Steve Mouzon has a very well-done piece this week about “Walk Appeal” – and a thorough critique/evaluation of the 5 minute walk radius over at The Original Green.
Steve’s piece is important because it dissects one of the dogmas of planning and the New Urbanism, and points us towards a better understanding of what makes for truly successful walkable places. And, isn’t that the goal?
The notion of walking distance (or ped sheds in New Urbanist jargon) is something that’s been on my mind since I moved to Savannah about 2 years ago. For the previous 17 years I lived in a Midtown Kansas City neighborhood that I consider one of the most walkable in the city. Unlike many of my neighbors, I actually did walk on a regular basis for routine trips – dining, coffee, going to the park, etc. But, even as I ventured around, I did notice a pretty tight limitation I placed on how far I was willing to walk, or at least how far I’d walk on a daily basis.
Since coming to Savannah I’ve had the pleasure of observing how my own behavior has changed, simply by living in this place. Where once I rarely went beyond a 10 minute walk, I now routinely walk 20-30 minutes for the same kinds of destinations. The 5 minute walk radius that we cherish so much in New Urbanism has in fact become meaningless for me. If I limited myself to that 5 minute distance, it would eliminate nearly all of the places that I visit daily – the park, the coffee shops, the bars/restaurants, the grocery store, etc. (cont’d below the pics)
The 5-minute walk radius applied to my residence in Savannah
My actual walking maps. The inner dashed line represents daily destinations/distances. The larger dashed area represents weekly destinations/distances. Note the park space highlighted.
So, the question is – why do I walk so much farther here, and what can we learn as designers/planners from this?Steve alludes to some of the elements in his post, but I’ll add my experience:
- Beauty. We simply don’t talk enough about how important beauty is in the physical environment. If a place is beautiful in either building or landscaping (ideally both), the act of walking around NEVER gets boring. In fact, it’s invigorating and restorative for the mind.
- Public space / parks. Of course Savannah is renowned for its 22 squares (of the original 24). And, I would add, one of certainly the top 5 urban parks in America in Forsyth Park. The sheer amount of beautiful, useful public space encourages a walking culture, even at the expense of developable real estate. Of course, it also creates valuable real estate, as so many parcels have frontage on a beautiful space. But there’s another key lesson here – those public spaces are well-placed as well. They’re not just great parks or squares – they are also along primary pedestrian routes, to and from downtown and key destinations in the entire historic district. More on the importance of this in a subsequent post…
- Walking (or even biking) is the easy, common-sense thing to do. In order to make walking appealing, there has to be a trade-off that makes driving more of a pain to do. It’s not that it’s impossible to drive in Savannah or to destinations downtown, but, it’s slow, sometimes frustrating, and parking is not always easy to find, or cheap. It’s just enough of a disincentive to make walking even more appealing than it already is.
- The importance of destinations, and embracing the muddle. That’s right, the muddle. I suppose if I had to use Transect-based zoning for Savannah’s historic district(s), the majority of it would be T4 or T5. But living in a place like this shows the value of allowing the character to change on a block-by-block basis, and not to get too caught up in the hyper-coding of place. When walking around, you can just as easily spend time walking down beautiful residential-only streets as you can walking down streets that have a haphazard mix of all kinds of uses. Businesses seem to pop up in all kinds of locations (including some that as planners we’d typically not allow), rentals are inter-mixed with single family homes, and civic uses abound. Now, that sounds like a description of many T4/T5 zones we aspire to. The difference that I observe is that it’s far less rigid here than what our form-based codes tend towards. And the important result of that flexibility is that it creates more destinations for walking – arguably the most important element for success.
An example of keeping it simple, and making walking easy – the sidewalks in the squares align with the sidewalks along the streets.
When I first was drawn to the New Urbanism, it was in large part because of the emphasis folks like Andres Duany and the founders of the CNU put on discarding dogma. That is, we are going to take a cold, hard look at what actually works – measure it, analyze it, and talk about it – even if it goes against some of our preconceived notions. Unfortunately, for the last several years I fear that the New Urbanism has ventured off into its own, ever-smaller dogmatic practice and language. We’ve become more and more enamored with our own techno-speak and techniques, and less willing to embrace that attitude from the early years. In the big picture, I suppose this is what happens to all movements based on ideas. But my hope is that discussions like this can begin to get us out of our collective bubble. In truth, our understanding of creating successful, walkable places is still in its infancy.
What does your walking map look like? Continue the discussion here, or at www.urbanismblogoffs.com
9 Responses to “Walk Appeal” – Beyond the 5 minute walk, Savannah edition
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Having attended SCAD for graduate school, I agree that Savannah is infinitely walkable. I was one of the few students that had a car, but I rarely used it when living there. In great part, I think the walkability has to do with how easy it is to orient yourself in the city (you always knew what direction the river was intuitively), and the grid layout keeps you from getting lost. Of course, I got caught up in more than one 3pm summer shower as well as staying fit.
Thanks for this post, Kevin! I especially appreciate what you said in the last paragraph. Here’s the BlogOff page, BTW… just posted it:
http://urbanismblogoffs.com/blogoffs/walk-appeal.html
I’m heartened that you’ve listed Beauty first. In fact, at the risk of sounding too radical, I think you could take all of the others off the list and treat them as subtexts or interpret them through the lens of beauty. When New Urbanism and the field of urban economics ring hollow, it’s often because beauty can’t be quantified. The impacts of beauty on the human spirit and the culture of place can’t be measured. If you’re looking for data to drive you towards or justify the merits of beauty, you’re not going to find it. Beauty doesn’t necessarily translate to IRRs, increased rents or tax revenues, or generation of economic activity or wealth, but its intrinsic value is what makes places sustainable.
Why would you be willing to walk from Piazza del Popolo to the Victor Emmanuel monument, but you wouldn’t be willing to walk across the street from Best Buy to Old Navy? Don’t over-think this. It’s not because of the transects, it’s not because of where you’re located geographically in relation to the region. I’m not saying those things are irrelevant, nor that the other factors in the above list aren’t explanatory. But I do think they’re of limited impact without beauty.
If we had to do just one thing to save our cities – just one thing – it would have to be to build more beautiful places. Our real estate culture has gone bust and hollowed out our cities by talking about function, form, and rates of return, while leaving beauty and its importance to the city entirely out of the conversation. But Bernini didn’t build Piazza Navona because it was a good investment. He did it because, in the Eternal City, he understood the importance of everlasting beauty.
As we continue to experience the Great Stagnation, and our language starts to shift from “growth” to “quality of life” and “prosperity” instead, the places that thrive on those new metrics will be the places that are placing human happiness above efficiency and short-term returns.
Wes – thanks so much. If I could “like” a comment here, I’d do that on yours. In fact, I’ve been working on something for years along the lines of “Beauty is Economic Development”. But of course you’re right – it simply can’t be quantified.
Thanks,
Kevin
Kevin, I’d be really interested to see what you’ve worked on for connecting beauty with economic development. I believe such an effort is definitely moving in the right direction. Do you have my email from my filling out the required field to post?
Thanks Kevin and Steve. I had been troubled by the 5 minute walk limitation too; but certainly thinking about an interesting 10-15 minute walk, or longer, isn’t antithetical to new urbanist principles. All of us who have been to European cities, or the quality east coast ones, know that walking far longer than five minutes is no chore. I am moderating a local panel on health and transportation tomorrow and had planned to open with the need for quality place-making and the role of parking. You both have given me even richer material for my planned comments.
Your maps are a great demonstration of how big you world can be on foot if you are fortunate enough to live in a place like Savannah.
I’d like to think that I’m not a dogma guy, but I can understand why folks grab ahold of technical jargon and things that are settled. We are in a weird time with no shortage of uncertainty. A good time to be clear and pragmatic about what works because we are walking around looking at it hard.
Woo hoo!
I’ve been bitching about the New Urbanist failure to understand this for 20 years.
To really loacate the limits of walkability: map where schoolhouses were located in the pre-auto era.
Kids could be expected to walk six miles (a double Jeffersonian Township) but if the distance was greater, most often people would find a way to build another schoolhouse.
Distances almost never got greater than 10 miles.
Good work.
I love Wes’ observation on Beauty and look forward to a future post from Kevin on the topic. We are doing a local bike/ped project, and like Jerry, this has given me a new lens through which to evaluate it. Thanks!