Walkable city

Like Owen, Jacobs was fighting a dominant ethos that more green spaces make cities more healthy, when in truth their microcosmic appearance belies their macrocosmic impact. By separating useful things from each other, they can contribute to an automotive culture that exacerbates pollution. Jacobs’s case in point was Los Angeles, with the most open space and the most smog of any contemporary American city.14 This doesn’t mean that we should stop building parks—Chicago and Seattle are two cities with new, big, expensive waterfront parks that nobody regrets—but rather that we shouldn’t allow open space to rip apart the urban fabric of our walkable city centers. Every city, particularly if it is to attract millennials, needs to provide easy access to nature, including regionally scaled trails for hiking and biking. Likewise, frequent small pocket parks and playgrounds are key for retaining citizens into their parenting years. But meeting these needs is a very different brief from turning the city into a garden. Current impulses to make our downtowns more sustainable by filling them with pervious surfaces, prairie grass, and the latest craze—“rain gardens”●— threaten to erase one of the key characteristics that distinguishes cities from the suburbs that remain their principal competition.

Indeed, it was desire to somehow magically merge city with country that created the environmental, social, and economic disaster that is sprawl. Still, it is common to come across architecture-school proposals and design-competition entries that have us questing for “a new and unprecedented relationship between man and nature,”■ as if there is some undiscovered way to improve the city by diluting its best qualities. We know better. And we know that central among these qualities is the street life that is only possible in a truly urban environment, where there are more buildings than bushes.