City Life comes from Connectedness
“Walkability” is a red herring
How do you think about your daily routine?
You probably think of it as a sequence of events, with an emphasis on the activities you do, and specifically the places where those happen. Get ready for the day. Take the kids to school. Stop for coffee. Go to work. Pick up the kids. Take them to the playground. Go home.
Everyone’s routine is different, but the mental picture is similar. If you were to draw it, to sketch out your day, it might look something like this:
This is a very normal way to picture your day.
In my last post, I asked, “What is City Life?” I concluded that “City Life” is an experience that some people have had, some people haven’t.1 The people who have had it can’t explain it to the people who haven’t. That resonated with a lot of people.
In that article, I pointed out that when people try to describe “City Life,” they often end up talking about “walkability.”
The one thing people tend to land on is “walkability,” because it’s the closest thing we have to a concrete concept that is always present in all places that have “City Life” and rarely present elsewhere. But even that is fading, as more suburban developments try to offer “walkability,” which manifests as wider sidewalks, or parks with “trails”, or open-air shopping centers. I’ve had suburbanite family members show me things like this and say they are “walkable,” and I can only shrug because, no, that’s not what “walkable” means to me, but there’s no point debating that because we have no shared frame of reference to understand each other.
I feel pretty strongly that centering on “walkability” is a mistake. I’ve written about this before (See:“When Urbanists say ‘urban’” for photos!), but I’ll put it differently today: walkability is not the cause of “City Life,” it’s an effect.
The cause is something deeper. Something we don’t have a well-established term for. I think we should call it connectedness.2
To understand this, I want you to consider two different kinds of neighborhoods.
First, the Austin suburbs, where I grew up. If you made your mind map more physically accurate, it would look something like this.
What connects every dot is a trip in the car. Note: driving is fine! But when you’re traveling on those lines, you’re spending your time here:
Actually, here:
You’re a packet on the internet, flowing through the network. Or water in a pipe. You’re spending your time in liminal space. What you experience is the inside of your car and a podcast.
Any social interaction you have with other people in this context is a problem. It would be better for you if there was nobody else using the road. You could go as fast as you wanted and never stop, which would be awesome!
Second, let’s consider the “streetcar suburb” of Denver, where I live now. A more physically accurate depiction of a day would look like this:
The streets between every dot are public, social space. I can drive through. I can bike through. I can, and usually do, walk through.
When I walk, interesting things tend to happen. I bump into friends and neighbors. I see that guy who rides a giant tricycle, which, I think is kind of weird, but, that’s fine. I pass by shops that I like, and see flyers in the window saying they have an event this weekend. When I’m traveling on those lines I’m spending time here:
I don’t have to stop and experience the space in between the places I’m going, but I can. They are all connected. At every point in the journey, I’m passing by someone’s front yard, or patio, or storefront, or lobby, etc.
The mode of travel is not the cause. Having multiple nice options to pick from is an effect!
There’s another nice effect of connectedness. The lines on my map up being different because my kids can get themselves to and from school on their own, which is fun for them and saves me time.
When they walk home from school, the kids’ path is often like this: look in the shop windows, stop and buy a donut using their allowance money, stop and play on the playground with some other friends from school, get home in time for dinner.
From our house to the school there’s continuous, seamless, connected social space. It’s where we know our neighbors, where people hangout, and where most of the business of the neighborhood happens.
To bring this illustration full circle, and emphasize that the issue is not the literal ability to walk, I want to go back to the suburbs I’m from. My parents live closer to several convenience stores than I live to the school or church we regularly walk to. But this is the space in between:
If they were to walk, it would be considered weird and anti-social (not to mention dangerous!). If a neighbor saw them, there’s a good chance they’d pull over and ask if they were okay. They’d offer a ride. You are not meant to be outside in the infrastructure. That’s liminal space, not fit for human consumption. If you’re out there something has gone horribly wrong and/or you must be desperately poor.
In America, almost everything we’ve built since the mid-century is disconnected.
Round Rock is an archipelago. Even when you’re close enough to see the other islands, you don’t swim those shark-infested waters. You take your boat. You’re meant to take your boat. Swimming between the islands would be crazy. And no matter how nice each island is, no matter how internally interesting or walkable, it’s still not connected to the rest. (See also, most “New Urbanism” is just a theme park.)
The connected, mainland places that remain have something we really struggle to put into words. I’ve called it “City Life.” Or as I said in my last post, “the cultural experience of living inside of an urban fabric where all the parts of your life, including your home, are part of a larger whole, that you belong to, and are immersed in every time you step outside.” It’s something experiential, that people who lack the experience can’t really understand (through no fault of their own!).
It’s not walkability, although walkability is an effect. It’s a kind of social fabric that makes the community stronger, and offers more freedom and independence for children and the elderly. It’s valuable. And to the best of our ability, we should all be working to bring it back.
Note that “City Life” is not limited to “big cities.” Many small towns have it, and many big cities lack it!
Note that I’ve also written about connectedness before, in “A Taxonomy of Place,” specifically illustrating the importance of connected street networks.
The graphics for this are top notch!
I still think that "Walkable City" by Jeff Speck is one of the best intro-to-urbanism texts, and that walkability is a pretty good guiding light for building towards quality urbanism.
And there is a spectrum of walkability/car-dependence. My parents live in a suburb where the worst "stroad" through town is mostly only 3 lanes wide, they can easily walk to a grocery store, a convenience store, a couple bars and restaurants, a Starbucks. It is more walkable than a lot of other suburban places, and that's good! It is still far from the threshold of what I would call "urban"... but I think I would define the urban/not-urban divide as being a point on the spectrum of walkability!
New York is also /more/ walkable than San Francisco or DC or Boston (more destinations in close proximity at any given point), and yet all those cities are at least walkable enough to be urban.
To use a point from CityNerd, being able to carve out an "urban" life for oneself is very granular down to the neighborhood, not determined by the city as a whole. I think you mentioned Houston and Montrose in your previous post, even though most people in Houston aren't living urban lives. I think one could also carve out a pretty urban lifestyle living in close proximity to some high quality suburban downtowns, and that does pretty much come down to what we call "walkability."