March 15, 2022
There is a certain essential quality of dense cities that is rarely found anyplace else. New York City, in some parts, has this quality; Mexico City does as well. To go to the grocery store yesterday, I had to walk about half a mile of the most densely inhabited part of a neighborhood, with people passing me on all sides, street vendors making the sidewalk into a duck-and-weave puzzle, hearing conversations from the four-story buildings above drift down, the smell of lime and meat drifting in from street-side restaurants, and the gravitational pull of talking to people on the street. Different building styles pop up right next to each other, with beautiful art-deco window molding adjacent to a modern glass-and-metal construction, jacaranda trees blooming in the limited green space, and decorative protrusions changing the felt distance between the sidewalk and the road.
These features combine to form a richly textured city, with physical movement alongside visual, less common and confined to smaller areas in American cities. It seems that a common belief among American urban planners is that making an area walkable will naturally transform it into a bustling place, just as textured and lively as Brooklyn. This is not the case. The area in which I live, West Campus, Austin, Texas, USA, is walkable - there are bike lanes and wide sidewalks through most main streets - and people do walk places more frequently than they would living in suburban Houston. But it is not alive. People walk; walk to class right before 8am, 9am, 10am, in hour increments and return, walk to bars and restaurants and the three 7-11s we have in the span of one mile for some reasons, walk at night to parties, and scream and yell as they walk home, much to the annoyance of those who live on these main thoroughfares. But walking is not the only component of liveliness. In West Campus (I really apologize for using my neighborhood as an example - I love living here regardless), people’s energies are confined to themselves or the group they are part of; in the above example, the energy of the city is created by interactions, anchored by shops, stalls, and people. A city planner cannot bestow sidewalks upon an area and declare it lively, as no person can dictate how people will interact.
What can we do to create this rich texture of interactions? On a state level, deregulation of street-side stalls may help, reducing costs and permitting paperwork. But ultimately, there may not be a state-sponsored solution that can create this change in the way we want. Currently, we have an ingrained driving culture, and this can take years to change. That, with the added issues of over-policing, public transit, culture of fear, and so on, are society-level issues that we have lost the knowledge to solve. To begin to fix this, city planners must take a step back, allowing towns to become illegible again.
On February 27, 2022, I thought it would be a great idea to create some sort of content - writing, art, coding, etc. - every day of the next month. Luckily, the alliteration worked out. This should be the fifteenth post in the series.