cut so many down.

In the interview, Lior points to us being trapped in a car-centric system that prioritises the needs of cars over what helps humans flourish. Without humans at the centre of those designs, we experience loneliness even while surrounded by millions of people.

More widely, we prioritise accumulation over what we actually need.

We need air to breathe, yet we still contribute to deforestation and pour plastic into our waters and poison plankton - all to maintain economic edges. Logic and rationality left the building a long time ago, even though we still dress our decisions up in that language.

However, despite the failures that Lior has faced in what he promotes, he retains some hope for us. The cigarette ban in many public spaces is one of them. There was a time this would have seemed unthinkable - when we could smoke on planes, when Hollywood stars and footballers were promoting cigarettes on TV - and yet one day, you couldn’t even smoke in a bar.

The other source of hope - and this one comes at a terrible cost:

“Crisis will make us change our habits. We will not be able to continue to do things the way we do.” - Lior Steinberg

Crisis carries its own potency for us personally too.

Throughout all these interviews, one particular moment stays close to my mind. It is of a prisoner in a rehab and recovery wing, telling his fellow inmates about hitting rock bottom, saying that he just doesn’t know why he is here in this world. Then a young man, with little interest in recovery, suggested to him that the very thing he was doing was his reason or purpose in life.

Change can come in unexpected moments.

Another interview moment comes to mind. A man who smoked from his late teens to his early forties quit last year, and it was easier than he expected. It came from a conversation with his two youngest children. They were talking about the environment, about things people do that harm themselves. And they asked a very simple question: if you’re talking about that, why do you still smoke?

He didn’t have an answer. Something then simply shifted.

I remember quitting booze for a time when a psychologist initially mentioned it to me as a helpful part of the process while I was in therapy. I couldn’t imagine not drinking on St. Stephen’s Day (the day after Christmas) with my oldest friends. I recall even saying that out loud to her: “What about Stephen’s Day?” Like it was a reasonable objection to something that was causing more suffering in my life.

While I might have the odd glass of wine every few months now, the thought of a rake of pints would make me wince.

We are a strange creature. I have no moral to any of this. Mainly just confusion.

However, before you continue to berate yourself for all your self-help work not taking you to a disciplined utopia, or your mental understandings not playing out into changed life patterns, two things:

1. We live in systems that are getting in the way of simple necessary responses.

2. You have no idea when change is coming.

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2. This Week’s Questions

1. What is the most obvious, simple, and accessible thing you could regularly do to benefit your life that you are not presently doing?

2. Is there a radical change to make in your life that seems almost unimaginable to you right now?

Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

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4. Full Episode - Cities That Make Us Happier with Lior Steinberg - What is a Good Life? #182

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Lior Steinberg below.

For Apple podcast click here.

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About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.