What kind of city do people want to live in? What makes for a vibrant street life? What kind of city is safe and healthy for its citizens?

Jeff Speck’s Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America has one answer to all these questions: walkability. Walkability, a score that ranges from 0-100, is defined as how accessible destinations are on foot. It is walkability, he argues, that can help city decision-makers answer those questions smartly. Think about all the ways in which you get around: walking, biking, taking public transport, or driving. In what places do you choose to walk? Where do you choose to drive?

Walkable Cities is an eye-opening journey in learning how our responses to these questions are not wholly our own, and this is completely intentional. These responses are the result of subtle nudging by designers and planners. He tells us what those nudges are.

First, let’s talk about why we should care about walkability. Walkability in cities is not only preferable but crucial in numerous ways: for health reasons, safety, and demographic shifts. Did you know that a shift in how different generations of Americans desire urban life can be explained by their TV shows? 70’s shows like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family portrayed cities and city life very differently from 90’s shows like Sex and the City and Friends: what was once dirty and dangerous in the American consciousness is now vibrant and interesting. People want to move to cities with energetic street life, and in order to attract them, we must improve walkability in cities.

The meat of Speck’s book details the 10 commandments of what he playfully terms “The General Theory of Walkability”. Each prescription is categorized into the useful walk, the safe walk, the comfortable walk, and the interesting walk. All four traits must be achieved in a city in order to successfully coax out what Speck calls the “extremely fragile species” of pedestrian.

If your city has ever been subject to road widenings, “Step 1: Put Cars in their Place” will explain how this comes about. Congestion is a universal problem for cities and towns of all sizes. You might think that because demand (drivers) outstrips supply (pavement), the simple solution would be to just increase the supply (more lanes). This, unfortunately, is not the answer, due to a something called induced demand: when roads are widened to alleviate congestion, the time cost of driving is reduced, which encourages more people drive, negating whatever benefits the new road was intended to create.

This chapter showcases Speck’s smart, sarcastic, and at times biting writing, like when he goes on a tirade on the uselessness and dog-headed profession of traffic engineers, who cannot seem to grasp this concept. Tradition, faulty computer models, and misplaced incentives ensure that engineers will always be in favor of more lanes and wider roads, resulting in narrowed sidewalks, fewer trees, and a less hospitable environment for the pedestrian.

Speck also has a knack for combining a bit of evolutionary psychology with architectural history and presenting them in a digestible way. For instance, he discusses how to create a comfortable walk for the pedestrian, by “shaping spaces”. What does he mean by comfortable walk? Animals require prospect and refuge when they travel: they need things to look forward to and places to feel safe in. For humans in cities, this means finding the balance enough open space and a sufficient sense of enclosure. Too much or too little of either discourages the driver from becoming the pedestrian. The next time you’re in a public space, look at where people gather. You won’t find them in exposed open spaces.

Many cities get this balance wrong, and Speck attributes this to the conceptual shift from figural space to figural object in modern city planning. Figural space is the attitude that buildings must accommodate the spaces in between them to facilitate civic life and create “outdoor living rooms”. Paris is a good example of this.

However, modern urbanism was founded on the “cult of the figural object”, which views buildings as sculptures, without regard for the space in between or the pedestrians who navigate them. Boston’s City Hall, a famously brutalist building, sits adjacent to a notoriously bleak and open plaza, lacking the comforting sense of enclosure that would attract wayfarers. (For a scathing review on City Hall, see Paul McMorrow’s Boston Globe column on why it should be torn down.)

Speck’s personality comes through in his writing, full of sharp wit and snark, making Walkable City an engaging read. The reader’s inner monologue will be constantly buzzing with a-ha moments that can be applicable to any built environment people find themselves in. I found myself hanging on to his words like they were spoken from a walkability Messiah, supplemented with just enough statistics and theory to convince and not overwhelm. Walkable City will get you to rethink your town or city in a whole new way. How does your city score?

Source image: https://www.businessdestinations.com/destinations/the-worlds-most-walkable-cities/