How Not to Build a City
What is a City for?
Is it just a place to put your stuff? Is it an accident of geography or convenience? Are they necessary evils or resplendent goods? What is the point of a city?
Man is a social animal. We can’t help but live together. We like each other too much. Reclusivity tends to not be a sustainable lifestyle, the hermitage isn’t for most of us. So if we must — for our own sake — live with each other then we ought to figure out the best way to organize ourselves.
A Place for People
Cities ought to be destinations in and of themselves, not mere conduits to other places. To this end that clarifies and, more importantly, restricts how a city should and should not be organized. Cities are for our own benefit, therefore everything about them should serve to improve the lives of those who live there — and do so in a manner that is replicable for the centuries and millennia to come. (No point in living the collective good life for 20 years only to leave behind an uninhabitable husk of a ghost town).
So, if cities are inevitable, and should be geared towards our flourishing, what then do humans need to flourish?
We need a livelihood, recreation, and beauty. That’s places to work, rest, and pray. Now, you might scoff at beauty being a necessity, but as I’ve said before, we naturally seek out the beautiful. How great then would it be to be in communion with the beautiful as often as possible! To the contrary, imagine life where your material and social needs are met but everything around you is built in grayscale (or perhaps beige if the designer was daring enough) and only boxes posing as buildings dotted the landscape. What a dreadfully efficient dystopia. Look at all the most visited cities in the world and you will see texture, color, interesting layouts, and most importantly you will find a city meant for humans — not for politicians, businesses, or cars.
Cities are not here so we may have more roads to drive upon. The city must be the destination, not a thoroughfare. It is a tragedy for us to be divided by a common road that is six, eight, ten lanes wide. The eyes can focus on nothing but big box stores far out on the horizon with only asphalt and paint bridging the gap. Straight lines bore us and dull our senses while driving. Wide streets have been proven to encourage faster driving regardless of the posted speed limit. We uprooted every tree and left their natural shade, the animals that depended upon them, and their beauty (not to mention their potential food) behind. Where we are able to, we have flattened every deviation so that nothing impedes our construction lest we be forced to eschew the gridded streets for once and follow the contours of the land.
People complain that their city is too hot to be outdoors frequently or for long periods. How much of that is to be blamed on our simple but poorly thought out city design? A lack of tree shade coupled with moats of concrete and asphalt separating mountains of glass and steel turn our cities into greenhouses, worsening already warm conditions. Even our gridded streets make it worse, providing no defense nor shade that a zig-zagged or curved street might supply even without tree cover.
If we are miserable in our cities then it is us who has done it to ourselves, not some inevitable consequence but a deliberate one.
Unsafe by Design
If cities are going to be for our own flourishing, then they are required to be safe. This seems to be something that we simply do not care about when designing roads, if the data are anything to go by.
The New York Times recently published a piece about the tragic deaths of pedestrians and motorists across the United States. Speeding, running lights, blowing past stop signs, distracted drivers, drunk drivers, angry drivers and all manner of reasons are given as contributing to the danger posed by simply existing on or near our roads. Have we considered that it is the roads themselves that are unsafe? With incredible advances made in vehicle passenger safety, it would seem we have forgotten to do the same with our roads and streets.
The police chief reassured the New York Times that the police department had begun issuing more traffic citations. The spokeswoman for the mayor said that the city is implementing “improved lighting and the use of mobile speed enforcement devices and radar-equipped speed vans.” Perhaps this will prove effective in time, but addressing symptoms does not solve the actual problem.
We should be looking at our road design to facilitate safe driving and safe pedestrian crossing. This means eliminating slip lanes where drivers can continue driving round corners at high speeds. This means shortening the distance pedestrians have to walk in order to cross intersections (which can be done with bulb-out designs to ensure drivers can see pedestrians and force them to drive more carefully around a tighter turn). Narrowing lanes, placing street parking between the road and sidewalks, planting large trees along the sides of roads, continuous raised sidewalks, chicanes, louder street surfaces like bricks or cobblestone to signal to drivers to be alert, and all manner of traffic calming designs that actually help save lives are what we need. There’s more to improving traffic safety than just speed-bumps and yield signs, but it’s as if we are incapable of implementing anything else.
Our streets should be built in such a manner that a “crossing guard” who alters the normal flow of traffic so school children are not in danger is not a necessary position.
Designing roads with the goal of maximizing motorist speed is a surefire way of ensuring more tragic deaths and injuries. Not only that, they also deaden the character of the towns they plow through. Real streets that are designed to facilitate safe movement of people and vehicles are more pleasant for everyone involved. Roads and streets must be designed to improve human lives, otherwise they are dangerous and expensive failures.
Actionable Plans
If we want our cities to be for our benefit then we need to do a handful of things. First is to see what your city’s zoning laws are. What type of building is allowed to be built where? It is good and proper that highly polluting factories are not permitted to be built right in the middle of a quiet neighborhood — but a corner store would be nice.
Think of the last time you went to a local mom-and-pop shop. I can’t think of the last time I went to one, personally. All the shopping in my area is dominated by big box stores that pull in shoppers from miles and miles out. Would it not be much easier to walk down the street to the bakery for freshly baked bread and next door to them for lunch meats than to drive to the big box stores? Load up the car, drive a couple miles, stopping at several stop signs and stop lights, dodging bad drivers, maybe even having to get on the highway for a bit, finding parking and then walking further than you would have at the smaller stores just to get from the back of the crowded parking lot to the front door of the store.
The customer service there is undeniably worse, no one knows each other, there is no sense of community. When was the last time you got a cup of coffee with the proprietor of your local Walmart? Then having to make the drive all over again headed home. Worse service that takes more time, no wonder so many consider grocery shopping a chore. No wonder so many Americans stock up on groceries once a week with their carts filled to the brim like they are going to hide in a fallout shelter. Having smaller shops within walking distance of where people live allows for a more responsive, and quite frankly more pleasant experience. Seeing the same people — probably even the owners — working at the store helps to remind us of the human behind the till.
(And if you’re unsure of what this could look like, leave it to the French to ensure that 94% of Parisians are within a five minute walk of a bakery and other shops.)
Bankrupting Ourselves
Unchecked and endless sprawl of legally mandated low density single-family homes (designated in yellow as R1 on most zoning maps) coupled with only a handful of gigantic commercial centers is a surefire way to stretch city resources past their limit. We should no longer be allowing developers to build new neighborhoods or shopping centers out on the distant edges of our cities, further stretching our already tight finances. The extra costs of building and maintaining brand new roads, water, sewage, electric, and emergency services absolutely dwarfs any extra tax revenue the city might pull in. We must refurbish our downtown centers, as Joe Hicks clearly demonstrates. Think, how many run-down, abandoned, or perfectly good but simply empty buildings are you aware of in your town? Now ask yourself if there is any new development on the outskirts of town.
We hear lots of talk about “roads and bridges” and much ado is made about "infrastructure spending” but we seem to be addicted to frivolously squandering our money on developments that will never be able to offset the cost of their own maintenance. When the cost of developing new roads is cheap, and provides cities with an immediate influx of tax revenue from new citizens and businesses, it encourages growth and sprawl. However, those new roads are only cheap because they are subsidized by the State and Federal government. The catch is that while cities can get the new roads almost as cheaply as possible, the maintenance of those roads is 100% on the city. This practically forces locales to continue expanding outwards just to obtain the funds they need to pay for old roads they already built. New developments are paying for existing ones. This is incredible foolishness.
We should strive to have financially solvent cities, so focusing on the type of development that brings in the most bang for our taxed buck — mixed use, middle density developments — is an obviously good tool to use. On top of that, developing our city centers with smaller and locally owned businesses will not only help revive our indebted cities, but also encourage a sense of community. I’m not just buying a hammer and nails from a mega-corp who probably hates me and only views me as a statistic, I’m buying them from Dave and helping him send his kids to college.
Investment in our downtowns also allows us to make them nice places to be. Instead of decrepit one-story buildings with disintegrating facades and boarded up windows like the ones I passed by for years in my college town.
We are capable of creating great spaces that fulfill all our needs. We just have to have the political will to break the norms of the past few decades and get back to how we built cities before the car-centered suburban experiment began. Cities are for people not driving, not developers, not “free” parking. The next time you’re stuck in traffic going to the store or coming home from work, think about how your life would be different if you didn’t have to drive just to participate in society.