A high-level overview that covers many of the major urban planning ideas from perspective of making citizens happy. I find myself thinking back to examples like the correlation between street speed limit and friendliness with neighbors frequently as I walk around Cambridge and San Francisco.
Quotes
There is a place that has sought to deliver these things, in part by blotting out any sign of the discomforts and ugliness of the modern city. If you have kids, chances are they have begged you to take them there. Officially branded “The Happiest Place on Earth” when it opened its gates in 1955, Disneyland was conceived as a pay-per-visit alternative to the freeways and sprawl that were just beginning to dominate Southern California.
In short, the dispersed city is the most expensive, resource-intense, land-gobbling, polluting way of living ever built.
It’s very, very hard for people in the dispersed environment to cut back on driving.
The upshot of this stretching: long-distance commuters’ friends were less likely to be friends with one another, making it logistically more challenging to get face time with each of them. So while the long-distance commuters may have had lots of friends, they just weren’t able to get as much support from them.
The final assault on the old city arrived via the interstate highway system. In 1956 the Federal-Aid Highway Act funneled billions of tax dollars into the construction of new freeways, including dozens of wide new roads that would push right into the heart of cities.
[The resulting attitude] infuses the zoning codes that freeze such first-generation suburban towns as Palo Alto, where Nancy Strausser raised her children, but where none of them or their own children will likely ever be able to afford to live again.
It seeps into once-quiet neighborhoods in suburban Los Angeles, where long-distance commuters barrel through residential streets to avoid now-congested freeways, and children have been banned from playing street ball.
“Go play in the street” used to be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Now, it’s something that my uncle used to tell me to do as a morbid joke.
Like many people born in the 1960s, I could not imagine spending my adult life in some generic apartment. I wanted a house and my own piece of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “good ground.” I did not base this wish on any particular utilitarian calculation. I was just certain I would be happier once I had achieved it.
“I would walk into an absolutely gorgeous home with a beautiful pool that never got used and a game room that was never actually filled with friends, owned by people who were living really unhappy lives.”
On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.
By corralling pedestrians with fences, barriers, and dispersed crosswalks, engineers send drivers a message that it is safe to put the pedal to the metal…. 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.
The sustainable city has got to promise more happiness than the status quo. It has got to be healthier, higher in status, more fun, and more resilient than the dispersed city. It has got to lure us closer together rather than pushing us apart. It has got to reward people for making efficient choices when they move around. It has got to be a city of hedonic satisfaction, of distilled joys that do not cost the world.
“We can’t just build Central Park and say, ‘Well, we’re done,’ ” Kuo insisted. “Nature has to be part of your life. It has to be part of your daily habitat and routine.”
This is interesting, and is something that most urban planning stuff I’ve read hasn’t discussed much. To me and to a lot of people that I grew up with in Alaska, lack of access to nature is a huge downside of living an urban life.
As Gil Peñalosa once put it: cities need green in sizes S, M, L, and XL. Otherwise the human ecosystem is incomplete.
Early on, Project for Public Spaces was asked by the owners of Rockefeller Center to suggest how spikes might be configured to keep peo ple from sitting under or touching the yew trees on their plaza. The plaza management had always seen people as a problem. They did not want the hassle of dealing with vagrants or litterbugs. Kent politely suggested that rather than fortifying their trees, they add benches for people to sit on. The owners took a chance and retrofitted the plazas to accommodate, rather than repel, people. It was the beginning of a gradual transformation that has seen Rockefeller Center become one of the most visited sites in the entire city.
The more traffic there was, the fewer local friends and acquaintances residents had.
We have traded conviviality for the convenience of those who wish to experience streets as briefly as possible. This is deeply unfair to people who live in central cities, for whom streets function as the soft social space between their destinations.
The dynamic at play is obvious: those parking lots shift the balance of shoppers from local people toward people just passing through.
The dynamic in cities especially is often that cars pass through neighborhoods, worsening the experience for those that live in the neighborhood being passed through. These cars disrupt the connectivity of individual neighborhoods, but the people inside them will never experience the neighborhoods they are gouging.
When designers try to maximize the number of cul-de-sacs in an area, they create a dendritic—or treelike—system of roads that feeds all their traffic into a few main branches…. Connectivity counts: more intersections mean more walking, and more disconnected cul-de-sacs mean more driving.
Can we get a happy medium between the low vehicle traffic that cul-de-sacs provide and the human connectivity that a grid provides? We can connect cul-de-sacs by public walking path. I’ve seen this in Palo Alto some places (not that Palo Alto is by any means a pinnacle of urbanism)
“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.”
Indeed. I believe this, and this is why so many tech startups get on my nerves.