Urban Design
Nov. 2nd, 2024 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithIf We Build Cities for Kids, We Build Cities for Everyone
Years ago, a mayor I used to know said that retail or neighborhood street design should be judged by one safety metric: Can you walk with your kids—without gripping their hands and anxiously eying traffic—and feel comfortable and relaxed? If you can’t, he said, then something isn’t right with the design.
This is a good standard, although it has become rare.
This past week, I found a guide for a kid-centered concept of street safety in the form of an article in The Atlantic, called “Cities Aren’t Built for Kids: But They Could Be” by Stephanie Murray. Her piece starts out with a description of Funenpark, a quiet corner in Amsterdam’s city center, where children play unattended in a square whose “edges are lined with stores and public spaces, including a daycare, a bookstore, and a primary school next to a large playground. Sprinkled across the enclave, apartment buildings sit amid plots of grass that blend into smooth stone walkways. There are no private yards or driveways in Funenpark, and no cars.”
This is actually a great way to design a safe, walkable neighborhood in the midst of a big, busy city. The midrise apartment buildings, typically 6-9 stories, form a wall around most of the neighborhood. They'll do a lot to block outside noise, but the interior is large enough to be sunny instead of shady. A frontage road supplies vehicle access to those buildings, so if you need accessibility, it's right there. Interior buildings run 3-6 stories, each with a patch of green lawn separated by wide white paths. There are some tall trees, a ballfield in one corner, and a playground in the far corner. Responsible-age children could be turned loose with two simple rules -- "Don't go into other people's buildings without an invitation, and stay inside the boundaries of the neighborhood." -- to keep them safe and mostly out of mischief. With the amenities listed in the previous paragraph, people could accomplish a great deal of everyday life without needing to leave the neighborhood, which cuts way down on traffic. Hollow blocks make excellent communities.
And although fewer young children die in car accidents in the U.S. now than did about half a century ago, Gill suspects that progress is partly because parents have massively restricted children’s freedoms. That trade-off results in something of a paradox: In cities full of danger, childhood can become too safe.”
Then you have to ask, safe from what? Children and teens today get shortchanged on life skills that undermine their ability to function as adults; then adults blame them for not knowing how to do things they were never taught and forcibly prevented from learning on their own. You don't get greatness by wrapping kids in cotton wool; you don't even get competence. You get couch potatoes who spend most of their time online or playing video games, because that's the only place they were allowed to do anything. So as adults, they don't tend to be physically active because they didn't get to form that habit, and they may have trouble with relationships because they didn't grow up wandering around to form their own. This is not the basis of a healthy life; a sedentary and lonely life will almost certainly be shorter.
Gill was the source of a recent graphic and explainer video widely circulated in urbanist social media about how much children’s independent activities and movements have changed in cities since auto-centric design took a firm hold. A boy’s great grandfather in Sheffield, England, was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing in 1919, but that same boy’s grandfather traveled independently only a mile from home in 1950. The boy’s mom regularly walked a half mile from home in 1979 and the boy himself was only allowed by his parents to travel 300 meters to the end of his street, in 2007.
Look at the map. The oldest two areas overlap. If you moved the 6-mile one upward, it would overlap all of the others. That makes it easy to see how a larger area not only provides access to more places and activities (e.g. waterfront and fishing) but also to more people. Since people need each other in order to survive, choices that cut down people's opportunities to interact are not good.
Basically, people have created societies and environments that are shitty for humans to live in, don't meet survival needs effectively, and undermine both physical and mental health.
We need better street design, and we can look to an example Murray and Gill share, an “ideal child-friendly city” of Vauban, a district of Freiburg, Germany.
“Few of its 5,000 or so residents own a car, and those who do must park it in a lot on the outskirts of town. A tram and a dense network of paths for cycling and walking crisscross the neighborhood. Multifamily housing leaves plenty of space for recreation and socializing. And with little traffic, parents don’t need to corral children into gated playgrounds. Instead, play structures such as swings and slides are scattered throughout town, allowing children to rub shoulders with their fellow city dwellers.”
That's another good design.
In North America, it may not be possible to rebuild many of our neighborhood streets and retail sector, or to rework stroads, in a short timeframe.
Oh well, they're falling apart anyhow. Modern buildings are only designed to last 39 years; the lifespan of a road is usually 20-30 if you patch it regularly before it needs replacing. Plus of course most cities are broke, so they're nowhere near keeping up with maintenance.
When you add in Byzantine zoning codes and climate change -- it's likely easier and safer to move and start from scratch somewhere else. People have done that throughout history, and the world is littered with the ruins of failed cities.
Another alternative would be to cut the city down to its financially solvent core, and leave the outskirts that don't support themselves to figure out how to pay their own way, reconfigure things themselves, or choose somewhere else to live. Similarly, a coastal city could quit building on the waterfront (which is more flood-prone every year) and instead focus on creating a new and compact core well inland and upslope. Build a walkable / bikeable and family-friendly core and you improve not only climate resilience but also human resilience.
Both methods have been done widely in history, but people today don't seem willing. That leaves them with option "wait until the city collapses and become refugees."
Gill suggests starting by looking at individual neighborhoods for potential child-friendly design. Cities can test out ideas before implementing them broadly.
Something Terramagne does routinely that local-America does rarely is testing and scaling projects. Many different ideas can be tried on a small scale (e.g. a block or neighborhood). The most promising are then expanded to a medium scale (e.g. a town or county), with attention to refining them and solving any issues. The best, evidence-based options can then be implemented on a larger scale (e.g. a state or bioregion) with reasonable confidence that they will work. It avoids making big, sweeping changes where one mistake can affect many people and be difficult or impossible to fix.
Earlier this year, Steve Wright wrote a piece for Strong Towns about universal design, focusing on how transformations to streetscapes to make places safer for wheelchair users and meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements can make safer, more productive places for everyone. The argument here is that slowing streets, creating better crosswalks, and accommodating cars, but designing for people of all mobility types, is an infrastructure choice that makes places safer and more productive.
Bear in mind that there is no such thing as universal design. If a person can't walk, or only has a short distance they can walk, then a car-free neighborhood designed for pedestrians and bikers may shut them out because they can't get door-drop access anymore. Not to mention, you need access for delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, etc. If a person can't sit, or has a limit on how long they can sit, then they typically can't use an ordinary vehicle so most of society becomes inaccessible to them. If they have to travel flat, but there is no door-drop vehicle access to buildings, they're just screwed. As for family-friendly, how far can a pregnant person or a tired parent get on foot? It definitely won't be as far as an ablebodied, unencumbered college student.
Ideally, get an accessibility team of people with different disabilities, at different life stages, to assess design ideas. You can often expand access by offering different options like a hollow block that is car-free inside but has door-drop access around the perimeter, or having both stairs and a ramp or an elevator.
Years ago, a mayor I used to know said that retail or neighborhood street design should be judged by one safety metric: Can you walk with your kids—without gripping their hands and anxiously eying traffic—and feel comfortable and relaxed? If you can’t, he said, then something isn’t right with the design.
This is a good standard, although it has become rare.
This past week, I found a guide for a kid-centered concept of street safety in the form of an article in The Atlantic, called “Cities Aren’t Built for Kids: But They Could Be” by Stephanie Murray. Her piece starts out with a description of Funenpark, a quiet corner in Amsterdam’s city center, where children play unattended in a square whose “edges are lined with stores and public spaces, including a daycare, a bookstore, and a primary school next to a large playground. Sprinkled across the enclave, apartment buildings sit amid plots of grass that blend into smooth stone walkways. There are no private yards or driveways in Funenpark, and no cars.”
This is actually a great way to design a safe, walkable neighborhood in the midst of a big, busy city. The midrise apartment buildings, typically 6-9 stories, form a wall around most of the neighborhood. They'll do a lot to block outside noise, but the interior is large enough to be sunny instead of shady. A frontage road supplies vehicle access to those buildings, so if you need accessibility, it's right there. Interior buildings run 3-6 stories, each with a patch of green lawn separated by wide white paths. There are some tall trees, a ballfield in one corner, and a playground in the far corner. Responsible-age children could be turned loose with two simple rules -- "Don't go into other people's buildings without an invitation, and stay inside the boundaries of the neighborhood." -- to keep them safe and mostly out of mischief. With the amenities listed in the previous paragraph, people could accomplish a great deal of everyday life without needing to leave the neighborhood, which cuts way down on traffic. Hollow blocks make excellent communities.
And although fewer young children die in car accidents in the U.S. now than did about half a century ago, Gill suspects that progress is partly because parents have massively restricted children’s freedoms. That trade-off results in something of a paradox: In cities full of danger, childhood can become too safe.”
Then you have to ask, safe from what? Children and teens today get shortchanged on life skills that undermine their ability to function as adults; then adults blame them for not knowing how to do things they were never taught and forcibly prevented from learning on their own. You don't get greatness by wrapping kids in cotton wool; you don't even get competence. You get couch potatoes who spend most of their time online or playing video games, because that's the only place they were allowed to do anything. So as adults, they don't tend to be physically active because they didn't get to form that habit, and they may have trouble with relationships because they didn't grow up wandering around to form their own. This is not the basis of a healthy life; a sedentary and lonely life will almost certainly be shorter.
Gill was the source of a recent graphic and explainer video widely circulated in urbanist social media about how much children’s independent activities and movements have changed in cities since auto-centric design took a firm hold. A boy’s great grandfather in Sheffield, England, was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing in 1919, but that same boy’s grandfather traveled independently only a mile from home in 1950. The boy’s mom regularly walked a half mile from home in 1979 and the boy himself was only allowed by his parents to travel 300 meters to the end of his street, in 2007.
Look at the map. The oldest two areas overlap. If you moved the 6-mile one upward, it would overlap all of the others. That makes it easy to see how a larger area not only provides access to more places and activities (e.g. waterfront and fishing) but also to more people. Since people need each other in order to survive, choices that cut down people's opportunities to interact are not good.
Basically, people have created societies and environments that are shitty for humans to live in, don't meet survival needs effectively, and undermine both physical and mental health.
We need better street design, and we can look to an example Murray and Gill share, an “ideal child-friendly city” of Vauban, a district of Freiburg, Germany.
“Few of its 5,000 or so residents own a car, and those who do must park it in a lot on the outskirts of town. A tram and a dense network of paths for cycling and walking crisscross the neighborhood. Multifamily housing leaves plenty of space for recreation and socializing. And with little traffic, parents don’t need to corral children into gated playgrounds. Instead, play structures such as swings and slides are scattered throughout town, allowing children to rub shoulders with their fellow city dwellers.”
That's another good design.
In North America, it may not be possible to rebuild many of our neighborhood streets and retail sector, or to rework stroads, in a short timeframe.
Oh well, they're falling apart anyhow. Modern buildings are only designed to last 39 years; the lifespan of a road is usually 20-30 if you patch it regularly before it needs replacing. Plus of course most cities are broke, so they're nowhere near keeping up with maintenance.
When you add in Byzantine zoning codes and climate change -- it's likely easier and safer to move and start from scratch somewhere else. People have done that throughout history, and the world is littered with the ruins of failed cities.
Another alternative would be to cut the city down to its financially solvent core, and leave the outskirts that don't support themselves to figure out how to pay their own way, reconfigure things themselves, or choose somewhere else to live. Similarly, a coastal city could quit building on the waterfront (which is more flood-prone every year) and instead focus on creating a new and compact core well inland and upslope. Build a walkable / bikeable and family-friendly core and you improve not only climate resilience but also human resilience.
Both methods have been done widely in history, but people today don't seem willing. That leaves them with option "wait until the city collapses and become refugees."
Gill suggests starting by looking at individual neighborhoods for potential child-friendly design. Cities can test out ideas before implementing them broadly.
Something Terramagne does routinely that local-America does rarely is testing and scaling projects. Many different ideas can be tried on a small scale (e.g. a block or neighborhood). The most promising are then expanded to a medium scale (e.g. a town or county), with attention to refining them and solving any issues. The best, evidence-based options can then be implemented on a larger scale (e.g. a state or bioregion) with reasonable confidence that they will work. It avoids making big, sweeping changes where one mistake can affect many people and be difficult or impossible to fix.
Earlier this year, Steve Wright wrote a piece for Strong Towns about universal design, focusing on how transformations to streetscapes to make places safer for wheelchair users and meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements can make safer, more productive places for everyone. The argument here is that slowing streets, creating better crosswalks, and accommodating cars, but designing for people of all mobility types, is an infrastructure choice that makes places safer and more productive.
Bear in mind that there is no such thing as universal design. If a person can't walk, or only has a short distance they can walk, then a car-free neighborhood designed for pedestrians and bikers may shut them out because they can't get door-drop access anymore. Not to mention, you need access for delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, etc. If a person can't sit, or has a limit on how long they can sit, then they typically can't use an ordinary vehicle so most of society becomes inaccessible to them. If they have to travel flat, but there is no door-drop vehicle access to buildings, they're just screwed. As for family-friendly, how far can a pregnant person or a tired parent get on foot? It definitely won't be as far as an ablebodied, unencumbered college student.
Ideally, get an accessibility team of people with different disabilities, at different life stages, to assess design ideas. You can often expand access by offering different options like a hollow block that is car-free inside but has door-drop access around the perimeter, or having both stairs and a ramp or an elevator.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-04 02:41 am (UTC)Thank you!
Date: 2024-11-04 02:46 am (UTC)Re: Thank you!
Date: 2024-11-05 02:29 pm (UTC)I also try to drop off suitable useful ideas when I find them.
Re: Thank you!
Date: 2024-11-05 06:50 pm (UTC)Woohoo! If I can put good ideas in hands like yours, I know they'll get passed around. <3
>>I also try to drop off suitable useful ideas when I find them.<<
You are one of my most reliable sources for that.
Re: Thank you!
Date: 2024-11-08 03:57 am (UTC)>>Woohoo! If I can put good ideas in hands like yours, I know they'll get passed around. <3 <<
Re: fidget buckets, I am trying to add that in a social space I am responsible for.
>>You are one of my most reliable sources for that.<<
Thanks!