The Bhutanese use four measures of GNH: 1) sustainable development, 2) cutlural values, 3) natural environment, and 4) good governance.

As you can see these are not individual measures so they would not be suitable for measuring whether our respective orange sellers are happy.

In asking my question I was attempting to find two comparable (environment) contextual (indivisual) orange sellers and a way of summising whether one was happier than the other.

Yes, I agree it would have been interesting (in a strange way) to go inside the walled city in Kowloon – but not at the risk of disappearing(!) – so I would have had to have toured after the residents had left and before demolition. Or maybe it would have been safe to enter and exit with a Chinese Hong Kong guide?

I did not know about Hong Kong’s walled city either but I think it was more like a fort than a traditional Chinese walled city. It has a nightmarish quality on the photograph but I rather regret its loss. It would have been a great thing for the world if Corb could have spent a couple of weeks there, preferably in his 20s. I can’t see it having put him off high-rise but it might have let him work out a way of ‘doing it better’.
The recent talk about planning for Gross National Happiness (instead of Gross National Product) came up against the problem that there are no agreed measures for GNH. My suggestion is to judge happiness from facial expressions – I think it probable that face recognition software could be developed for this purpose. There are many paintings of Georgian London but not enough, I fear, for the computer test to be applied.

I wonder what Corb would have thought? It certainly makes modernist highrises seem like super-sized condo’s in comparison.

An interesting study from MIT suggests city location and growth of cities depended to a large degree on the availabilty of modes of transportation, with transportation being usually either by river or sea (harbour). The critical factor was the movement of people and goods between cities and the hinterland regions.

Cairo (6 million) is certainly comparable to London (7 Million plus)in terms of population. Should we compare the happiness of the orangeseller in Georgian London (2 million) to your Egyptian family or to Tom Moggach who lives in London today?
[ http://www.newcoventgardenmarket.com/blog/fruit-vegetable-market-report-sep ]

I have had similar experiences with a back street in Cairo, where I used to watch a family of orange-sellers who lived in cardboard boxes, and looked wonderfully cheerful, and with the main street in Luxor.
Thank you for the list of walled cities – I have visited 8 of them and wish the world had kept more of its walled cities. In fact I am rather in favour of building more walled cities – to keep cars out and to keep the residents safe. They obviously would not be the first choice for everyone (!) but I think they would suit sufficient people to make their construction worthwhile. They would be super-sized-condos!

In the first instance in London green driveways could be incorporated into all new development precincts. It would be important to consider the character implications for wider implementation in other parts of suburban London.

In considering walkability understanding the nature of the city and the opportunities it offers residents, workers and visitors is important.
[ http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/what-makes-a-city-walkable.shtml ]

I have visited a few cities which contain within them old walled cities. These sites seem to be ideal places for gaining an understanding of walkability. [ http://www.touropia.com/walled-cities-in-the-world/ ] A good question to ask is when residents leave their city or people arrive at the city, how do they travel to get there?

Tom, perhaps you could also do a cyclists guide to walled cities?

Maybe, maybe. But I often think of a week in which I walked along a street in Egypt, looking at happy people with happy laughing faces, and then walked along a street in London, looking at unhappy, stressed, ashen faces. So I am doubtful about ‘development’ making people happy.
Yes, they should certainly make green driveways in London and elsewhere – but is this a responsibility of the owner or should it be enforced by law?
Protecting virgin sites is not so hard: you just ‘refrain’ from building roads! Still thinking about China, it is a great pity that they have built a coach road through the Chengde estate AND they refused permission for a man with a sore ankle (=me!) to take his small bicycle into the estate! I managed a very long walk, with several cameras, so why can’t everyone walk?

So there needs to be some way in which the development of my city doesn’t depend on the destruction of their forest. Not only is this justice, but it is also in everyone’s interest. It is quite likely that their forest is cleaning the air of all the carbon pollution from my city (now part of the global commons) and their river is cleaning all the toxins from South American cities further upstream.

Tom, perhaps continued innovation of the idea of the grassed driveway and other variants will provide a solution to the suburban front garden in London?
[ http://rolu.terapad.com/resources/648/assets/images/green%20driveway.jpg ]

As for those virgin sites [ http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7dOXTv38zKA/TAhh8g9x-BI/AAAAAAAAACQ/SVcCC6r8RHM/s1600/Plitvice-Lakes.jpg ] some sites, (for example these lakes in New Zealand) should only be accessible by extreme eco-tourism (which leaves no trace of human impact.) Other virgin sites which exist in cities [ http://vancouver.ca/images_aboutvan/cityscape.jpg ] require a sensitive balancing of natural and built attributes and an honest appraisal of whether as Jerry says 1 + 1 is much greater than 2.

Lawrence identifies THEY as the development industry. A few years ago we used to think THEY were the ‘military-industrial complex‘. I rather fear that THEY are you and me and everyone else. We want bigger homes, better hotels, more energy, more roads, more air travel, more products. So:
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

“They paved the paradise, and took all the trees’, who are they? They must be the persons who DESIGN the world- artificial world.

Urban designers? or even unqulified landscape architects? I think this song could put one main landscpate text books in the future, what is the main job of landscape architects, which could be known more clearly in this song, rather than a statment of goverment.

Yes, THEY do not know what WE have got!