Look around in your city. What do you see? Are people happy? Do they have a place to live? All of them? Are animals and birds happy? Do they have clean air to breathe and water to drink? And what about trees and plants? How do they feel in your city? Look around.
Observe. Listen. And if you don’t like what you see, bring your box of crayons and let’s make the city of happiness. Happiness City is an invitation to examine the state of our cities and collectively dream and design for a better tomorrow. It challenges the norm of cities being made with expertise and dares to reimagine the act of city making with crayons and dignity for all.
Bhawna Jaimini is an urban practitioner, writer and mother of two cats. She received the Chevening scholarship in 2023 to pursue a masters in Sustainable Cities at King’s College London and is currently setting up the Centre for Urban Commons, a platform dedicated to creating more shared public spaces in Indian cities. She tries hard to balance cynicism with hope in her practice, and her book, Happiness City is a culmination of that struggle.
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​Deepa Balsavar has written and illustrated more than thirty books for children. As a consultant with UNICEF on the Meena Project in South Asia, Balsavar wrote scripts and trained animation houses in Bangladesh. She has also developed communication material on HIV/AIDS, sexuality and gender education, mental health, and women’s studies. Deepa’s illustrations for this book are a bit like the concept of Happiness City itself. Using collage work, watercolours, transparent inks and crayons, each image was layered to form the final pictures.
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