Livable Cities
Introduction
A city is a Dynamic Equilibrium at the largest scale a person inhabits directly. Its condition is held by continuous activity, and the qualities that make it liveable are properties of that activity rather than of the built fabric alone. A street is safe because people are on it. A neighborhood is legible because it is used. Neither state survives being left alone.
Liveability is therefore measurable through behavior rather than through appearance. The relevant questions are how many people are outside, how long they stay, how far children travel unaccompanied, and how many people a resident knows on their own street.
Traffic and acquaintance
Donald Appleyard and Mark Lintell's study of three residential streets in San Francisco, published in 1972, is the clearest measurement of how a single variable reshapes social life. The streets were comparable in every respect except traffic volume.
- On the light traffic street, about 2,000 vehicles per day, residents reported an average of 3.0 friends and 6.3 acquaintances on the block.
- On the heavy traffic street, about 16,000 vehicles per day, the figures were 0.9 friends and 3.1 acquaintances.
Residents of the heavy street also drew their sense of home as a smaller area, and reported the space as somewhere to pass through rather than to occupy. The physical fabric was similar. The equilibrium the street settled into was not.
Design responses
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), argued that safety on a street is produced by continuous casual use, and that the problem is one of organized complexity rather than of disorder.
- Christopher Alexander's "A City is Not a Tree" (1965) argued that planned cities fail by imposing hierarchies where real cities carry overlapping sets.
- Jan Gehl's Life Between Buildings (1971) established the practice of counting people rather than vehicles. Copenhagen's Strøget was pedestrianized in 1962 and served as the long-running case study.
- Woonerf schemes in the Netherlands from the 1970s reduced the legal and physical separation between vehicle and pedestrian space so that drivers were obliged to negotiate rather than proceed by right.
- Hans Monderman's shared space work, notably at the Laweiplein in Drachten, removed signals and markings from junctions on the argument that removing the appearance of certainty raises attention and lowers speed.
What Gropius recorded
Gropius's 1954 notes on Japanese settlement describe the same equilibrium from the other direction. He found villages without derelict lots, dumped rubbish or waste ground, and attributed the standard of repair to a clan structure under which building a house was a shared obligation.[1][2] Maintenance was continuous and distributed, which is what holds a settlement in condition without an enforcement apparatus.
Two of his observations bear on how such an equilibrium is defended. He reports that the removal of rocks from riverbeds and open landscape had become widespread enough to require legal prohibition.[3] And he describes a large tree left standing in the middle of a highway near Tokyo, carrying a sign put up by townspeople who had refused to give it up for traffic.[4]
He was equally clear about the pressure on that equilibrium. He names overpopulation as the central problem, describes a general cheapening under it, and notes that the architects he met were discouraged by the conditions.[5]
A liveable street does not need to:
- Be programmed with events
- Be policed to be safe
- Be signed to be understood
- Be rebuilt to change behavior
Just as a street holds its social life through the traffic it carries rather than through the buildings that line it, a liveable city is a condition maintained by use.
References
Further Reading
- Appleyard, Donald, and Mark Lintell. "The Environmental Quality of City Streets: The Residents' Viewpoint." Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. 38, No. 2 (1972).
- Gropius, Walter. "Architecture in Japan." Perspecta, Vol. 3 (1955), pp. 8–21, 79–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566830
