Is your city making you sad? People in some of North America’s wealthiest cities report being the most miserable. We have fewer friends, less spare time and more heart attacks than ever. We don’t trust our neighbours as much. Our kids are fatter and grumpier. We are not the people we wish we were. New discoveries in brain science and psychology suggest that the shape of our cities—our homes, our neighborhoods, even the streets we use—may be partly to blame. Cities can tinker with our well-being by altering the way we move, socialize and regard strangers. They can be machines for happiness or, if we ignore their power, misery.

Happy City will reveal the striking relationship between the design of our minds and the design of the places where we live. It will show readers the hidden power that their homes, their neighborhoods and their cities have to influence how they feel. Like his award-winning first book, The Last Heathen (published internationally as The Shark God), this story will weave together rich characters, science and stories in pursuit of a life-changing idea, this time leading readers from the seething streets of Bogotá, through the laboratories of neuroscience and the minds of their evolutionary forebears, right back to their own doorsteps.