Rob was single and had no kids, so five hundred square feet seemed quite enough, especially given the panoramic view from his floor-to-ceiling windows. He could see the ocean. He could see islands in the distance. He could look over the other towers to the forested slopes of the North Shore Mountains. When the fog rolled in, he floated above it. The place wrapped biophilic views, status, and privacy in a neat package.

In this excerpt, Montgomery finds truth in the old dictum, “good fences make good neighbors,” by looking at the case of Rob McDowell, a diplomat who bought a condominium on the 29th floor of the 501, a hip, design-heavy tower in Vancouver’s Yaletown district.

The following piece is from a new book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design , by journalist Charles Montgomery. It examines how cities shape not only our physical lives, but our mental and emotional wellbeing as well.

“I invited all my friends up there to see the view,” he told me later. “I was so happy.”

But that changed as the months went past.

Whenever McDowell left his apartment, he would follow a hallway he shared with twenty people to an elevator he shared with nearly three hundred people. When the elevator door opened, he could never be sure whom he would see inside, but they were almost never his own neighbors. Standing a foot or two apart, well within the zone of personal space and unable to control the duration of the encounter, McDowell and his neighbors would studiously avoid eye contact, gazing up instead at the LED floor display. Like Baum’s dorm residents, McDowell felt increasingly claustrophobic. His view was no salve for solitude. “You go up the elevator, into your apartment, the door closes, and there you are, stuck alone with your beautiful view,” he said. “I began to resent it.”

McDowell’s Vancouverist tower, so successful in delivering views of nature and a sense of status, was falling short as a social tool. This became clear when his life suddenly changed course.

You go up the elevator, into your apartment, the door closes, and there you are, stuck alone with your beautiful view.

The city had forced the 501’s developer to build a row of town houses along the podium base of McDowell’s tower. The townhouses were a bit cramped, but their main doors all faced a garden and a volleyball court on the building’s third-story rooftop. McDowell noticed that the town house residents regularly played volleyball in the garden. He and his tower-living neighbors had every right to join in, but they never did. It was as though, by their proximity, the town house residents owned that space.

After some friends moved into the town houses, McDowell gave up his view and bought a unit next to them. Within weeks his social landscape was transformed. He got to know all his new neighbors. He joined in the weekend cocktail and volleyball sessions in the shared garden. He felt as if he had come home.