Letters From Here

Rice University Professor of English Terrence Doody contributes this wonderful essay about walking. Doody has signed the “May 1,000 Night Walks Bloom” petition calling for a street to be opened to pedestrians once a week and you can add your signature here.

My daughter Clare moved to Washington, D. C., in September to take a job with a political writing group. She was born in Houston and went to private schools from pre-K through twelfth-grade. Which meant she had to be driven everywhere—not only to and from school everyday, and then back again some nights, but also to the houses of all her friends, who lived as far away from school, in every direction, as she did. From the house in Bellaire, she could walk to a sidewalk but saw no need to. Then she went away to school, but to University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Continues here.

Paging Alissa Walker.

If we didn’t know better, we might have thought Ms. Horowitz had a multiple-personality disorder when we went for a midafternoon stroll with her last week. As we slowly made our way around the block that encompasses Bryant Park and the New York Public Library, she pointed out signs of insect life in a patch of ivy; the 1960s-era font on a building on 42nd Street; and a collection of cigarette butts, gum and other trash in a grate on the sidewalk (and all this before we’d walked 50 feet).

Back when I lived in Los Angeles, I would often take guests visiting from out of town on private sightseeing tours around the city. Inevitably, during the downtown portion of the tour, they would marvel at the postapocalyptic emptiness of the streets and sidewalks. How, they would ask, could the urban core of one of the world’s biggest and most culturally significant cities be so utterly devoid of energy, of street life, of any life?

This question is at the heart of Walkable City, a new book by Jeff Speck, a city planner. Speck operates as something of an itinerant pathologist, traveling around the country helping cities fix their most intractable health problems: out-of-control congestion, unsafe streets and sidewalks, the vexing puzzles of parking policy.

Keep reading here.

Los Angeles resident Alissa Walker makes her living writing about urban planning and architecture.

She gave up her car six years ago and she walks, bikes, and uses public transit. And she’s not alone: a national study used by city planners estimates that 17% of all trips in Los Angeles County are made on foot. In fact, Los Angeles ranks just behind Portland, Oregon in walkability according to Walkscore.

Christopher Leinberger, a professor at the George Washington University School of Business. Using the Washington, D.C., area as a model, Leinberger finds tremendous pent-up demand for more housing in denser, mixed-use, Walkable Urban Places — or WalkUPs, as he dubs them.

So far, that’s nothing that the average home hunter couldn’t have figured out by noting that a Dupont Circle two-bedroom costs more than whole house in Woodbridge, Va., right? Except here’s the rub: These WalkUPs don’t have to be urban at all. They can be waaay out in cul-de-sac country — and most of them are. “Only 42 percent of the WalkUPs are in the District of Columbia,” finds Leinberger. “A surprising 58 percent are in the suburbs.”

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But as much as these urban simulacra might be an improvement over the sprawl they’re  jury-rigged into, you don’t have to be Jane Jacobs to see that many are not what we’ve always thought of us “urban.” If anything, they reflect suburban ideals contorted (sometimes painfully) into vaguely urbanish form, a Frankenstein of supermarkets, outdoor dining, parking lots and mock-cobblestone sidewalks.

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Daniel Malouff, editor of the blog BeyondDC, sees these WalkUPs as more like “starter cities” for suburbanites. “A place like Reston can introduce people who have grown up with suburbia to the idea of urbanism,” he says.

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Does density and walkability alone make something urban? Though these outer-ring WalkUPs display many of the technical metrics of a city, most have an unmistakable suburban flavor. “When you go to Tysons Corner and you don’t mistake it for a real downtown, there are two reasons,” says Nathan Norris, director of implementation for the planning firm Placemakers. “One is the nature of the blocks — they’re what we call super-suburban blocks,” meaning they’re many times larger than your average city block, which has a perimeter of around 1,800 feet. Why does that matter? “Because humans, we bore easily,” says Norris. “If I have to walk too far without seeing something different, I’m going to be bored. A bit part of urbanity is not boring the humans.”

Which leads to the second problem: transparency. Many city codes dictate that as much as 75 percent of buildings’ ground floors must be non-tinted, non-mirrored windows. Parts of these suburban WalkUPs have that — especially the mall-like sections — but many do not, leaving long stretches of shrubbery-adorned blank walls facing the sidewalks (and the parking lots). “No windows has the effect of killing street life,” says Norris. Creating an urban place is about more than simply adding mixed-use density and places to stroll.

They’re also often exceedingly tidy, sometimes because they’re controlled by a single developer who manages a private maintenance crew and sets rules about behavior. And WalkUPs that are built from scratch usually have few mom-and-pop stores, thanks to high rents and contracts offered to tenants promising no competition.

For all of these reasons, many of these far-flung suburban WalkUPs resemble a suburban version of a city. You can see the identity crisis at work: The WalkUP in Reston “is ringed by parking garages,” says Malouff. “There are buses that go there, but they’re not used very widely. People drive to get there.”

Robert Macfarlane, who writes our new column “A Walk on the Wild Side”, has just published a new book called “The Old Ways”. It’s about ancient paths—from the chalk landscapes of southern England to Minya Konka, a site of Buddhist pilgrimage in Tibet. Macfarlane reckons he walked more than 7,000 miles to write the book.

“If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,” says Norton. “That’s practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.” Streets back then were vibrant places with a multitude of users and uses. When the automobile first showed up, Norton says, it was seen as an intruder and a menace. Editorial cartoons regularly depicted the Grim Reaper behind the wheel. That image persisted well into the 1920s.