Urbanism

What do housing, transit and lifestyle statistics have to do with loneliness and unhappiness, you might ask. Well, I don’t think it’s a reach to suggest that separating people physically also leads to emotional and psychological separation. Moreover, the implements that make sprawl-induced physical separation work on a societal level — cars to contract long distances and digital media to ameliorate the effects of social isolation — deepen loneliness and unhappiness on the personal level. These implements also make people sedentary, directly relating to the fact that 73% of the total American population is overweight and 42% is obese, per the CDC.

One of the biggest issues is population density. At the risk of oversimplifying, it’s a lot harder to socially isolate when there are people around you.

If you think NIMBYs are hard, it’s astronomically worse when the NIMBYs are right. So you should do everything you can to avoid helping the NIMBYs be right.

I’ll often point to existing buildings and say, “If I thought that’s what I was going to get as a community, I’d be against it too.” The city has to be able to virtually guarantee the quality of the outcome from the urban design, livability, multimodal perspective. And a lot of cities have not set up the culture, the structure, the capacity, the training, or the tools to deliver quality. So when NIMBYs express a fear of change over density, they’re often right.

Don’t let them be right, is what I’m saying. Vancouver has a track record of delivering density in a pretty good way, so we can have a different conversation about change and density and height.

Most climate advocates have, I think rightfully, moved away from anything that is focused on this type of personal sacrifice. Land use changes mistakenly get lumped in with this strain of environmentalism. People think that we are going to have to force people to live in places they don’t want to live and that will be unpopular.

The reality is the opposite. We are currently forcing many Americans to live in auto-dependent, low-density places where they don’t want to live. Many of these folks would choose to live in walkable, urban neighborhoods if they could. This dynamic is most easily seen in the long history of surveys that ask Americans if they would rather live in a smaller home that is in a walkable neighborhood close to amenities and jobs or a larger home where you have to drive to get to those same things. While it’s true that a majority of Americans pick the bigger home, a large minority, 42% in Pew Research’s 2023 survey, choose the smaller home near amenities. The problem is that, today, very little of the US fits the preferences of that 42%.

In Smart Growth America’s 2023 Foot Traffic Ahead report, only 1.2% of neighborhoods in the 35 largest metropolitan areas met these criteria. This huge disparity in supply and demand has also contributed to big price premiums for more compact walkable neighborhoods. Many millions of Americans want to choose the smaller home that is close to things, but single-family zoning, large lot-size requirements, and a thicket of other regulations severely limit our ability to build new walkable neighborhoods and also make it hard to add homes in these existing neighborhoods. To get more climate-friendly land use patterns, we don’t need to force people against their will: we just need to remove those limitations so the 40% of Americans who are locked out of these neighborhoods can live where they want. 

Part 1 here. Parts 3 and 4 still to come, apparently.

It starts with asking yourself: Do you want families downtown and in urban places? A number of cities say they do, yet they’re not willing to do what’s necessary to make it happen, such as regulate. That’s particularly a problem in the United States, where regulation is a dirty word. It’s that ideology around regulation that can often keep cities from progressing.

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Point two is, even if you have the homes, you need the services and amenities that support family living. Those start with daycare and schools.

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Point three is, you design the public realm for kids and families, because that means it will work for everyone. You have to think about all age groups: the parents with their strollers, young kids and their need for playgrounds, and then teenagers and their distinctive needs, which are different than those of younger kids.

The use of cars in cities has many negative impacts, including pollution, noise and the use of space. Yet, detecting factors that reduce the use of cars is a serious challenge, particularly across different regions. Here, we model the use of various modes of transport in a city by aggregating Active mobility (A), Public Transport (B) and Cars (C), expressing the modal share of a city by its ABC triplet. Data for nearly 800 cities across 61 countries is used to model car use and its relationship with city size and income. Our findings suggest that with longer distances and the congestion experienced in large cities, Active mobility and journeys by Car are less frequent, but Public Transport is more prominent. Further, income is strongly related to the use of cars. Results show that a city with twice the income has 37% more journeys by Car. Yet, there are significant differences across regions. For cities in Asia, Public Transport contributes to a substantial share of their journeys. For cities in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, most of their mobility depends on Cars, regardless of city size. In Europe, there are vast heterogeneities in their modal share, from cities with mostly Active mobility (like Utrecht) to cities where Public Transport is crucial (like Paris or London) and cities where more than two out of three of their journeys are by Car (like Rome and Manchester).

An interview with Brent Toderian:

The fact that you get pockets of urbanism out in the suburbs can be a result of a few things. One, sometimes these pockets are original urban places — traditional towns or villages that stood on their own, initially — that got gobbled up by sprawl. And they’ve become special places within those suburbs. I know so many suburban communities where, if you ask where the best place is, they will name those places, because they’re the places with scale, character, and walkability.

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I’ve worked on New Urbanist projects that are walkable and mixed, and even have some density in their core, but you get to them by getting off the interchange of the highway. The urbanist project is plugged into the big-infrastructure, suburban genetic code.

It’s very difficult to retrofit the growth pattern of cities on a project-by-project basis. You get islands of right in a sea of wrong. It ultimately has to come down to a new system, a new genetic code at a regional scale — which is really hard to do, but important.

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There’s an old Chinese proverb that says: The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. So wherever you are in the learning curve, stop doing the wrong thing! [laughter]

That’s often the hardest part. It’s easier to start doing the right thing, because you get credit for those things. What’s hard is to stop doing things that don’t match your new vision — building wider roads and more lanes, or building big-box retailing on your periphery. It’s not enough to start doing the right thing, you have to stop doing the wrong thing. 

Where are downtowns headed? One simple answer is intriguing, if somewhat fanciful: Perhaps they are headed to the suburbs.

They may be headed to places like Tempe, Ariz. In the past four years, in this suburban town of 184,000 that’s 10 miles outside Phoenix, a development has begun to rise that is explicitly trying to re-create downtown vitality and ambience in a seemingly unlikely place. Culdesac Tempe, which has drawn a fair amount of publicity, allows no cars inside its 17-acre expanse. Its goal, when built out, is to contain more than 700 apartments, 16,000 feet of retail commerce and 1,000 residents. “The removal of the car,” writes Robert Steuteville of the Congress for the New Urbanism, “allows for a porous, fine-grain urban pattern with a network of narrow, shaded pedestrian-only paseos, intimate courtyards and a central plaza.”

If you are familiar with the Phoenix area, you may be inclined to dismiss the importance of the development because Tempe is a college town, home to Arizona State University, and towns full of students and faculty are often thought to be entities unto themselves. But that’s not the case with Hampstead, a development gradually taking shape 12 miles outside of Montgomery, Ala. It advertises itself bluntly as an attempt to bring the city to the suburbs. “Imagine living in a community where you can walk to work, where your kids can (really) walk to school,” one brochure exults. The project managers tout “an opportunity for an active lifestyle without even reaching for the car keys.” That’s basically the whole selling job.

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All of the experiments seem pointed, to a large extent, at people under 35 years of age, a group that still desires the density and variety of the center-city lifestyle, even as downtown commercial spaces remain disturbingly empty. And intriguingly, all of this is brewing even though conventional suburban office parks are experiencing worrisome vacancy rates.

Our world is built up of roads and cars to get us to our destination! But what about cycling and even walking? Have we been brainwashed to think that the car is always king? Si goes on a deep dive into just how we are convinced to think that modern car culture is acceptable in our lives!

We once heard a story from a driver in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia who was annoyed that a cyclist was slowing him down. Do you know what he said? “You’re not saving the environment, buddy.” This was interesting. The assumption was that if you’re on a bike trying to get somewhere you must be doing it for environmental reasons, probably in an annoyingly self-righteous way. But what if it was just a convenient way to get to work without having to worry about parking? What if it was how he spends time with his kids? What if he just enjoys the fresh air and activity? What if he sold a car in order to save money for other priorities? What if he just finds driving unpleasant? None of this occurred to the driver. The assumption was that the cyclist was there on a bike slowing them down for environmental reasons, probably climate change in particular.

Have you ever walked through a great city and thought, wow I love this place? What is it that makes some places great and others ... not? One key factor is what urban planners call a “sense of place.”