What Kind of City Do You Want?
By: Eric Carlson
Tags: Cities, Urban Planning, Society, Life, Transportation

Answering this question can help us design better urban areas

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

Whenever we make a decision about our cities, we often take too narrow a view of the impacts of that decision.

When the larger implication of these projects is not taken into account, we can often end up with cities that don’t fit our vision of what we want them to be. That widened road or interstate that allowed drivers to cut a few minutes off their commutes has now separated neighborhoods and severed communities, changing the larger feel of that city.

“We were just doing what the numbers suggested,” a planner might say, holding up a graph that showed the increasing number of people driving through town and the need for an expanded transportation option.

That may be true, but the reactionary method of planning transportation options is an outdated one. Urban form begets transportation choice, which leads us back to how we design our cities from the ground up.

And that, of course, leads us back to suburbanization.

Suburbanization was in many ways in a phenomenon that sought to solve a few problems but ended up ruining the larger feel and operation of cities in the process.

The suburbs were intended to alleviate public health and congestion by separating land uses. Those industrial plants? Yes, they should be on this part of town. And the commercial centers? Put those over here. Houses? Apartments? They can all surround each other so no one has to live near a business, god forbid.

Unfortunately (or fortunately if you’re that gung-ho about cars and traffic) ended up creating a culture of driving-only cities (with accidents being a public health crisis of their own) and severed neighborhoods where essential services and places were often too far away to walk to.

When car-oriented suburbanization really became a growing phenomenon, it was already too late to ask this question: is this the kind of city we really want? Suddenly whole groups of people found themselves isolated in their homes with no other option than to buy a car and drive increasingly-long commutes to their office job.

Now that many urban planners and citizens are looking for a different kind of city, one full of various transportation options and dynamic layouts, it’s time we ask that question again.

When it comes to transit, these bigger questions often get left out. Transit projects can often be narrowly focused on serving the disadvantaged or providing a disjointed and fractured service just so the city can say they provide it. This is why we get street car projects that are stuck in traffic and bus systems that make almost no sense to ride if you have another option (Walker, 2012).

We all appreciate the urban form of cities like New York City and San Francisco, cities that seemed to form organically over the last few centuries. What makes those cities interesting is not only their history, but the way geography forced them to make decisions about transit, architecture, and services that other cities did not.

When you drive into a sprawled city, the sense of disconnect can be overwhelming. Surrounded by cookie cutter suburbs, endless cul-de-sacs, and strip malls, it can be easy to feel like you’re in no-place at all. If the intention of suburbs was to create this sense of anonymity and boredom, then it is true that they’ve succeeded.

Though it may be true that some desire the cultural vacuum of the suburbs to the noise and excitement of the city, I don’t think that the majority of people do. Many studies have found that a sense of beauty, stirred by things such as interesting buildings and varied landscapes, are vital to human happiness:

Variety, novelty, enchantment: these things are left out of our discussion around our cities. Though they do have to take a backseat to practical choices about building codes and transportation needs, they cannot be ignored, either. Everything we build in our cities comes together to form a cohesive whole, an idea of a city that will attract people to move there and intrigue tourists enough to visit, creating a legendary place that is more than the sum of all its parts.

Of course, the urban form that has been created in many cities is not set up for the things many of us want out of our cities. Support for public transit is now pretty wide and consistent (Walker, 2012). The problem, though, is that many are disappointed at the level of service (LOS) many transit lines in the U.S. are able to give to disjointed, fractured layouts of suburban neighborhoods and single-family houses.

We may want our cities to reflect a certain form, but the road ahead to transform a sprawling city is a long one.

That’s why the we keep coming back to that question: What kind of city do we want? Constantly asking that question, implementing it into a city and region’s comprehensive plan, and refining it along the way, are crucial to forming the kind of city where everyone can thrive.

It’s not going to be easy, and in some cases might take intensive measures of zoning changes and outlook reframing to be effective. But if it’s the kind of city that we want, it’s worth moving toward.

So what kind of city do you want?