How to Make our Cities More Walkable | Jeff Speck

uh good morning or good afternoon or good evening uh wherever you may happen to be right now uh thank you for coming to listen to me my name is jeff speck and this is the first it's a first for me this is the first time i've traveled physically to give a talk which is virtual so i had the pleasure today of arriving in new york uh walking a wonderful three miles in this city uh that is that our attorney general says is an is an anarchy an anarchic city uh but everything looked very peaceful and and lovely uh the only anarchy i saw was a few people not wearing masks but otherwise i think uh people are behaving quite well and and i i want to bring up the masks only because um i'm i'm a city planner who who's observing uh changes that are happening to cities uh with with the with the covid crisis and i'm not going to be talking to you about that today but i did want to mention that a couple things first is that kovid is an opportunity that some cities have been using to change themselves and it's a conversation that's been happening for some time now certain cities like paris london uh have taken this this kind of break in activity to reassess their streets their public spaces and are making very dramatic changes many cities are making similar changes temporarily i think the cities with the strongest leadership and the most progressive leadership are using this this opportunity to address the real crisis which is how our cities need to change in the face of climate change and as a result a lot of the street changes that are happening in other cities are becoming more permanent or are anticipated to become more permanent the other thing i wanted to say about covid is that we don't think that it's fundamentally going to change the way that people use cities buildings yes but i think the general conversation in the city planning profession is that just like you know the roaring 20s followed the pandemic of 1918 we will get back to city life as usual we hope it's soon we don't know how soon it's going to be but honestly saying that covet is going to make our cities fundamentally different places when the reason for cities to exist and draw us together has not changed i think is is a misapprehension so i wanted to briefly address that but then move on to my topic which is walkability the title of my talk is walkability the best motivation means and measure for making sustainable cities but understanding that this is also a global audience i wanted to mention another title we could have which is lessons from america don't copy our mistakes and i give this talk or versions of this i i share this message all over the world a lot in south america and other places and i have this this image in many different languages we've done a lot of interesting and positive things in the us in terms of city planning some of which i'll share with you but mostly i think we we set the standard for taking the wrong direction earlier in the 20th century and the main message that i'm able to share with other countries is to learn from how we've been harmed by the choices we've made which we're now trying to correct so uh please don't repeat our mistakes around the world so i'm a city planner i work on plans for places like this one but i'm also a writer uh and i have a book called walkable city that is uh that describes the framework that i'm going to be sharing with you today um i'm convinced that the proper conversation to have today around planning city planning urban design is best framed through walkability that if you can make a place that is walkable you will make a place that is well planned and and so i've reorganized my practice and my writing and my talks entirely around this framework and what i've realized as i've worked on that is that essentially there's two messages to share the first is why we need our cities to be more walkable and the second is how to make our cities more walkable and that's the message i'm going to share with you with you today in fact i've never given a major talk like this where i tried in such a short period of time to cover both of these topics completely but i'm going to do that today and uh hopefully i will succeed so um the the discussion about why we need to make our cities more walkable was was my experience as a planner as identifying or discovering three different professions who were arguing for more walkable cities much more effectively than the planners were and this was about 15 or 20 years ago the economists the environmentalists and the epidemiologists all had their own arguments for making uh cities more walkable and when i heard these arguments i realized wow people care about these issues more than they care about for example uh spatial definition or popinquity or the things that we planners like to discuss so let's talk about them one by one uh first uh the economists point out that in the united states in 1970 we spent 10 percent of our income on transportation and between 1970 and 2010 we doubled the number of roads in the united states the length of highway the amount of streets and what we achieved by that is by 2010 we were spending 20 percent of our income on transportation so we tied ourselves to the most expensive uh most inefficient way to get around and as a result transportation is a much larger part of the cost that we have to pay in our daily lives in fact if you are a poor american as so defined by the federal government you're paying 40 percent of your income remarkably on transportation additionally there are the externalities associated with that now this image that i'm sharing with you um the math is tricky this could be off by a factor of 50 it could even be off by a factor of 100 but the main lesson is that if if walking costs you a dollar then society pays almost nothing for that i don't in fact know how walking would cost you a dollar except maybe for your sneakers but the cost of society of providing sidewalks and other things is extraordinarily low same thing for biking yes transit is subsidized perhaps to the tune of a dollar or two for every dollar that dollar that you spend on transit but driving is subsidized somewhere around ten dollars for every dollar that you spend that's the cost of the roads the cost of the policing perhaps ambulances and hospitals all the other things that come together to support your drive and so actually uh it's not only the least efficient way for you to get around it's the least efficient way for your city to get you around um there is much more to say but i'm going to move on to the environmentalist discussion uh clearly we have a an issue with um uh with climate change being the greatest challenge that faces our generation we need to solve it we need to solve it quickly when i built my house now uh 10 years ago in washington dc uh you know i wanted to build a green house and i did my best to clear the shelves of the sustainability store so i had the bamboo floor the uh you know the solar panels on the roof the wood burning stove that according to the catalog uh a wood log in my german wood burning stove contributes less to carbon than if it were left alone to decompose in the forest yet somehow all those factors it turns out when i did the math contributed less to the greenness of my house than the fact that it exists in a walkable urban neighborhood you could change all of your light bulbs to energy efficient uh you know um you know fluorescent light bulbs and you should or led um but changing all your light bulbs to the most efficient light bulb saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable neighborhood saves in one week there was a study done by the epa called boiling it down to btus and what this study did was it compared the greenest house the greenest car you know the prius and the lead platinum house in the suburbs and the same types of houses in the city and then of course the most polluting car the most polluting house and what it found was that the greenest house and the greenest car in the drivable suburbs caused you to contribute more to climate change than a completely gray or brown house and car in the middle of a city so really where you're located it's called location efficiency where you're located has the biggest impact on your carbon footprint and in fact if you look at the carbon maps of the usa for many years these sent the wrong message because they look like a night sky photograph of the u.s they're hottest in the city centers and cooler in the suburbs and coolest in the country and if you look at any city it's the same but this map of chicago as we measured carbon was measured per square mile which someone realized about 15 years ago is the wrong way to measure carbon we shouldn't measure carbon per square mile we should measure it per household and if you measure carbon per household the maps entirely flip coolest by far in the city center red hot in the ex-urban areas surrounding it mostly because the principle way that we contribute to carbon is through our driving to get around and if you compare different cities this chart is comparing american cities and european cities in terms of density of dwelling which is a good measure of urbanity to gasoline use you can see very clearly across american cities across global cities uh the the more densely you you settle uh and the more dense of a city you choose to live in the lighter of a the lighter climate footprint you will have and then finally the epidemiologists who i like to say that august 7 2004 was the best year to be a city planner the best day to be a city planner in america because this book came out called urban sprawl and public health and it was three epidemiologists telling us actually that the reason why we had the first generation of children who were expected to live shorter lives than their parents and that fully a third of our children born after 2000 were anticipated to get diabetes by the federal government was yes because our diet is bad but perhaps more importantly that we have engineered out of our society the useful walk so the idea that you can um in a typical american city or suburb uh you know drive your car to park to get on the escalator to go to the gym to get on the machine to walk is indication of a society in which walking has stopped being useful and because it only takes place as exercise we don't do it enough um and and the the the cure to this problem was to make our cities more walkable and of course to encourage people to live in places that are that are more walkable this chart compares the um obesity of different countries to the amount of transit use and bicycling and walking and basically not driving and of course shows that the the lesser country drives the uh the healthier it is and then this wonderful experiment that was accidentally conducted in china where they had a lottery and the the only certain people were allowed to get cars and they tracked the folks who won the lottery and were allowed to get cars and and everything else was completely constant right it was a perfect control group and they found that five if you were over 50 then five years after getting your car you were 22 pounds heavier so a clear relationship there and then finally in terms of health there's dying is a real health problem and we're dying by the by the tens of thousands in car crashes it's 40 000 americans a year um you can see that that you know when we drive we kind of take it for granted that we're risking our lives but how much you're risking your life is a direct function of what kinds of streets and what country or city you're driving in and if you look at this chart um you see the car crashes have gone down because of all the safety equipment that we've added to our vehicles but still the united states is doing much worse than uh than europe and actually you're twice as safe or more in certain european cities driving than you are in the u.s and within the us it's remarkable how our cities differ so new york loses almost four people per hundred thousand per year san francisco about the same dallas is more than twice that and orlando is almost twice that again because of the way our cities are designed and in fact the number of people who have to live in environments like this one where they're required to walk because they don't own vehicles and the walk is incredibly unsafe this image my cat seems to have taken a liking to this new book which is a fantastic new book called right of way by angie schmidt and angie describes the pedestrian death rate which has gone up and up over the years and i should say in my newer book walkable city rules i talk about a fourth factor so in walkable city i discussed health wealth and the environment it was a mistake of mine not to investigate and talk more about equity and what we find in our societies of course is that poorer people are walking to work need to walk to work much more often they're biking to work much more often remarkably fully 40 almost 40 percent of the people who bike to work are from the poorest 25 percent of income earners and so any investment in cycling people think of it as an elitist activity but in fact any investment in cycling any investment in in uh pedestrian infrastructure is disproportionately going to help those people uh in your society uh who have less like this typical bike commuter in a very uncomfortable situation that you might find all over the u.s so quickly that was why we need to make our cities more walkable now moving on to how to make them more walkable again it's it's all in my book walkable city where i ask the question how do you get people to walk and the answer is you need to do four things simultaneously and you can't just do three all four the walk has to be useful it has to be safe it has to be comfortable and it has to be interesting and that's the structure of what i'm going to now describe to you in the rest of this talk so the useful walk is the story that i learned from my mentors andres duane and elizabeth platerzeiberg and andres used to give this talk that he called the um the story of of planning and he talked about how back in the 19th century people were choking on the soot from the dark satanic mills and the planners said hey let's separate the housing from the factories and they did and life spans increased immediately and dramatically and the planners were hailed as heroes and we like to say they've been trying to repeat that experience ever since so you have the onset of what's called euclidean zoning single-use zoning where housing is separated from office is separating from hospital is separated from from shopping each one on its large single piece of land and of course that's a that's an inevitable recipe for having an unwalkable city yet for years that was the standard in most places of course the most walkable places and this map in contrast is um is manhattan the center of manhattan have a zoning or at least a land use that's much more confetti like very small uses all piled on top of each other in this diagram the red color is actually mixed use vertically right so our more walkable cities have have either non-use based zoning so uses are allowed to go wherever they want or the different users are allowed to collect very close to one another which brings us to kind of the fundamental argument that we as city planners and my colleagues before me feel we need to make whenever we have a large audience which is to describe um this this this new urbanist concept of towns and cities versus sprawl because there's really only two ways two tested ways to make places in america and the world one is the traditional neighborhood and the other is suburban sprawl there are a thousand ways to make a city but there's only two ways that we've tested by the thousands the traditional neighborhood is defined as being compact as being diverse and as being walkable there's places to live places to work places to shop all near each other that's a land use diversity if not human diversity at least land use it is compact in the sense that it's almost always about a five minute walk from the edge to the center so about a quarter mile and the neighborhood's about a half mile across so a little less than a kilometer and it's walkable because there's lots of streets so no one street needs to be all that big sprawl of course as the name would tell you is not compact it's not diverse whole square miles will often hold just one use like housing as you see in this image and it's not lockable because very few of the streets actually go anywhere and if you look at this image you'll see that that most streets are loops or cul-de-sacs and those few streets that do connect then have to carry all the traffic they become overwhelmed with traffic we call them car sewers the cars go as fast as they can of course and they become incredibly unpleasant and unsafe to walk along so it's fun to break sprawl down into its constituent parts we've built so much of this in america the equivalent of cities every month but they don't add up to anything because they're places where you only live where you only work only shop and giant public institutions like our schools that get bigger and bigger and even playing fields are consolidated into huge large areas where the child who lives in the house across the canal that is literally only 100 feet from this sports facility has actually a mile and a half drive um to get there and of course if you separate everything from everything else reconnect it only with automotive infrastructure uh your your your highway system uh becomes a commuter way and that was the one thing that we forgot to do was to count the cars and to realize that if we were going to institute this system of different land uses separated from each other that it would quickly become overwhelmed with traffic congestion so i always tell people it's a two-part deal you can have this if you really want it but it comes with this as well often to absurd extremes and the amount that we invest in our horizontal infrastructure so you never have to wait to delight more than one cycle is really preposterous preposterous when you consider um how we're not paying very much for our schools or for our civic buildings or the other buildings that really matter so it can be very frustrating uh to inhabit this uh this landscape um it's destructive to families your divorce rate is actually much higher in suburban areas than it is in urban areas because principally of the length of the commute um we already talked about its impacts on our health and driving can be a real drag and walking can be even worse this image or this pair of images is really the last image i want to leave you with when it comes to the creation of whole developments whether it be a housing subdivision or a shopping center or anything else if you're building something new of some size beyond just a single building you're either ascribing to the sprawl model or you're ascribing to the neighborhood model and what's important to see in this image is that it's the same stuff places to live work shop recreate etc but how big is it how far apart is it and is it connected with a nice delicate network of small roads that allow driving to be more efficient because there are many ways to get from anywhere anywhere else but also make walking feel possible so another big part of this conversation about making walking useful is transit now you can have a perfectly walkable neighborhood with no transit but a walkable city relies utterly on transit because you have to get from the walkable places to each other and you have to inhabit the region in an effective you know economically effective way and what people often forget is the incredible efficiency that trains and buses and other mass transit uh bring to our our public spaces and in fact you cannot have urban public spaces if you're relying on the space that an automobile takes to move every human around one l train one single l train in in manhattan carries as many people into manhattan as 2 000 motor vehicles 2000 individual cars and remarkably this is the great story that explains the efficiency of transit in 1947 brooklyn bridge carried 400 000 people across it every day they modernized it in 1948 they modernized it by removing the train the outcome was that in 1948 instead of 400 000 the bridge carried 170 000 people across it every day they turn the train tracks into driving lanes to make it modern and cut its effectiveness more than in half and this image in a nutshell describes why cars in the city are not a good mix you can certainly have them but if every individual is arriving in one you can't have the sort of density and energy that makes cities uh the places that people are drawn to um for that sense of of of economy of um of you know collectiveness and of the the great efficiencies that come from just being all in one place together and my favorite quote here is from enrique penalosa the former mayor of bogota colombia who says a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars it's where the rich ride public transportation and i know many of you are in cities where that is the standard in the u.s it's quite rare that was the first category the reason to walk the second category the safe walk is where i spend most of my time because it's the thing in our cities that we're able to fix the fastest and i showed you that that cars are getting safer but we still lost 40 000 people in car crashes last year and that number keeps going up and the reason it keeps going up is because pedestrians and cyclists are being killed more and more every year it's about been about five percent more per year every year for the last 10 years and there's a number of reasons for this as angie schmidt describes in her book the principal one is the switch to suvs and we don't need to get into that but an suv hits you higher it hits you harder and you get thrown underneath it so being a pedestrian has become more and more perilous now the principal thing that we can do to make streets safer and therefore more walkable is to slow the speed of vehicles so everything that i'm going to talk to you about here is about what can you do to cause drivers to just go a little more slowly in your city a driver going 35 miles an hour is seven times as likely to kill you as a driver going 25 miles an hour and that's about where speeds hover in our more densely settled areas um so what can we do to make someone move closer to 25 or even 20 than to 30 or 35 the first topic is block size small block cities are safer cities this is portland oregon famously walkable famously 200 foot blocks this is salt lake city in utah famously unwalkable famously 600 foot blocks this is my family crossing a street in in utah where they give you flags to hold up so you don't get plowed down by a vehicle here the two cities are side by side and what you see is that a 200 foot block city can basically be a two-lane city and that's what portland is while salt lake city is essentially a five or six lane city this image is a comparison of 24 different california cities and you can see about halfway down on the graph that when the block size doubles the number of non-highway fatal crashes almost quadruples so block sizes is the first thing the second thing is i've implied is the number of lanes now this is not a place where anyone is walking but there's a lot we learned from the study of highways that also applies to the study of our city streets the argument i try to make everywhere i go to anyone i speak to because it's the great black hole in american transportation planning is the argument about what's called induced demand induced demand for driving the image that you see now is classic traffic theory where the yellow line is the number of vehicles the purple is the capacity of the street and the presumption is that if you widen the street as the forecast predicts if you widen the street it will absorb the additional trips that are coming and you will not have congestion anymore that is a lovely theory it unfortunately has never happened in the history of the world what happens instead in congested systems is that there are a bunch of trips that weren't happening because of the congestion in fact the the main thing to say here is that in congested systems the principal constraint to driving is the very congestion itself so when you do anything to reduce the amount of congestion you encourage more driving people move further further from work they they start commuting right on peak instead of spreading out the rush hour other things happen and the roads fill right up again as newsweek magazine says today's engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse and i read this article and i jumped for joy but then i landed and said well who are these engineers and may i meet some of them please and here here i should interrupt myself to say everything i'm telling you i learned from traffic engineers so there are some very good ones out there however almost any traffic study that's done still around the world or in the us does not take induced demand into account and so they say oh we need to widen the lanes because the traffic is coming and then the traffic comes and they say see we told you so but in fact the wider lanes invited the additional traffic here's the study presented at the the paris school of economics very straightforward actually i have no idea what this page means but i know what this page means which is essentially the data shows that immediately any new capacity is taken up 40 with new driving trips and within four years 100 of that capacity has been taken up by new trips except when it's been taken up immediately by new trips like the 401 in in california it was widened for a billion dollars and immediately it opened with more congestion than it had had before the widening and it never went down from there that's induced demand now interestingly there's something also called reduced demand which is what happens when you take a street away or a highway away that happened with the embarcadero freeway or the central and and the central freeway in san francisco which had to come down after the loma prieta earthquake the west side highway here in new york city had to come down because it was falling apart and people predicted this carmageddon they predicted incredible traffic and the traffic never came now of course you need to plan for this you need to invest in transit you need to invest in walkability and make sure that there are alternatives to driving but the best example i have is the chongyae-chan expressway shown here in seoul korea that was carrying 120 000 trips per day it was it was hiding a river which they then day lit they turned the massive highway into very delicate light surface roads around it and the traffic just went away they did invest in transit they did the other things they needed to do but the point is the carmageddons that are predicted seem to never happen people adjust their behavior so you can stop thinking about widening any highway to reduce congestion or widening any major city street to reduce congestion and you should start thinking about what highways in your cities can come down now i make this argument wherever i go and then i move on because even if i've convinced you i generally don't convince the people who didn't come to the lecture so we ask a different question which is what streets exist in your city that don't have a lot of congestion on them and most of our cities have streets that are uncongested and can be made narrower and we always do lane audits how many lanes do you have and can we remove some of them the mayor of oklahoma city called me to oklahoma city when they were named by prevention magazine the worst city for pedestrians in the entire country and he said what can we do and i said let's do a walkability study and we looked at the number of trips on the downtown streets and we know that a two-lane street can handle 10 000 cars per day easily and these were the streets in the center of the downtown which were designated as four to six lane streets holding ten thousand eight thousand five thousand four thousand trips and yet they were this wide and they were going to be staying that wide i said why do you need six lanes on a street that's carrying 8 000 vehicles and so we did a plan and and it was funded thanks to a new tower being built in the downtown that was generating 200 million dollars in tax increment the plan was funded to rebuild every street in the downtown core from building face to building face was called project 180 and we did that and it was my job to design the curb to curb of every street where i eliminated half the driving lanes uh i doubled the amount of on-street parking because we had that extra space and we create of course created a bike network where no bike network had been before so a typical street went from this to this here it is under construction and a street like this became this and notice the bike lane is is is what we call in the door zone this was done more than 10 years ago we've learned so much since then and me and others you know we've been catching up we would not do a bike lane like this anymore but the point is we were able by reducing the number of travel lanes to add biking infrastructure and to make the streets happier this is what you do when you have money now i always tell cities though don't rebuild re-stripe you can restripe a whole downtown for the price of rebuilding just a few streets and so typically when i work in cities we work on the pavement between the curbs and we say how can we reallocate this resource to make it more equitable to make it safer and to make it more efficient part of doing that is to discuss the width of the lanes themselves the typical road to the typical subdivision in america is wide enough to allow you to experience the curvature of the earth as my mentor andrei stuani used to say and this is an image of a subdivision from the 60s and here's one from the 80s and compare the 60s to the 80s and look what's happened to the streets this is my old neighborhood in south beach when it wasn't draining properly we had to rebuild it according to the new standard which was larger than the old standard we lost half our sidewalks and our street trees what happens on wider streets well the data is very clear if you make a street wider people drive faster on it here's one chart of that phenomenon and thankfully we have nacto the national association of city transportation officials here in the u.s that is pushing us back to what used to be the standard which is ten feet or roughly three meters uh streets street lanes and busy areas in the us have grown from 10 feet to 11 feet to 12 feet we're pushing back now and of course when you're doing a residential neighborhood and here's a couple new ones that my colleagues and i have worked on um you can go much narrower uh you know this is a 18 this is a 16 foot way for two-way traffic this is a 12-foot way for two-way traffic and of course in australia where the fire trucks are smaller you can do an eight-foot way for one-way traffic you basically can't go more than five miles an hour on this street also important are the street trees and the parallel parking parallel parking if you do not have something else to protect the curb is an essential barrier of steel between moving vehicles and people on the sidewalk this is fort lauderdale you'll notice there's nice sidewalk dining on the left where the parallel parking is on the right where the parallel parking isn't uh this is happy hour with no one there because no one wants to be right up against those cars moving very quickly then of course the trees are the other part of this image engineers refer to them as fhos fixed and hazardous objects and in some places the engineers tell you not to put them against streets because they're risky but in fact trees make streets safer there are fewer injuries on streets with trees because they slow cars down sometimes dramatically but it's important that the car would hit a tree rather than a pedestrian but trees are one of many things that cause drivers to be more cautious and proceed more carefully and this image by a dutch artist shows you what a street feels like to a pedestrian when there's no trees no parallel parking or nothing else protecting the curb from vehicles signals we have too many signals in america we have many intersections and i've seen this phenomenon in europe as well we have many intersections that have signals that shouldn't they should have four-way stops instead and the reason they should have four-way stops is because of the study that was done that taught us that when 472 signals were removed in philadelphia and data was collected on 200 of them crashes dropped 24 injury crashes dropped 63 percent and pedestrian injury crashes dropped 68 percent by putting an always stop um in the intersection and this image i believe from eugene oregon is where i was when i took this image um uh shows us the the the calmness the eye contact the slow speed that happens at a nice delicate four-way stop intersection where of course the bikes are comfortable folks in wheelchairs are much more comfortable and this is one illustration of the good city i'm always reminded to bring up wheelchairs now the walkable city the term that i use for all my work is an ableist term and i have to apologize for that i take some comfort in the fact that i have friends who use wheelchairs who tell me that they call what they do when they move around walking but the fact is that anything you do to make a city more walkable if you do it right will make it more rollable and certainly anything you do to make a city more welcoming to folks in wheelchairs will make it a more walkable city so we're absolutely talking about the same things bicycling deserves more than just a little mention bicycling is the greatest revolution currently underway in only some global cities certainly copenhagen uh probably sets the highest bar but i mean this is portland from even 10 years ago where you invest in bike infrastructure is where you get biking it is that simple no investment no biking investment biking weather really doesn't matter hills don't really matter anywhere near as much simply as investment the the gold standard here in the u.s is what i'm showing here the separated protected bike lane where the parked cars are pulled off the curb here in pittsburgh here in chicago they protect the parked cars protect the bike lane which is up against the sidewalk um here at prospect park in new york city not far from this location uh you can see a four f a three lane road was turned into a two-lane road the bike lane was added it's protected the number of cyclists of course went up um the amount of sidewalk cycling stopped speeding went from 75 percent to 17 injury crashes dropped precipitously 63 and remarkably car volume and trips did not change because essentially in these three lanes folks were just speeding from red light to red light and the two lanes made it just a calmer road for everyone this being new york city of course there was a drawn out five-year lawsuit but eventually the bike-hating nimby trolls grudgingly surrendered to reality and i like to show this this image from the village voice to remind us of the difference between a protected lane um and a unprotected landing no one really wants their daughter in the door zone but also if you don't protect the lane people will put stuff in it you know this is an uber driver who stopped to pick me up in boston the parking spots are right there but they all stop in the bike lane because it's not protected the trash cans go in the bike lane some remarkable things have been known uh to go in bike lanes so you really do need to protect them and of course when you truly invest in great bike infrastructure for example the out of the street up on the sidewalk edge infrastructure that you see in northern europe like in places like copenhagen you get the massive crowds and in fact in copenhagen six times as many people bike or walk to school or work than drive and it's remarkable what they've been able to accomplish and what our cities can accomplish because this image was amsterdam in the 1960s and it looks just like america in fact this is the same street right now some american cities are beginning to make similar choices we have a lot of catching up to do and we can do it because they did it and their culture was not so different from ours in the 1960s now i mentioned to avoid restriping sorry i mentioned to avoid rebuilding and to restripe wherever you can but every now and then a rebuild makes so much sense economically that perhaps you should do it anyway this is one street in one city in california lancaster california where this rebuild was done and yes it cost 11.2 million dollars but this simple rebuild that which still is full of cars right it's full of cars but it's cars moving slowly and a lovely streetscape with trees um injury crashes dropped 49 pedestrian crashes 78 percent pedestrian activity doubled 57 new businesses opened 800 new housing units came on market 2 000 new jobs with an economic impact of 282 million dollars all essentially from an 11 million dollar investment so these changes are important and useful the last two categories are quicker they're the comfortable walk and the interesting walk the comfortable walk is a bit counter-intuitive it has to do with spatial definition a great term we planners like to use we try to design our urban spaces as outdoor living rooms if you don't have good edges you don't feel comfortable the evolutionary biologists tell us that all animals are simultaneously seeking prospect and refuge we want to see our predators before they get us but if our flanks don't feel covered from attack we're not comfortable and so a street that doesn't have good edges is not a good street we've been talking about this for a long time what's the right ratio three to one is great one to one is the renaissance ideal beyond six to one you don't really feel enclosed anymore and the space becomes uncomfortable so six to one here in salzburg can be absolutely delightful the opposite of saltsburg of course is is uh houston um this is houston in the 90s it's a lot better now houston is actually doing wonderful things but you can see how the parking lot is the principal villain in this conversation about making spaces that have good edges to them and here's a brand new town center in wales that's the same old model they call it a town center but basically it's a strip center with the parking lot in front no sense of space ignoring the vehicles that are filling the whole space there's no sense of outdoor living room no sense of spatial definition so it's uncomfortable and this has to do with the fundamental difference between modernist and traditional urban fabric modernist urban fabric is about standalone buildings that are sculptural that sit in the landscape and you can see them in you know three dimensions you can circle them you can be impressed by them but the object the figural item is the building itself traditional urbanism the figural object is the space the space between the buildings the buildings take all different forms that are are necessary to shape public spaces that make sense so here you have le corbusier's famous uh planned voice of paris where he proposed tearing out a big center of the city and you can see the difference in the figure ground drawing between traditional urbanism with well-shaped streets and squares and then modern urbanism with well-shaped buildings but the residual space that surrounds them is completely uncomfortable and of course we've built this all over the place uh the plan of wasan was not built in paris but it was built here in new york it was built in in russia it's of course all over china when we all know the places we like to spend time in are much more like this image from madrid where the outdoor living room is truly a living room and so well contained on all four sides and then finally the comfortable walk our last category today um uh is false excuse me the comfortable walk is followed by the interesting walk and the interesting walk has to do with just like just not boring people making them so bored that they uh uh turn around and go home so we talked about how one to one was the renaissance ideal uh for the shape of a space this space right here is a one-to-one space it's in grand rapids a very walkable downtown but no one wants to walk on this street in grand rapids because it actually connects the two best hotels but when one side of the street is a exposed parking deck and the other side is a conference facility that was apparently designed in admiration for that parking deck it's just too boring to lock down so here's where we say blame the architects but more seriously we've learned that it only takes 20 feet of building to hide 200 feet of parking you can easily put this thin edge of building between the parking lot parking structure and the street here's one in miami i call it the chia pet garage that does it with plant life but still that active open friendly facade on the sidewalk hiding the parking from view additionally we like variety the traditional american main street has many different buildings that arrived at many different times and that happened naturally because the speed of economic development used to be a lot calmer but now we build very large places all at once and that presents a problem the plan was then for paris celebrated the idea of kind of this uniform existence where everyone got an apartment that was the same in a building that was the same but of course that creates a really boring uh environment and you'd like to think that we learned not to do that to do that anymore in fact we're still doing it but nowadays we do it more for the celebration of certain architects so this image is zaha hadid's project in bratislava this image is steve hole's project in china and this idea that we need to stamp our signature as an architect on whole vast areas rather than allowing our friends perhaps to take a piece of the commission and come in and put a different building so that the walk would have some interest to it is something that we've forgotten jane jacobs said no one will willingly walk from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition even if the effort expended is minimal and that's why our buildings need to have variety and when we build new places like this one we give the work out to many different architects so that there is variety in the streetscape here's a dutch version java island in amsterdam which almost to a fault has handed out the buildings to many different architects but you can see there's nothing boring about this image and then finally if you look at the building itself we build buildings that are too large because we build too quickly because the infusions of capital are so fast and so large this is an image that i did not put together but it talks about how all these new buildings particularly in the u.s developer housing buildings all seem to look the same and what it is is it's this it's a fear of scale it's a breaking it's breaking the building down into lots of little pieces so that it no longer seems that large but of course none of the pieces are coherent none of them make sense of themselves and so actually it just reminds you of how big the building is and there's no real compositional uh logic to the facade to fight this we've created something that is called the demise line and the demise line here shown in a project by elkis manfredi breaks one building down into this fiction of multiple buildings yes it is a lie but it is a lie that makes the streetscape much more interesting here's one in portsmouth new hampshire this is one building that looks like three here's one in uh san francisco a modernist version there's no reason the style has to be any particular era but the variety is what creates the life on the street and and i'm going to show you a few images from a project that i'm doing now in newton massachusetts outside of boston where we have as this page indicates demise lines in the plan that direct the architects to break the buildings down into multiple buildings so a building like this which is meant to look like three separate buildings as you saw in that earlier photograph or buildings broken down to look like row houses where actually individual apartments along a long hallway each get their own entry on the street and makes the make the place a more social place in addition to giving that reason to walk down a street because things change and evolve as you pass through public space so that's it that's that's the list useful safe comfortable and interesting and you do need to do all of them so i ask you think about the place where you live think about the place you might want to live feel free to move and the best way we're going to attack climate change because we need to solve it quickly isn't so much building new places but by getting more people to move to places that are more walkable we need to do both but in the short term moving will have a great greater impact which which means um we need to build more housing in our existing city centers and most american mayors recognize this and we're investing and we're subsidizing attainable housing in our city centers so consider moving but think about the place where you live and think about this this list i've given you and how perhaps you could change it to satisfy all four of those categories some people would make the choice uh to walk more often so i thank you very much for your attention um it's been a pleasure i i always like to end with some resources so let me direct you if i may to my book walkable city which is still available my new book walkable city rules and then to my website it's jeffspeck.com j e f f c speck.com i also teach a two-day class at harvard university every summer hopefully next summer i believe i believe it's likely next summer and i would hope to see you there and then finally all these resources and more can be found at my website jeffspec.com thank you so much for your attention today

Channel: WRLDCTY

Views: 18,840

Keywords: city, cities, future of cities, smart cities

Id: 7dAckA1Ef-M

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021