Happy City by Charles Montgomery
Published 2013 · 400 pages · 95,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Arts & Culture, Nonfiction, Psychology
How hard is Happy City to read?
Happy City scores 18 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 25 out of 100
- Accessible vocabulary. Urban planning concepts explained clearly.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- Research and theory grounded in specific cities and stories.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Rich with research, case studies, and neuroscience.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- City-by-city case studies building a thesis.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- The city as happiness machine or misery generator.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Suburbs built for the good life produce the opposite.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Montgomery provides clear models: Bogota, Copenhagen, Portland.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Thematic chapters organized around design principles.
How Happy City is regarded
Happy City holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.