As I think I may have said before in this column, we urbanists think that the answer to any question is the walkable, mixed-use, reasonably dense city. Whether it be happiness and wellbeing, health, community, economic sustainability and mobility the answer is always the same.

We are right of course, but we do need to be careful not to jump to lazy conclusions. For all our talk of the “happy city”, for example, how do we explain that levels of mental illness are often much higher in cities?

This month when we came together as the Academy of Urbanism to discuss how cities, and housing in particular, need to respond to the zero carbon action plans being discussed at COP26, we were careful to show our workings.

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