Happy City
The City Has Always Been a Happiness Project
Where the Athenian philosophers had championed the spiritual life of the polis, the Romans gradually came to be disgusted by city life. Rome’s greatest poet, Horace, fantasized about returning to a simple farming existence. Foreshadowing a twentieth-century trend, the patrician elite retreated to their villas in the countryside or on the Bay of Naples.
Happiness, as expressed in philosophy and architecture, has always been a tug-of-war between earthly needs and transcendent hopes, between private pleasures and public goods.
...early economists seized on Bentham’s concept of utility, but they cleverly reduced his felicific calculus to something they could actually count. They could not measure pleasure or pain. They could not add up virtuous action or good health or long life or pleasant feelings. What they could measure was money and our decisions about how to spend it, so they substituted purchasing power for utility.
As long as economic numbers grew, economists insisted that life was getting better and people were getting happier. Under this peculiar analysis, our estimation of well-being is actually inflated by divorces, car crashes, and wars, as long as those calamities produce new spending on goods and services.
The market economist’s case for suburban sprawl goes like this: if you can judge what makes people happy by observing how they spend their money, then the fact that so many people have purchased detached homes in urban sprawl is proof that it leads to happiness.
...sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed.
As long as economic numbers grew, economists insisted that life was getting better and people were getting happier. Under this peculiar analysis, our estimation of well-being is actually inflated by divorces, car crashes, and wars, as long as those calamities produce new spending on goods and services.
The market economist’s case for suburban sprawl goes like this: if you can judge what makes people happy by observing how they spend their money, then the fact that so many people have purchased detached homes in urban sprawl is proof that it leads to happiness.
...sprawl, as an urban form, was laid out, massively subsidized, and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there. It is as much the result of zoning, legislation, and lobbying as a crowded city block. It did not occur naturally. It was designed.
The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness. The good city should be measured not only by its distractions and amenities but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work, and meaning.
- The city should strive to maximize joy and minimize hardship.
- It should lead us toward health rather than sickness.
- It should offer us real freedom to live, move, and build our lives as we wish.
- It should build resilience against economic or environmental shocks.
- It should be fair in the way it apportions space, services, mobility, joys, hardships, and costs.
- Most of all, it should enable us to build and strengthen the bonds between friends, families, and strangers that give life meaning, bonds that represent the city’s greatest achievement and opportunity.
- The city that acknowledges and celebrates our common fate, that opens doors to empathy and cooperation, will help us tackle the great challenges of this century.
How We Got Here
Zoning was intended to reduce congestion, improve health, and make business more efficient. But most of all, it protected property values. Perhaps this is why we so enthusiastically embraced it.
So-called exclusionary zoning, which on the surface bans only certain kinds of buildings and functions from a neighborhood, served the deeper purpose of excluding people who fall beneath a certain income bracket.
Together, these rules and habits have ensured that the American city is as separated and as static as any Soviet-era housing scheme. They have ensured that first-generation suburbs closer to downtowns do not grow more diverse or dense. They have pushed new development out to the ever-expanding urban fringe and beyond.
At first, all levels of society banded together to protect the shared street. Police, politicians, newspaper editors, and parents all fought to regulate automobile access, ban curbside parking, and, most of all, limit speeds to ten miles per hour.
Cities, like many systems, are prone to a phenomenon known as autopoiesis, which can be compared to a viruslike process of entrenchment, replication, and expansion.
So-called exclusionary zoning, which on the surface bans only certain kinds of buildings and functions from a neighborhood, served the deeper purpose of excluding people who fall beneath a certain income bracket.
Together, these rules and habits have ensured that the American city is as separated and as static as any Soviet-era housing scheme. They have ensured that first-generation suburbs closer to downtowns do not grow more diverse or dense. They have pushed new development out to the ever-expanding urban fringe and beyond.
At first, all levels of society banded together to protect the shared street. Police, politicians, newspaper editors, and parents all fought to regulate automobile access, ban curbside parking, and, most of all, limit speeds to ten miles per hour.
Cities, like many systems, are prone to a phenomenon known as autopoiesis, which can be compared to a viruslike process of entrenchment, replication, and expansion.
Getting It Wrong
However, it is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house because the house is exactly the same size every time we come in the front door. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery, with different people honking at us, different intersections jammed with accidents, different problems with weather, and so on.
...we consistently make decisions that suggest we are not so good at distinguishing between ephemeral and lasting pleasures.
they put far too much weight on obvious differences between residences, such as location and architectural features, and far too little on things that were not so glaringly different, such as the sense of community and the quality of relationships they would develop in their dormitory. [Study, Location, Location, Location: The Misprediction of Satisfaction in Housing Lotteries].
Snobbery? Not necessarily. Architects’ brains may be physically altered by the act of studying and reading about the philosophy of building. ... When a typical architect was asked to rate a building, her medial orbitofrontal cortex (a part of the brain that helps measure how much reward we’ll get from decisions) lit up much brighter than the same region in the nonexpert's brain.
The mere sight of a can emblazoned with the Coke label activated volunteers’ hippocampi more than the act of actually sipping the cola, and this caused people to prefer its taste. ... The point here is that exposure to cultural information can change the way our brains function, dredging up images and feelings that alter the way we experience things.
they put far too much weight on obvious differences between residences, such as location and architectural features, and far too little on things that were not so glaringly different, such as the sense of community and the quality of relationships they would develop in their dormitory. [Study, Location, Location, Location: The Misprediction of Satisfaction in Housing Lotteries].
Snobbery? Not necessarily. Architects’ brains may be physically altered by the act of studying and reading about the philosophy of building. ... When a typical architect was asked to rate a building, her medial orbitofrontal cortex (a part of the brain that helps measure how much reward we’ll get from decisions) lit up much brighter than the same region in the nonexpert's brain.
The mere sight of a can emblazoned with the Coke label activated volunteers’ hippocampi more than the act of actually sipping the cola, and this caused people to prefer its taste. ... The point here is that exposure to cultural information can change the way our brains function, dredging up images and feelings that alter the way we experience things.
An especially common trap is the tendency to simplify multifaceted problems. The world is wildly complex, and humans have always relied on simplification, metaphor, and story to make sense of it. ... It is difficult for us to conceive of in-between states, complex arrangements, or overlapping patterns, even though our lives are full of them. ... Cities are especially full of contradictions, especially when you consider the complexity inherent in places that mix living, working, shopping, recreation, and other functions.
We drive as fast as road designs tell us to drive. The result: drivers kill four times as many pedestrians on spacious suburban residential streets than on the narrow streets of traditional neighborhoods, because those spacious roads make driving faster feel safer. And it is not collisions that kill people, but collisions at high speed.
How to Be Closer
We are torn between competing needs. None are more contradictory than the push-pull between proximity and isolation. In some ways our needs are at war with each other. We need the nourishing, helping warmth of other people, but we also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but we also need to retreat. We benefit from the conveniences of proximity, but these conveniences can come with the price of overstimulation and crowding. We will not solve the conundrum of sustainable city living unless we understand these contradictory forces and resolve the tension between them. How much space, privacy, and distance from other people do we need? How much nature do we need? Are there designs that combine the benefits of dispersal with the dividends of proximity?
The evidence suggests that to get closer to one another, we need a little more distance from one another, and a little more nature—but not too much, and not the sort of nature we might think we need.
The less green the environment, the higher the rate of assault, battery, robbery, and murder. This is especially remarkable given the fact that criminologists have pointed out that bushes and trees provide convenient cover for illicit activity.
Nature is not merely good for us. It brings out the good in us.
It turns out that the happiness paradox—that gulf between what we choose and what is good for us—even extends to landscapes.
... such work suggests that sterile lawns and token trees might be hollow calories for the nature-craving brain.
As Gil Peñalosa once put it: cities need green in sizes S, M, L, and XL.
Underperforming or unused transportation infrastructures are fine terrain for biophilic retrofits. [High Line, East Bay Bike Path]
If we infuse cities with natural diversity, complexity, and, most of all, opportunities to feel, touch, and work with nature, we can win the biophilic challenge. Quite simply, biological density must be the prerequisite for architectural density.
... the sheer crowdedness of cities creates so much stimulus that residents have to shut out the noise and objects and people around them in order to cope. City life, Milgram felt, demands a kind of aloofness and distance, so that crowding, while pushing us together physically, actually pushes us apart socially.
People who live in residential towers, for example, consistently tell psychologists that they feel lonely and crowded by other people at the very same time.
Crowding is a problem of perception, and it is a problem of design that can be addressed, at least in part, by understanding the subtle physics of sociability. ... First of all, it is critical to understand that human density and crowding are not the same thing. The first is a physical state. The second is psychological and subjective.
The less green the environment, the higher the rate of assault, battery, robbery, and murder. This is especially remarkable given the fact that criminologists have pointed out that bushes and trees provide convenient cover for illicit activity.
Nature is not merely good for us. It brings out the good in us.
It turns out that the happiness paradox—that gulf between what we choose and what is good for us—even extends to landscapes.
... such work suggests that sterile lawns and token trees might be hollow calories for the nature-craving brain.
As Gil Peñalosa once put it: cities need green in sizes S, M, L, and XL.
Underperforming or unused transportation infrastructures are fine terrain for biophilic retrofits. [High Line, East Bay Bike Path]
If we infuse cities with natural diversity, complexity, and, most of all, opportunities to feel, touch, and work with nature, we can win the biophilic challenge. Quite simply, biological density must be the prerequisite for architectural density.
... the sheer crowdedness of cities creates so much stimulus that residents have to shut out the noise and objects and people around them in order to cope. City life, Milgram felt, demands a kind of aloofness and distance, so that crowding, while pushing us together physically, actually pushes us apart socially.
People who live in residential towers, for example, consistently tell psychologists that they feel lonely and crowded by other people at the very same time.
Crowding is a problem of perception, and it is a problem of design that can be addressed, at least in part, by understanding the subtle physics of sociability. ... First of all, it is critical to understand that human density and crowding are not the same thing. The first is a physical state. The second is psychological and subjective.
We tolerate other people more when we know we can escape them.
Life’s lighter, breezier relationships soothe and reassure us, specifically because of their lightness.
Your social life must be scheduled and formal. Serendipity disappears in the time eaten up by the commute and in that space between car windshields and garage doors. On the other hand, life in places that feel too crowded to control can leave us so overstimulated and exhausted that we retreat into solitude. Either way, we miss out on the wider range of relationships that can make life richer and easier.
The geometries of conviviality are not simple. We cannot be forced together. The richest social environments are those in which we feel free to edge closer together or move apart as we wish. They scale not abruptly but gradually, from private realm to semiprivate to public; from bedroom to parlor to porch to neighborhood to city, something most tower designers have yet to achieve.
As it turned out, the geometry of profit also created a near-perfect scale for happy living. Market streets were lively and bustling, while the residential streets behind them were quiet and leafy. Most people got their own house and yard. There were porches rather than front garages, so people could keep their eyes on the street. Kids had the freedom to walk to school. Without modern suburbia’s massive yards, wide roads, and strict segregation of uses, almost everything you needed was a five-minute walk or a brief streetcar ride away. In the streetcar city, greed helped produce density’s sweet spot.
Your social life must be scheduled and formal. Serendipity disappears in the time eaten up by the commute and in that space between car windshields and garage doors. On the other hand, life in places that feel too crowded to control can leave us so overstimulated and exhausted that we retreat into solitude. Either way, we miss out on the wider range of relationships that can make life richer and easier.
The geometries of conviviality are not simple. We cannot be forced together. The richest social environments are those in which we feel free to edge closer together or move apart as we wish. They scale not abruptly but gradually, from private realm to semiprivate to public; from bedroom to parlor to porch to neighborhood to city, something most tower designers have yet to achieve.
As it turned out, the geometry of profit also created a near-perfect scale for happy living. Market streets were lively and bustling, while the residential streets behind them were quiet and leafy. Most people got their own house and yard. There were porches rather than front garages, so people could keep their eyes on the street. Kids had the freedom to walk to school. Without modern suburbia’s massive yards, wide roads, and strict segregation of uses, almost everything you needed was a five-minute walk or a brief streetcar ride away. In the streetcar city, greed helped produce density’s sweet spot.
The geometry of the neighborhood rewrote the pattern of my movements, the pace of my days, and the rhythm of my social world.
Convivialities
What brought the people out? Gehl watched, scribbled down every movement to find out. When the city added a new bench, Gehl counted the people who came and lingered. The benches told a story. A bench facing the passing crowds got ten times as much use as a bench that faced a flower bed. He also noticed that more people gathered on the edges of construction sites than in front of department store display windows. But as soon as the construction crews went home, the audience dispersed. “They were much more interested in watching people doing things than watching flowers or fashion,” he noted. His conclusion seems obvious, and yet it was revolutionary at the time: “What is most attractive, what attracts people to stop and linger and look, will invariably be other people. Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities.”
In effect, Gehl was doing for human traffic what traffic engineers had once done only for cars. His studies made pedestrians visible to planners for the first time.
Many of those people came not because of previous plans for shopping or business, but simply because there were so many other people to see. Things were happening, so more things happened.
We enjoy hovering in the zone somewhere between strangers and intimates. We want the opportunity to watch and be watched, even if we have no intention of ever actually making contact with one another.
We have gotten so good at privatizing our comforts, our leisure time, and our communication that urban life gets scoured of time with people who are not already colleagues, family, or close friends.
As more and more of us live alone, these conveniences have helped produce a historically unique way of living, in which home is not so much a gathering place as a vortex of isolation.
In effect, Gehl was doing for human traffic what traffic engineers had once done only for cars. His studies made pedestrians visible to planners for the first time.
Many of those people came not because of previous plans for shopping or business, but simply because there were so many other people to see. Things were happening, so more things happened.
We enjoy hovering in the zone somewhere between strangers and intimates. We want the opportunity to watch and be watched, even if we have no intention of ever actually making contact with one another.
We have gotten so good at privatizing our comforts, our leisure time, and our communication that urban life gets scoured of time with people who are not already colleagues, family, or close friends.
As more and more of us live alone, these conveniences have helped produce a historically unique way of living, in which home is not so much a gathering place as a vortex of isolation.
Seniors who live among long stretches of dead frontage have actually been found to age more quickly than those who live on blocks with plenty of doors, windows, porch stoops, and destinations. Because supersize architecture and blank stretches of sidewalk push their daily destinations beyond walking distance, they get weaker and slower, they socialize less outside the home, and they volunteer less.
It was acceptable to have people pause and gape at the architecture. It was not acceptable for them to get too comfortable.
Human bones have evolved to withstand impact with hard surfaces up to a speed of about twenty miles per hour, which is faster than a reasonably fit person can run. So it is natural to get anxious when confronted with hard objects moving faster than that. Add a bunch of fast-moving objects to a space and make those objects big enough to pose a salient danger, and we get even more uncomfortable. Make those objects unpredictable and noisy, and you have created a perfect storm of stimulus to preoccupy anyone who might enter that space without the benefit of his own protective shell. Yet this is the condition we have designed into most modern city streets.
Human bones have evolved to withstand impact with hard surfaces up to a speed of about twenty miles per hour, which is faster than a reasonably fit person can run. So it is natural to get anxious when confronted with hard objects moving faster than that. Add a bunch of fast-moving objects to a space and make those objects big enough to pose a salient danger, and we get even more uncomfortable. Make those objects unpredictable and noisy, and you have created a perfect storm of stimulus to preoccupy anyone who might enter that space without the benefit of his own protective shell. Yet this is the condition we have designed into most modern city streets.
But traffic’s social corrosion also stems from the noise it produces. We are less likely to talk to one another when it is noisy. We end conversations sooner. We are more likely to disagree, to become agitated, and to fight with the people we are talking to. We are much less likely to help strangers. We become less patient, less generous, less helpful, and less social, no matter how detailed and inviting the street edge might be.
Mobilicities I: How Moving Feels, and Why It Does Not Feel Better
It can be thrilling in the short term, but if you bathe in these hormones for too long, they can be toxic. Your immune system will be compromised, your blood vessels and bones will weaken, and your brain cells will begin to die off from the stress. Chronic road rage can actually alter the shape of the amygdalae, the brain’s almond-shaped fear centers, and kill cells in the hippocampus.
One stress-medicine specialist, Dr. John Larson, reported that many of his heart attack patients had one thing in common: shortly before their hearts gave out, they had been enraged while driving.
One stress-medicine specialist, Dr. John Larson, reported that many of his heart attack patients had one thing in common: shortly before their hearts gave out, they had been enraged while driving.
Why would traveling more slowly and using more effort offer more satisfaction than driving? Part of the answer exists in basic human physiology. We were born to move—not merely to be transported, but to use our bodies to propel us across the landscape. Our genetic forebears have been walking for four million years.
This is a troubling state of affairs, given that immobility is to the human body what rust is to the classic car. Stop moving long enough, and your muscles will atrophy. Bones will weaken. Blood will clot. You will find it harder to concentrate and solve problems. Immobility is not merely a state closer to death: it hastens it. Just spending too much time sitting shortens your life span.
Less than a year after the LYNX commuter light-rail line was installed in Charlotte, North Carolina, people living near the line had started walking an extra 1.2 miles every day because the system changed their daily calculus. People who switched to the LYNX for their commute lost an average of six and a half pounds during that time.
Aesthetics matter. We walk farther when streets feel safe and interesting. People who live in central New York or London typically walk between a third to a half mile to go shopping. That’s a four-to ten-minute stroll. Even in Montreal, with its freezing winters and sweat-soaked summers, people reported walking about a third of a mile (six to eight minutes) between shops, bags in tow. The numbers are almost as high for people arriving at enclosed shopping malls, which mimic the downtown experience, at least once you’re in the building. But dump us in a vast parking lot surrounded by big-box outlets, and our inclination to walk evaporates. Even when people are equipped with shopping carts, they won’t endure so much as the three-minute stroll between retailers. Researchers observed that a third of the shoppers at one Canadian power center actually parked their cars three or more times during one visit. They just hated trudging across the asphalt desert. It felt ugly, uncomfortable, and unsafe.
The problem is that the vehicular cyclist is almost as rare a creature as economic man. Most people are simply too scared to ride bicycles in traffic. This fear is entirely logical. Nearly half of people struck by cars moving at thirty miles per hour die, and the mortality rate just keeps going up with velocity. Some say the bicycle helmet is a solution to this reasonable fear. They are dead wrong.
Ian Walker, an English traffic psychologist, put his body on the line to make this discovery. Walker fitted his bicycle with an ultrasonic distance sensor, then pedaled around the English cities of Salisbury and Bristol to see how close motorists would come when overtaking him. He found that drivers were twice as likely to come dangerously close when he was wearing a helmet. In fact, Walker was struck by a bus and, later, a truck, during the course of the experiment.
Bus riders have it the worst. They are generally forced to endure the congestion caused by car drivers, but unlike drivers, they have almost no control over their fate. They experience the stress of uncertainty with every minute of waiting by the side of the road and with every transfer, not to mention the discomfort that comes with unmediated social proximity. There is nothing quite like the beer breath, scowl, or touch of a total stranger to get you thinking about purchasing a car.
Aesthetics matter. We walk farther when streets feel safe and interesting. People who live in central New York or London typically walk between a third to a half mile to go shopping. That’s a four-to ten-minute stroll. Even in Montreal, with its freezing winters and sweat-soaked summers, people reported walking about a third of a mile (six to eight minutes) between shops, bags in tow. The numbers are almost as high for people arriving at enclosed shopping malls, which mimic the downtown experience, at least once you’re in the building. But dump us in a vast parking lot surrounded by big-box outlets, and our inclination to walk evaporates. Even when people are equipped with shopping carts, they won’t endure so much as the three-minute stroll between retailers. Researchers observed that a third of the shoppers at one Canadian power center actually parked their cars three or more times during one visit. They just hated trudging across the asphalt desert. It felt ugly, uncomfortable, and unsafe.
The problem is that the vehicular cyclist is almost as rare a creature as economic man. Most people are simply too scared to ride bicycles in traffic. This fear is entirely logical. Nearly half of people struck by cars moving at thirty miles per hour die, and the mortality rate just keeps going up with velocity. Some say the bicycle helmet is a solution to this reasonable fear. They are dead wrong.
Ian Walker, an English traffic psychologist, put his body on the line to make this discovery. Walker fitted his bicycle with an ultrasonic distance sensor, then pedaled around the English cities of Salisbury and Bristol to see how close motorists would come when overtaking him. He found that drivers were twice as likely to come dangerously close when he was wearing a helmet. In fact, Walker was struck by a bus and, later, a truck, during the course of the experiment.
Bus riders have it the worst. They are generally forced to endure the congestion caused by car drivers, but unlike drivers, they have almost no control over their fate. They experience the stress of uncertainty with every minute of waiting by the side of the road and with every transfer, not to mention the discomfort that comes with unmediated social proximity. There is nothing quite like the beer breath, scowl, or touch of a total stranger to get you thinking about purchasing a car.
Planner Jeffrey Tumlin, author of Sustainable Transportation Planning, told me that administrators typically choose the most utilitarian-looking materials for bus interiors and stations—even when attractive finishes are no more expensive—simply to avoid the appearance of having wasted money. The result are systems that repel wealthier commuters and depress those who have little choice.
Mobilicities II: Freedom
“The future was not going to be defined by some kind of deus ex machina solution to all of our problems, but rather by step-by-step innovations and improvements applied to the tools we already had to work with.”
To depend on just one technology for urban mobility would be to deny human nature itself. Each of us has a unique set of abilities, weaknesses, and desires. Each of us is compelled and thrilled by a unique set of sensations. Every trip demands a unique solution.
...heteroscedasticity. It suggests that the bigger the size of any group, the harder it is to predict the variation in its characteristics or to find one solution to a problem involving huge numbers of independent variables and actors. “What heteroscedasticity tells us is that everything in cities is going to be a little bit complicated, a bit chaotic,” said Britton. “So the first thing you have to do is say, ‘ Okay, I gotta be able to deal with chaos. There is no single answer to any problem in the city. The solution comes from a multiplicity of answers.’”
...heteroscedasticity. It suggests that the bigger the size of any group, the harder it is to predict the variation in its characteristics or to find one solution to a problem involving huge numbers of independent variables and actors. “What heteroscedasticity tells us is that everything in cities is going to be a little bit complicated, a bit chaotic,” said Britton. “So the first thing you have to do is say, ‘ Okay, I gotta be able to deal with chaos. There is no single answer to any problem in the city. The solution comes from a multiplicity of answers.’”
But merely banning cars, Britton admits, is just as simplistic as depending on them entirely.
Britton suggested giving everyone in Paris a magic card that would automatically allow them passage on the Métro, trains, and buses. Just as proponents of Motordom once worked to reduce the friction of city roads that slowed cars down in the 1920s, Britton reasoned that by reducing friction and hassle, public transit would become a little more like driving. ... Within a couple of years, Paris introduced the Carte d’Orange, a combination subway pass and identity card that gave its holder unlimited access to all of the city’s public transportation for a flat monthly rate. The system did not make rides much faster or cheaper, but it chipped away at the anxiety and effort associated with each transit trip. No more fumbling for change or waiting in line for surly ticket agents. Within a year, bus ridership jumped by 40 percent.
Inaction has a warping effect on time: a minute spent waiting seems to pass much more slowly than a minute spent moving.
So most transportation planners agree that a bus needs to show up at least every fifteen minutes on any route for people nearby to use it effortlessly—i.e., without feeling as though they need to plan ahead.
Anyone who has ever stood at a bus stop in the rain or on a train platform, peering into the distance for headlights that refuse to appear, knows that the anxiety produced by delayed service has a very long tail.
Inaction has a warping effect on time: a minute spent waiting seems to pass much more slowly than a minute spent moving.
So most transportation planners agree that a bus needs to show up at least every fifteen minutes on any route for people nearby to use it effortlessly—i.e., without feeling as though they need to plan ahead.
Anyone who has ever stood at a bus stop in the rain or on a train platform, peering into the distance for headlights that refuse to appear, knows that the anxiety produced by delayed service has a very long tail.
But simply getting more information about the journey can speed the clock back up again. Take the express bus station on Boulevard du Montparnasse, just a couple of blocks from Britton’s apartment. There’s a covered seating area, but also a prominent screen at the entrance, showing exactly when the next two express buses will arrive. This subtle change in infrastructure is a powerful psychological intervention. Just having access to real-time arrival data causes riders to feel calmer and more in control. After arrival countdown clocks were mounted in the London Underground, people told surveyors that the wait time felt shorter by a quarter. The clocks also make people feel safer traveling at night, partly by giving them more confidence in the system.
“We don’t take shopping carts home after using them at the supermarket. We don’t cart around our own elevators or restaurants or airplanes. Why should we be forced by urban design to own cars and bicycles?”
This phenomenon seems to occur wherever cities see a spike in cycling: the more people bike, the safer the streets get for cyclists, partly because drivers adopt more cautious habits when they expect cyclists on the road. There is safety in numbers.
But the elements that made this ride thrilling also happened to render it a travel mode unavailable to most other people. You have to be strong and agile to ride a bicycle in city traffic. You need excellent balance and vision. (Children and seniors, for example, have worse peripheral vision than fit adults, and more trouble judging the speed of approaching objects.) Most of all, you must possess a high tolerance for risk. Even the blood of adventurous riders gets flooded with beta-endorphins—the euphoria-inducing chemical that has been found in bungee jumpers and roller-coaster riders—not to mention a stew of cortisol and adrenaline, the stress hormones that are so useful in moments of fight and flight, but toxic if experienced over the long term.
So if we really care about freedom for everyone, we need to design for everyone—not just the brave. This means we have got to confront the shared-space movement, which has gradually found favor since the sharing concept known as the woonerf emerged on residential streets in the Dutch city of Delft in the 1970s. In the woonerf, walkers, cyclists, and cars are all invited to mingle in the same space, as though they are sharing a living room. Street signs and marked curbs are replaced with flowerpots and cobblestones and even trees, encouraging users to pay more attention. It’s a bit like the vehicular cyclist paradigm, except that in a woonerf, everyone is expected to share the road.
He insisted that such shared spaces were more safe because they felt less safe. As in woonerven, pedestrians and cyclists who entered Monderman’s shared spaces were confronted with an uncertainty they could solve only by heightening their awareness of other travelers, establishing eye contact, and returning to the social rules that governed movement in busy places before cars took over. ... Accidents and injuries plummeted around Monderman’s intersections, but he wasn’t recording anyone’s stress levels. And there is a vast difference between safe travel and travel that feels safe.
Roger Geller, the city’s [Portland] bicycle coordinator, looked at surveys of the city’s commuters and realized that they were building infrastructure for a rare species. ... So Geller and his colleagues set out to create a network of “low-stress” bikeways that either physically separated cyclists from cars or slowed cars down past the speed of fear on shared routes. It worked. Commuting by bike more than doubled in Portland between 2000 and 2008.
[Houten] The downside? The reversed road scheme did almost nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared with other Dutch towns, because people who did drive had to take longer routes to go wherever they were headed (though emissions were still much lower than in North American cities). This reflects the externalities cities always experience when they adopt one grand solution to their problems.
They are motivated by self-interest. “They just want to get themselves from A to B, and now it happens to be easier and quicker to do it on a bike.”
“This means that we must be concerned not just about safety,” traffic director Niels Tørslov told me. “We care about how safe cycling feels.”
Even the smallest of private cars takes up about 150 square feet of road space when standing still. That’s thirty times the space used by a person standing, and 7.5 times the space used by a person on a bicycle or on a bus. The numbers diverge exponentially as we start moving. Someone driving alone in a car moving at thirty miles per hour takes up twenty times as much space as someone riding on a bus at the same speed.
How fair and efficient are our streets? A car moving at typical city speed uses seventy-five times as much space as someone walking.
This unfair state of affairs had its epicenter at Times Square, where pedestrians outnumbered cars by more than four to one yet were crammed into about a tenth of the space.
This phenomenon seems to occur wherever cities see a spike in cycling: the more people bike, the safer the streets get for cyclists, partly because drivers adopt more cautious habits when they expect cyclists on the road. There is safety in numbers.
But the elements that made this ride thrilling also happened to render it a travel mode unavailable to most other people. You have to be strong and agile to ride a bicycle in city traffic. You need excellent balance and vision. (Children and seniors, for example, have worse peripheral vision than fit adults, and more trouble judging the speed of approaching objects.) Most of all, you must possess a high tolerance for risk. Even the blood of adventurous riders gets flooded with beta-endorphins—the euphoria-inducing chemical that has been found in bungee jumpers and roller-coaster riders—not to mention a stew of cortisol and adrenaline, the stress hormones that are so useful in moments of fight and flight, but toxic if experienced over the long term.
So if we really care about freedom for everyone, we need to design for everyone—not just the brave. This means we have got to confront the shared-space movement, which has gradually found favor since the sharing concept known as the woonerf emerged on residential streets in the Dutch city of Delft in the 1970s. In the woonerf, walkers, cyclists, and cars are all invited to mingle in the same space, as though they are sharing a living room. Street signs and marked curbs are replaced with flowerpots and cobblestones and even trees, encouraging users to pay more attention. It’s a bit like the vehicular cyclist paradigm, except that in a woonerf, everyone is expected to share the road.
He insisted that such shared spaces were more safe because they felt less safe. As in woonerven, pedestrians and cyclists who entered Monderman’s shared spaces were confronted with an uncertainty they could solve only by heightening their awareness of other travelers, establishing eye contact, and returning to the social rules that governed movement in busy places before cars took over. ... Accidents and injuries plummeted around Monderman’s intersections, but he wasn’t recording anyone’s stress levels. And there is a vast difference between safe travel and travel that feels safe.
Roger Geller, the city’s [Portland] bicycle coordinator, looked at surveys of the city’s commuters and realized that they were building infrastructure for a rare species. ... So Geller and his colleagues set out to create a network of “low-stress” bikeways that either physically separated cyclists from cars or slowed cars down past the speed of fear on shared routes. It worked. Commuting by bike more than doubled in Portland between 2000 and 2008.
[Houten] The downside? The reversed road scheme did almost nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared with other Dutch towns, because people who did drive had to take longer routes to go wherever they were headed (though emissions were still much lower than in North American cities). This reflects the externalities cities always experience when they adopt one grand solution to their problems.
They are motivated by self-interest. “They just want to get themselves from A to B, and now it happens to be easier and quicker to do it on a bike.”
“This means that we must be concerned not just about safety,” traffic director Niels Tørslov told me. “We care about how safe cycling feels.”
Even the smallest of private cars takes up about 150 square feet of road space when standing still. That’s thirty times the space used by a person standing, and 7.5 times the space used by a person on a bicycle or on a bus. The numbers diverge exponentially as we start moving. Someone driving alone in a car moving at thirty miles per hour takes up twenty times as much space as someone riding on a bus at the same speed.
How fair and efficient are our streets? A car moving at typical city speed uses seventy-five times as much space as someone walking.
This unfair state of affairs had its epicenter at Times Square, where pedestrians outnumbered cars by more than four to one yet were crammed into about a tenth of the space.
Who Is the City For?
Bogotá’s TransMilenio bus system claimed the best road space in the city from private automobiles and used high-quality finishes in its stations. The intent was not just to cut travel times but also to boost the status of public transit riders.
Bogotá had never seen a teacher like this. Mockus sent more than four hundred mimes out onto the streets to make fun of rude drivers and pedestrians. He handed out stacks of red cards so that, like soccer referees, people could call out antisocial behavior rather than punching or shooting each other. He invited people to turn in their guns on voluntary disarmament days, and fifteen hundred firearms were ceremonially melted down to make baby spoons. (Only one in one hundred of the city’s guns were retrieved, but surveys found the exercise had the effect of making many people feel safer and less agressive.)
“Maybe not equality of income, but equality of quality of life and, more than that, an environment where people don’t feel inferior, where people don’t feel excluded.”
The TransMilenio system’s director told me later that Peñalosa had insisted on choosing the lipstick-red paint color and even the name for the rapid bus system. Both were supposed to imbue the bus with a hip, modern cachet, so that riders would feel that taking public transit was a high-status experience, even if they had no other choice. Peñalosa also insisted that new libraries such as El Tintal be spectacular architectural icons designed by the country’s most respected architects, “in homage to every child, every citizen who would enter there.”
As biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, “the disease consequences of feeling poor are often rooted in the psychosocial consequences of being made to feel poor by one’s surroundings.”
“Maybe not equality of income, but equality of quality of life and, more than that, an environment where people don’t feel inferior, where people don’t feel excluded.”
The TransMilenio system’s director told me later that Peñalosa had insisted on choosing the lipstick-red paint color and even the name for the rapid bus system. Both were supposed to imbue the bus with a hip, modern cachet, so that riders would feel that taking public transit was a high-status experience, even if they had no other choice. Peñalosa also insisted that new libraries such as El Tintal be spectacular architectural icons designed by the country’s most respected architects, “in homage to every child, every citizen who would enter there.”
As biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, “the disease consequences of feeling poor are often rooted in the psychosocial consequences of being made to feel poor by one’s surroundings.”
“Before the TransMilenio I had to leave home two hours before starting work,” he told me as he squeezed onto a northbound express. “Now, forty-five minutes, maximum.” This is the essence of Peñalosa’s happy city program. It actively redistributes the benefits of city living in order to make it fairer and more tolerable for the biggest number of people. The color of the bus matters, but even more important is the way it speeds riders across the city. (The average TransMilenio rider saves forty minutes a day.)
No matter how desperate, dysfunctional, or unfair the circumstances, and no matter how rational the initiative, new plans that threaten the urban design status quo face deep and emotional opposition.
Some of this backlash stems from stakeholders’ fear of losing the right to live and move as they have become accustomed. This is natural. As the benefits of urban systems get reapportioned, some people will be inconvenienced.
Some of this backlash stems from stakeholders’ fear of losing the right to live and move as they have become accustomed. This is natural. As the benefits of urban systems get reapportioned, some people will be inconvenienced.
Today’s urban mobility systems are flat-out unfair, especially in North America. As I detailed earlier, a third of Americans—those too young, too old, too poor, too infirm, or simply not interested—do not drive at all. In an auto-dependent city, that leaves one in every three people at the mercy of scarce public transit or dependent on someone else to chauffeur him around. Children and teenagers are the most obvious victims of this. They are trapped at home and denied the freedom to walk to school or to see friends as they wish.
Nondriving seniors are even worse off: they end up making it to the doctor, to restaurants, to social events, and to religious gatherings only half as often as seniors who can drive. Older African Americans and Latinos are twice as likely to depend on transit as Caucasians and much more likely to be stuck at home.
...but minorities in the United States are much less likely than white people even to have sidewalks in their neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, where the wealth has been poured into freeways, the city has admitted that 40 percent of its sidewalks are in disrepair.
In the United States, only about half of roadway expenses are financed by user fees such as gas taxes, vehicle registration, or tolls (and most of that money goes to highways, which pedestrians and cyclists tend not to use). The rest comes from property and income taxes paid by everyone. Here is where equity and efficiency collide: because of their light footprint, infrastructure for walkers and cyclists costs only a tiny fraction of auto infrastructure to build and maintain. So cyclists and pedestrian commuters who pay property and income tax actually end up subsidizing their car-driving neighbors.
...but minorities in the United States are much less likely than white people even to have sidewalks in their neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, where the wealth has been poured into freeways, the city has admitted that 40 percent of its sidewalks are in disrepair.
In the United States, only about half of roadway expenses are financed by user fees such as gas taxes, vehicle registration, or tolls (and most of that money goes to highways, which pedestrians and cyclists tend not to use). The rest comes from property and income taxes paid by everyone. Here is where equity and efficiency collide: because of their light footprint, infrastructure for walkers and cyclists costs only a tiny fraction of auto infrastructure to build and maintain. So cyclists and pedestrian commuters who pay property and income tax actually end up subsidizing their car-driving neighbors.
...your streets are not inclusive until you can imagine an eight-year-old or an eighty-year-old walking safely and independently. This might seem an audacious goal until you actually see the very old and the very young walking and cycling on the streets of Copenhagen or Vauban, and now El Paraíso.
What’s clear is that fairness demands that cities stop concentrating subsidized housing in poor zones so all residents and their children can enjoy equal access to decent schools and services. This mixing is the mark of a civilized, democratic, and ethical society.
The changes after three years were stunning: the downtown core was revitalized, school enrollment grew by 30 percent, and running water was provided to hundreds of thousands more homes. By 2001, almost twice as many people were cycling to work in the city, saving the average minimum-wage worker the equivalent of a month and a half’s salary that year. But here is the amazing thing: the happy city program, with its aggressive focus on creating a fairer city, did not only benefit the poor. It made life better for almost everyone. The TransMilenio moved so many people so efficiently that car drivers crossed the city faster as well: commuting times fell by a fifth. The streets were calmer. By the end of Peñalosa’s term, people were crashing their cars less and killing each other less frequently, too: the accident rate fell by nearly half, and so did the murder rate, even as the country as a whole got more violent. There was a massive improvement in air quality: along all the TransMilenio routes, the noxious fumes and dust clouds cleared, and real estate values along the routes spiked, too. Bogotans got healthier. Those who lived near the new parks, especially seniors, started walking more. Bogotans over the age of sixty actually reported getting more exercise if they lived in a neighborhood with a TransMilenio station. Just like the LYNX light-rail line in Charlotte, the TransMilenio changed people’s behavior, but it did it at a fraction of the cost by giving the formerly lowly bus the highest status on the road. The city had experienced a massive spike in feelings of optimism. People believed that life was good and getting better, a feeling they had not shared in decades, not even during Mockus’s super-citizen years. After Peñalosa’s term (sequential terms are illegal in the city), Mockus ran for mayor again. He gained Peñalosa’s endorsement—and won the race—in part by promising to continue the ambitious infrastructure plans, which he carried out in his second term. The next mayor, Luis Garzón, continued some of those plans. In their terms, the software and hardware agendas merged, and the city experienced its best times in anyone’s memory.
The changes after three years were stunning: the downtown core was revitalized, school enrollment grew by 30 percent, and running water was provided to hundreds of thousands more homes. By 2001, almost twice as many people were cycling to work in the city, saving the average minimum-wage worker the equivalent of a month and a half’s salary that year. But here is the amazing thing: the happy city program, with its aggressive focus on creating a fairer city, did not only benefit the poor. It made life better for almost everyone. The TransMilenio moved so many people so efficiently that car drivers crossed the city faster as well: commuting times fell by a fifth. The streets were calmer. By the end of Peñalosa’s term, people were crashing their cars less and killing each other less frequently, too: the accident rate fell by nearly half, and so did the murder rate, even as the country as a whole got more violent. There was a massive improvement in air quality: along all the TransMilenio routes, the noxious fumes and dust clouds cleared, and real estate values along the routes spiked, too. Bogotans got healthier. Those who lived near the new parks, especially seniors, started walking more. Bogotans over the age of sixty actually reported getting more exercise if they lived in a neighborhood with a TransMilenio station. Just like the LYNX light-rail line in Charlotte, the TransMilenio changed people’s behavior, but it did it at a fraction of the cost by giving the formerly lowly bus the highest status on the road. The city had experienced a massive spike in feelings of optimism. People believed that life was good and getting better, a feeling they had not shared in decades, not even during Mockus’s super-citizen years. After Peñalosa’s term (sequential terms are illegal in the city), Mockus ran for mayor again. He gained Peñalosa’s endorsement—and won the race—in part by promising to continue the ambitious infrastructure plans, which he carried out in his second term. The next mayor, Luis Garzón, continued some of those plans. In their terms, the software and hardware agendas merged, and the city experienced its best times in anyone’s memory.
Everything Is Connected to Everything Else
But Boston [Alex Boston, not the city of Boston] insists that by focusing on the relationship between energy, efficiency, and the things that make life better, cities can succeed where scary data, scientists, logic, and conscience have failed. The happy city plan is an energy plan. It is a climate plan. It is a belt-tightening plan for cash-strapped cities. It is also an economic plan, a jobs plan, and a corrective for weak systems. It is a plan for resilience.
Not one of its programs was directed at the crisis of climate change, but the city offered tangible proof of the connection between urban design, experience, and the carbon energy system. It suggested that the green city, the low-carbon city, and the happy city might be exactly the same destination.
Quality of life and climate action are complementary goals. It’s just easier to get people excited about plans that improve their lives. That’s why, when the City of New York explains its remarkable transformation in the way the city uses roads, it boasts about its huge improvements in safety, speed, efficiency, and people’s taking coffee on public plazas, leaving its goal of reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent to a footnote.
...interventions to make walking and cycling safe and comfortable are radically more effective at bringing down emissions than the technological fixes being pushed by the transportation industry.
Even if you don’t care about your own health or the health of the environment, the relationship between urban design, health, and climate change planning touches your life and your bank balance. That’s because the dispersed city that nudges millions of people toward inactivity—and exposes them to air pollution and traffic crashes—simultaneously creates financial burdens for all of society. We know that obese people have more medical troubles. But they also miss work more frequently owing to illness and disability. They also work fewer years than healthy people. In the United States, this costs society a thundering $142 billion every year. Meanwhile, pollution from auto-dominated roads causes tens of billions more in health-care costs. And then there are the costs incurred by traffic accidents, which run as much as $180 billion annually. Since the damage is directly related to the distance people drive every day, just reducing the frequency and length of automobile trips can ease the burden on emergency services, productivity, and the health-care system.
Consider the geography of the foreclosure crisis. As we’ve seen, the communities that fell hardest during the subprime implosion, places like exurban San Joaquin County, were classic low-density, segregated-use zones of single detached homes on plenty of acreage. This is because classic sprawl depends on cheap energy, and lots of it, to function. That dependence means that these neighborhoods are also climate killers because huge energy costs for households translate to huge greenhouse gas emissions. The relationship is clear: as emissions go up, operational affordability goes down.
A neighborhood of detached homes and duplexes on small lots can be serviced for about a quarter of the cost of servicing typical large-lot detached homes. Dispersed communities also need more fire and ambulance stations than dense neighborhoods do. They need more school buses. The waste is astounding: in the 2005–06 school year, more than 25 million American children were bused to their public schools. The country spent $18.9 billion getting them there—that’s $750 for each bus-riding student, which could have been spent on actual learning.
To explain, Minicozzi offered me his classic urban accounting smackdown, using two competing properties: On the one side is a downtown building his firm rescued—a six-story steel-framed 1923 classic once owned by JCPenney and converted into shops, offices, and condos. On the other side is a Walmart on the edge of town. The old Penney’s building sits on less than a quarter of an acre, while the Walmart and its parking lots occupy thirty-four acres. Adding up the property and sales tax paid on each piece of land, Minicozzi found that the Walmart contributed only $50,800 to the city in retail and property taxes for each acre it used, but the JCPenney building contributed a whopping $330,000 per acre in property tax alone. In other words, the city got more than seven times the return for every acre on downtown investments than it did when it broke new ground out on the city limits.
When Minicozzi looked at job density, the difference was even more vivid: the small businesses that occupied the old Penney’s building employed fourteen people, which doesn’t seem like many until you realize that this is actually seventy-four jobs per acre, compared with the fewer than six jobs per acre created on a sprawling Walmart site. (This is particularly dire given that on top of reducing jobs density in its host cities, Walmart depresses average wages as well.)
An average city can end up collectively spending more than $4,000 per household per year on energy, typically moving vehicles or heating and lighting buildings. Most of that money gets sucked right out of the community and paid to distant energy utilities or oil companies.
Thanks to their shorter commutes, by 2008, people in the Portland region were saving about $1.1 billion every year on gas, or 1.5 percent of all personal income in the region. This means that Portlanders send less money out of the city to car companies and oil barons and spend more at home in their city on food, fun, and microbrewed beer. 🍻
An investment of $100 million in slow-moving downtown streetcars actually pulled in $3.5 billion in new office, retail, and hotel development within a couple of blocks of the new lines.
Real power lies not in singular objects, but in the sinew and systems and invisible relationships that run through everything, from emotions to urban geometry to systems of energy distribution.
Not one of its programs was directed at the crisis of climate change, but the city offered tangible proof of the connection between urban design, experience, and the carbon energy system. It suggested that the green city, the low-carbon city, and the happy city might be exactly the same destination.
Quality of life and climate action are complementary goals. It’s just easier to get people excited about plans that improve their lives. That’s why, when the City of New York explains its remarkable transformation in the way the city uses roads, it boasts about its huge improvements in safety, speed, efficiency, and people’s taking coffee on public plazas, leaving its goal of reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent to a footnote.
...interventions to make walking and cycling safe and comfortable are radically more effective at bringing down emissions than the technological fixes being pushed by the transportation industry.
Even if you don’t care about your own health or the health of the environment, the relationship between urban design, health, and climate change planning touches your life and your bank balance. That’s because the dispersed city that nudges millions of people toward inactivity—and exposes them to air pollution and traffic crashes—simultaneously creates financial burdens for all of society. We know that obese people have more medical troubles. But they also miss work more frequently owing to illness and disability. They also work fewer years than healthy people. In the United States, this costs society a thundering $142 billion every year. Meanwhile, pollution from auto-dominated roads causes tens of billions more in health-care costs. And then there are the costs incurred by traffic accidents, which run as much as $180 billion annually. Since the damage is directly related to the distance people drive every day, just reducing the frequency and length of automobile trips can ease the burden on emergency services, productivity, and the health-care system.
Consider the geography of the foreclosure crisis. As we’ve seen, the communities that fell hardest during the subprime implosion, places like exurban San Joaquin County, were classic low-density, segregated-use zones of single detached homes on plenty of acreage. This is because classic sprawl depends on cheap energy, and lots of it, to function. That dependence means that these neighborhoods are also climate killers because huge energy costs for households translate to huge greenhouse gas emissions. The relationship is clear: as emissions go up, operational affordability goes down.
A neighborhood of detached homes and duplexes on small lots can be serviced for about a quarter of the cost of servicing typical large-lot detached homes. Dispersed communities also need more fire and ambulance stations than dense neighborhoods do. They need more school buses. The waste is astounding: in the 2005–06 school year, more than 25 million American children were bused to their public schools. The country spent $18.9 billion getting them there—that’s $750 for each bus-riding student, which could have been spent on actual learning.
To explain, Minicozzi offered me his classic urban accounting smackdown, using two competing properties: On the one side is a downtown building his firm rescued—a six-story steel-framed 1923 classic once owned by JCPenney and converted into shops, offices, and condos. On the other side is a Walmart on the edge of town. The old Penney’s building sits on less than a quarter of an acre, while the Walmart and its parking lots occupy thirty-four acres. Adding up the property and sales tax paid on each piece of land, Minicozzi found that the Walmart contributed only $50,800 to the city in retail and property taxes for each acre it used, but the JCPenney building contributed a whopping $330,000 per acre in property tax alone. In other words, the city got more than seven times the return for every acre on downtown investments than it did when it broke new ground out on the city limits.
When Minicozzi looked at job density, the difference was even more vivid: the small businesses that occupied the old Penney’s building employed fourteen people, which doesn’t seem like many until you realize that this is actually seventy-four jobs per acre, compared with the fewer than six jobs per acre created on a sprawling Walmart site. (This is particularly dire given that on top of reducing jobs density in its host cities, Walmart depresses average wages as well.)
An average city can end up collectively spending more than $4,000 per household per year on energy, typically moving vehicles or heating and lighting buildings. Most of that money gets sucked right out of the community and paid to distant energy utilities or oil companies.
Thanks to their shorter commutes, by 2008, people in the Portland region were saving about $1.1 billion every year on gas, or 1.5 percent of all personal income in the region. This means that Portlanders send less money out of the city to car companies and oil barons and spend more at home in their city on food, fun, and microbrewed beer. 🍻
An investment of $100 million in slow-moving downtown streetcars actually pulled in $3.5 billion in new office, retail, and hotel development within a couple of blocks of the new lines.
Real power lies not in singular objects, but in the sinew and systems and invisible relationships that run through everything, from emotions to urban geometry to systems of energy distribution.
Retrofitting Sprawl
In 2011 a survey by the National Association of Realtors found that six in ten Americans say they would rather live in a neighborhood that has a mix of houses, stores, and businesses within an easy walk than one that forced them to drive everywhere. But in places like Atlanta, only about 10 percent of homes can access such wonders.
And Atlanta’s suburbs are currently hell on the elderly. With everything so far away, many seniors can’t get anywhere on foot—leaving many in a homebound state that actually hastens the aging process. Those who can’t drive have a tough time getting services, and they are starved of the casual social encounters that keep people connected, strong, and healthy.
Tachieva literally wrote the book on the subject. Her how-to guide, the Sprawl Repair Manual, offers some wildly ambitious prescriptions: Business parks can be fixed by inserting streets and shops onto their tarmacs. Urban highways can be morphed into main streets by putting them on diets and slowing them down with narrower lanes, streetlights, and crosswalks. Disconnected tangles of cul-de-sac can be made walkable by strategic grafting of new roads and lanes between them. Huge, unaffordable McMansions can be divided into apartments. Gas stations can be humanized by wrapping their parking lots in new street-front businesses.
These mall retrofits are not quite the same as a downtown, and not quite as fine-grained and unpredictable as the old streetcar neighborhood, but they do infuse choice and freedom into the homogeneity of sprawl.
One reason stems from contradictions within our own preferences. Although it is true that most of us say we would prefer a walkable community over one that forces us to drive long distances, most of us also want to live in a detached home with plenty of privacy and space. In other words, we would like to have our cake and eat it too, the ideal world being one in which we reap the benefits of other people choosing to live in apartments and town houses nearby, but not close enough to disturb our sleep.
...the rules also forbid two different businesses from sharing parking, even if one attracts daytime visitors (say, accountants) and the other attracts nighttime visitors (say, bowlers). Such inanely simplistic rules mean there are an estimated eight parking spaces for every car in the United States.
“I remember the book—that horrible book always waiting on my desk. I was aghast that there was something that would tell me, the architect, what to do in terms of form. Then I realized that the power that shapes our city is in the code, not in the people. Miami looks the way it does, and Savannah the way it does, Paris the way it does, and New York City the way it does, and San Francisco the way it does, because of codes,” Duany told me. What was worse, the codes he worked under were forcing him to create structures that he knew would destroy the human scale and social life of the city. “Code appears to be neutral, but it isn’t. However neutral the language is, however neutral the metrics, however fair it seems to be, the outcome it has in mind is sprawl. What we needed to do to make great places was not to fight the code, but take it over.”
And Atlanta’s suburbs are currently hell on the elderly. With everything so far away, many seniors can’t get anywhere on foot—leaving many in a homebound state that actually hastens the aging process. Those who can’t drive have a tough time getting services, and they are starved of the casual social encounters that keep people connected, strong, and healthy.
Tachieva literally wrote the book on the subject. Her how-to guide, the Sprawl Repair Manual, offers some wildly ambitious prescriptions: Business parks can be fixed by inserting streets and shops onto their tarmacs. Urban highways can be morphed into main streets by putting them on diets and slowing them down with narrower lanes, streetlights, and crosswalks. Disconnected tangles of cul-de-sac can be made walkable by strategic grafting of new roads and lanes between them. Huge, unaffordable McMansions can be divided into apartments. Gas stations can be humanized by wrapping their parking lots in new street-front businesses.
These mall retrofits are not quite the same as a downtown, and not quite as fine-grained and unpredictable as the old streetcar neighborhood, but they do infuse choice and freedom into the homogeneity of sprawl.
One reason stems from contradictions within our own preferences. Although it is true that most of us say we would prefer a walkable community over one that forces us to drive long distances, most of us also want to live in a detached home with plenty of privacy and space. In other words, we would like to have our cake and eat it too, the ideal world being one in which we reap the benefits of other people choosing to live in apartments and town houses nearby, but not close enough to disturb our sleep.
...the rules also forbid two different businesses from sharing parking, even if one attracts daytime visitors (say, accountants) and the other attracts nighttime visitors (say, bowlers). Such inanely simplistic rules mean there are an estimated eight parking spaces for every car in the United States.
“I remember the book—that horrible book always waiting on my desk. I was aghast that there was something that would tell me, the architect, what to do in terms of form. Then I realized that the power that shapes our city is in the code, not in the people. Miami looks the way it does, and Savannah the way it does, Paris the way it does, and New York City the way it does, and San Francisco the way it does, because of codes,” Duany told me. What was worse, the codes he worked under were forcing him to create structures that he knew would destroy the human scale and social life of the city. “Code appears to be neutral, but it isn’t. However neutral the language is, however neutral the metrics, however fair it seems to be, the outcome it has in mind is sprawl. What we needed to do to make great places was not to fight the code, but take it over.”
First there is the “traffic impact exaction,” a standard fee that municipalities charge developers who create new density, based on the superficial assumption that density creates more automobile traffic and thus more costs. It backfires horribly because it actually punishes the kinds of mixed-use development that can support transit, and it spreads new development farther and farther across the landscape, creating even more traffic.
Then there is the U.S. government’s accelerated depreciation tax deduction, which gives developers a generous tax break for creating new buildings rather than renovating or reusing old ones. It effectively rewards Walmart for abandoning older stores and building in regional power centers far from the communities they first promised to serve. Another misguided gift to sprawl is the home mortgage interest tax deduction. The United States is one of only a handful of countries in the world that gives individuals a tax break on interest for home mortgages. In practice, the deduction has given the biggest tax break to people who can afford to buy new homes on the suburban fringe rather than those who buy cheaper, modest homes in older neighborhoods. (Personal loans for renovations, for example, don’t get the deduction.)
Despite the apparent recklessness that led to the 2008 financial crisis, lenders generally recoil from complexity and risk, so their funding formulas have ended up reinforcing simplistic, separatist patterns of development. Mixed-use retrofits demand more care and attention, and a cognitive break for these developers. If you cannot offer them certainty and attractive returns, says Tachieva, then the vast drosscapes and dead malls left behind by sprawl’s horizontal charge are unlikely to be repaired for many years.
Yet the aesthetic appeal of the Market Village obscures a deep flaw in the Smyrna redesign. This became apparent when I visited the mayor’s ninety-one-year-old mother, Dot, a frail, elegant woman who lived in an old yellow cottage behind the new city hall. Unable to walk very far, Dot had to beg rides from her neighbors to buy food and staples. There was no place to buy groceries in the Market Village, and the nearest supermarket was more than a mile away. Here she was, living steps from her son’s new downtown, and Dot was stranded. To support the grocery store Dot Bacon needed, the Market Village would need a heck of a lot more people. (It usually takes eight hundred dwellings to support a small corner store, for example, and Smyrna’s new downtown features just a few dozen homes.)
In a common replaying of the focusing illusion, they chose the salience of form over function. They chose a design that felt like a village but did not actually perform like one.
Then there is the U.S. government’s accelerated depreciation tax deduction, which gives developers a generous tax break for creating new buildings rather than renovating or reusing old ones. It effectively rewards Walmart for abandoning older stores and building in regional power centers far from the communities they first promised to serve. Another misguided gift to sprawl is the home mortgage interest tax deduction. The United States is one of only a handful of countries in the world that gives individuals a tax break on interest for home mortgages. In practice, the deduction has given the biggest tax break to people who can afford to buy new homes on the suburban fringe rather than those who buy cheaper, modest homes in older neighborhoods. (Personal loans for renovations, for example, don’t get the deduction.)
Despite the apparent recklessness that led to the 2008 financial crisis, lenders generally recoil from complexity and risk, so their funding formulas have ended up reinforcing simplistic, separatist patterns of development. Mixed-use retrofits demand more care and attention, and a cognitive break for these developers. If you cannot offer them certainty and attractive returns, says Tachieva, then the vast drosscapes and dead malls left behind by sprawl’s horizontal charge are unlikely to be repaired for many years.
Yet the aesthetic appeal of the Market Village obscures a deep flaw in the Smyrna redesign. This became apparent when I visited the mayor’s ninety-one-year-old mother, Dot, a frail, elegant woman who lived in an old yellow cottage behind the new city hall. Unable to walk very far, Dot had to beg rides from her neighbors to buy food and staples. There was no place to buy groceries in the Market Village, and the nearest supermarket was more than a mile away. Here she was, living steps from her son’s new downtown, and Dot was stranded. To support the grocery store Dot Bacon needed, the Market Village would need a heck of a lot more people. (It usually takes eight hundred dwellings to support a small corner store, for example, and Smyrna’s new downtown features just a few dozen homes.)
In a common replaying of the focusing illusion, they chose the salience of form over function. They chose a design that felt like a village but did not actually perform like one.
Save Your City, Save Yourself
Thomas Jefferson convinced his fellow Founding Fathers of the American republic to adopt the Roman grid barely four years after their victory against the British Empire. The national Land Ordinance of 1785 set the grid as the approved form for all settlements west of the Ohio River. It was part of the tool kit of colonization and nation building. The grid was the fastest, simplest way to divide land so that it could be commodified. Rectangular units were easy to survey, buy, sell, and tax. They made it easier to provide services. The grid was a spectacular success as an economic tool, but it created some seriously unbalanced cities. The Land Ordinance of 1785 did not have provisions for parks or open space. Its cities comprised private lots and public roads, as though the city existed purely for commerce rather than for the people that commerce was thought to enrich. In town after town, planners subdivided, overlooked, or avoided public parks and plazas. Cities that wanted parks actually had to buy the land from private holders.
But the imposition of the grid or any other plan from on high has another, ultimately more profound effect on the people who must inhabit it: it estranges them from the process of shaping their own world.
...great irony of the American city: a nation that celebrates freedom and weaves liberty into its national myth rarely gives regular people the chance to shape their own communities.
But the imposition of the grid or any other plan from on high has another, ultimately more profound effect on the people who must inhabit it: it estranges them from the process of shaping their own world.
...great irony of the American city: a nation that celebrates freedom and weaves liberty into its national myth rarely gives regular people the chance to shape their own communities.
Epilogue: The Beginning
Our challenge lives in the way we build, but also in the way we think. It is a design problem, but it is also a psychological problem. It lives in the tensions that exist within each and every one of us—that endless tug-of-war between fear and trust, between status aspirations and the cooperative impulse, between the urge to retreat and the need to engage with other people. As much as they embody a philosophy of living, cities also reflect our cognitive frailties, and the systematic errors every one of us tends to make when deciding what will make us happy in the long run.