Project for Public Spaces » book review

Book Review: Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form

Brendan Crain — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:55:03 +0000

Arguments about density are often front and center when walkability is being discussed. We know that density is an important factor in encouraging more walking (and discouraging driving), but walkability is a particularly complex, and seemingly ephemeral quality. Whether or not a person chooses to walk depends on so many factors beyond just the physical fabric of a place, from the socioeconomic to the psychological. As a result, there’s not always a one-to-one relationship between a neighborhood’s form and its walkability.

In a recent article looking at a study that found no link between perceived walkability and actual walking habits among women in Seattle, University of Washington professor Cindy Perry (who led the study) explained that “Just having a beautiful environment isn’t going to move people from the couch to walking…A walkable environment can help, but it’s not enough.”

The results here seem to support an argument that Placemaking advocates have been making for some time now: that it is not physical density itself, but the richness of a place that influences peoples’ decisions on whether to walk or use other modes of transportation to get around their communities. A dense place may very well still be a total place desert depending on how it is arranged, while there are scores of small towns and villages around the world that, while not physically dense, feature a rich mix of overlapping uses that make walking the default choice.

To anyone who’s tired of fighting an uphill battle in arguing for increased density in order to make the case for walkability, Julie Campoli’s new book Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form will seem a god-send. Campoli, one of the co-authors of Visualizing Density (also from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy), has put together a powerful follow-up that brings the reader down into the streets of a dozen walkable neighborhoods that “represent diverse regions and vary greatly in density, [while still meeting] the minimum density necessary to support transit and retail services.”

“Paging through for the first time, it is hard not to be dazzled…”

Each of these twelve places is distinct, in terms of everything from street pattern to aesthetics and architectural style. Together, these very different neighborhoods (from Brooklyn’s industrious, tightly-packed Greenpoint neighborhood to Columbus, OH’s relaxed & funky Short North) make a strong case for density by focusing, instead, on richness. “Density is often defined in terms of population per square mile,” writes Campoli in the book’s introduction. “We need to think about urban density in more complex ways…building density measured not by the square mile but by the foot.”

After the intro, the reader is brought through a succession of twelve case studies, each with extensive panoramic photography of key neighborhood streets stretching across the tops of the corresponding pages. Paging through for the first time, it is hard not to be dazzled by how well these images communicate almost everything that the companion text could hope to say. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these pictures together are worth a million. The full aesthetic range of density is on display here, all at a human, street-level scale. While Visualizing Density was a powerful tool for urban planners, Made for Walking has even greater potential, as a tool for convincing just about anyone with eyes that a dense environment can be beautiful, enjoyable, and even peaceful–in short, whatever the community that occupies it wishes it to be.

Accompanying these panoramas are a selection of smaller photos of various aspects of each neighborhood (local landmarks, housing stock, parks, etc.), as well as a series of detailed maps of everything from the area’s green space and pedestrian network, to intersection and housing density, to the variety of local services. The clustering of color-coded dots in that last set is telling: restaurants and retail play a big role in each example, but the maps highlight the mixing of different types of local services (health, civic, financial) that create the richness required for promoting walkable lifestyles. These maps also layer in mass transit routes (bus, train, and streetcar) to show that these high-functioning local destinations exist within a larger networks.

All of this information, in concert, could have been overwhelming. In Made for Walking, it is instead immersive. Campoli pops in at the start of each section to provide a bit of contextual and historical info, but the majority of the book’s written arguments are in the front and back of the book. Flipping through each case study in between feels uplifting, as if you are walking through the neighborhood documented on the page.

Ultimately, the book is an impressive illustration of how, after reaching a baseline density, form can be remarkably flexible. The author argues persuasively for the role that form plays in creating walkable neighborhoods, but as a whole Made for Walking seems better understood as a compelling illustration of density as more of a function of place than the other way around. The call for measuring density by the foot is essentially a call for measuring walkability by the richness of place. These are soft metrics, but creating great communities is more art than science.

Book Review: Helsinki Beyond Dreams

Brendan Crain — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:44:15 +0000

If anything is often lost in translation about the concept of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper Placemaking strategies, it is the idea that they are meant to be part of long-term efforts to create dynamic public spaces. The real value of a parklet or a pop-up is in its ability to get people talking, and to change perceptions about how a space can be used. To those who would argue that LQC interventions “aren’t enough,” the answer is “Exactly.” They’re merely paving the way by building new constituencies for transformative change in public spaces.

Hella Hernberg captures this nicely in her new book, Helsinki Beyond Dreams. In presenting a wide variety of projects and events that reflect the LQC ethos of citizens of the Finnish capital, the editor firmly underlines the idea that each of these pieces is part of a larger awakening around the idea that each citizen should have the opportunity to help shape their city. “People are motivated by doing concrete things that have an impact–however temporary–on their environment,” Hernberg writes. “Soft criticism of the city’s bureaucracy is being channeled into urban gardens and street parties.”

A city cannot meet every need of every person, but the LQC approach allows more people to make their desires known, so that officials and designers can be more responsive when making permanent changes to public spaces. This approach also has a way of bubbling over from one project, and changing the way that people think about public spaces far across town. Early on, Helsinki Beyond Dreams traces the title city’s contemporary fondness for LQC interventions back to the formation of Elmu, a live music association that took over an abandoned warehouse in 1979 and created an alternative cultural hub. One of the founders of the group, Teemu Lehto, explains the project’s origins frankly: “There were lots of enthusiastic bands and audiences, but simply no places to meet, so Elmu was born.”

The point made here seems central to the book’s message: we earn our public spaces. The most important aspect of successful Placemaking is that the people who are intended to use a space be engaged in the process of shaping it. If the people in charge of a city’s public spaces don’t adequately meet citizens’ needs, those citizens will go out and make their own great places, wherever they can find room. “We should endeavor to make our city a paradise,” Lehto says in the book. “Otherwise, it may turn into an empire of greed. It’s entirely up to us to decide what kind of city we want to live in.”

A map of several of the major sites in transition around central Helsinki; Kalasatama is site #2.

Many people these days feel disconnected from the processes that shape their neighborhoods and their public spaces. LQC projects are a way of grabbing the “low-hanging fruit,” so to speak, by showing people who are already looking for ways to get engaged in their cities but are unsure or tentative about how to start that they don’t need millions of dollars to start driving real change. In a chapter on the Kalasatama Temporary site, Hernberg writes that the idea behind this LQC cultural center “was based on a hunch that there were active people in Helsinki who would organize inspiring things–if they were given a little push to do so.”

The results, as chronicled in Helsinki Beyond Dreams, are truly remarkable. The site has transformed an abandoned industrial site into a place for experimentation; its organizers acknowledge that it’s been a learning process for citizens and city officials, and that there is value in that process. “The first years,” Hernberg writes, “have given hints as to what kind of methods and tools are needed to make the interaction between the city and its residents run more smoothly.”

At PPS, we have a term for places like Kalasatama Temporary: we call them “bureaucracy-free zones.” At their heart, many Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper projects are zones of this type, to varying degrees. While Kalasatama itself is exceptional for its flexibility and its inclusiveness, every community garden and painted piazza is an attempt to strip away some layers of the old way of doing things, and try something new. Helsinki Beyond Dreams illustrates how LQC interventions add up to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts by generating a more robust public discussion around public space. For that alone–never mind the crisp writing and beautiful illustrations–the book is well worth a read.

One of Helsinki Beyond Dreams' charming illustrations by Sac Magique