A wiser way of counting

Legare Street, Charleston. Reprinted with permission of John Wily & Sons, John Massengale and Victor Dover, Street Design

Note: This is the concluding essay in a 3-part series. The first discussed building communities of synergy and the second reported on the many business and demographic groups that could make up a coalition for urban place. 

Those who most want change in the built environment — the individuals and groups least likely to be satisfied with sprawl — can accept a new urban math.

One example of that new mathematics: A 9-foot travel lane on a thoroughfare costs less than a 12-foot travel lane — and it may provide more prosperity, safety, and freedom, all of which adds up to a better life for ourselves and our children. This is so because when traffic slows, more people walk. When more people walk, the stores do better, and builders provide housing. More stores and houses mean there’s more places to go nearby. More places to go means you are freer and you dump fewer carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Fewer carbon emissions means a better future.

All that from 9-foot lanes? Yes, narrower lanes can help. But those are only one element. Other elements, such as street trees, a new plaza, on-street parking, a form-based code, a transit line, or a new town center, could also be catalysts for this kind of progress. A better-connected street network or a boulevard that replaces an urban freeway may simultaneously encourage economic development, enlarge tax revenues, and improve health. It’s urbanism, and it adds up—more than most people yet realize.

To fully achieve their goals, bicycling, walkability, and transit activists, city boosters, developers, businesses, sustainable development proponents, and people who just want to live in urban places are called to do more than push their own agendas. They could, at least occasionally, gather under a big tent — one that recognizes that cities and towns are more than the sum of their parts.

These disparate groups don’t have to agree on everything, or buy into every smart growth theory. They don’t have to love every aspect of city living. But once they agree that the pieces of communities can be put together in surprisingly synergistic ways—which generate economic and social value—the decisions become easier. Complete streets are the baseline. Sprawl is not good enough. Investments in transit are no longer just about transportation.

Conventional suburban thoroughfares and sprawl represent a mechanistic view of place: A house is just a house, a store just a store. It doesn’t matter where you put them; just keep them apart. Connect them with a road that accommodates fast traffic, because that’s the only practical way to get from A to B.

The battle between urbanism and sprawl is often portrayed as city versus suburb. That’s a false dichotomy. It implies that “suburbs” and “sprawl” are synonymous and that cities are necessarily in competition with suburbs. Neither is true. The battle has been cast as one between drivable and walkable places. That’s part of the story and it is easy to explain. It’s shorthand, a code phrase for a different approach to planning entirely.

Alternative terms are “drive-only” and “drive-optional” places, terms that hint at something beyond walkability: freedom and lower costs, both of which are always strong selling points in America. But I don’t think we should stop there. What some of us would like to see is more emphasis on the magic of cities and towns, the appeal of meaningful places. The idea of placemaking gets closer to how cities and towns actually inspire people.

Most discussions on contemporary urbanism, especially in the mass media, get bogged down on this: Cities have problems. Crime, schools, and racial politics come to mind. Cities are not for everybody. So what? The walkable, mixed-use city or town is the only concept that allows a community to become more than the sum of its parts.

Much work has been devoted to pinning down the exact advantages of walkability: A higher Walk Score increases housing values (an average of $1,850 per point); walkability boosts social mobility, according to a University of Arizona study; deaths by trauma are lower in cities because of fewer car fatalities; per-acre property tax revenues are 10 times higher with smart growth; cities reduce household carbon emissions by 30 percent or more; cities boost productivity (2 to 4 percent higher with a doubling of density); mixed-use environments hold their values better—the list goes on.

Walkability is a key indicator of the new urban math. Making a place walkable achieves much more than merely helping people to get around on foot, and the numbers from a broad range of studies prove it. At the same time, the possibilities for improving communities go beyond mere numbers.

Climate change, energy, the economy, inequality — all of these issues could be addressed to a degree simply by planning our communities to be more than the sum of their parts. Even people who don’t care about most of these issues would benefit from synergistic growth. They would get more open space and less congestion, for example, if other people are able to choose urban living.

This also hints at a way to negotiate differences and find common interests among factions that favor places in which cars are optional instead of mandatory. Such factions are numerous. They include traditional and modernist architects, both of whom, despite their contrasting sensibilities, tend to love cities. They include advocates of bike lanes, and urban retailers that want on-street parking. They include real estate developers and environmentalists. They include cities and their suburbs, both of whom want to attract the “creative class” that is associated with prosperity. The goal is to find solutions that go beyond zero-sum, that provide a win for more than one side.

Those who are inclined to believe in the synergistic potential of communities possess more power than they know. They have more in common than they’re aware of. They may not even know that they believe in this idea, but on some level they do. They don’t even need to be convinced. They only have to be reminded what’s in it for them, asked to join, and shown what to do.

Come together, right now, for urban place.

Robert Steuteville is editor and executive director of Better! Cities & Towns.

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