Charles Montgomery is a journalist and urban experimentalist from Vancouver, Canada.
Montgomery has discovered a striking relationship between the design of our minds and the design of our cities, a concept he lays out in his forthcoming book Happy City. Montgomery’s writings on urban planning, psychology, culture, and history have appeared in magazines and journals on three continents. His first book, The Last Heathen (published internationally as The Shark God), won the 2005 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Among his numerous other awards is a Citation of Merit for outstanding contribution toward public understanding of climate change science from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Montgomery has used insights in happiness science to drive experiments that help citizens transform their relationships with each other and their cities. His Home for the Games initiative convinced hundreds of residents to open their homes to strangers during the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. His message is as surprising as it is hopeful: Doomsayers have warned that action to tackle the urgent challenges of climate change and energy scarcity will lead us into decades of hardship and sacrifice, but there is evidence to suggest the opposite—that the green city, the low-carbon city, and the happy city are exactly the same place.