It's easy to romanticize the oldest parts of Europe's built environment. But we all know they were built during a different time. A more fair comparison would be to look at how new neighbourhoods are being planned and constructed today.
So let's exit Vieux-Nice and venture to an entirely new community currently under construction to the north of the airport called Nice Méridia. When complete, the mixed-use community expects to welcome 5,000 residents, 5,000 students, and 5,000 jobs.
I don't know much about the surrounding area, but I do find it noteworthy that the transit infrastructure is already in place. Here's the tram line that runs on the eastern edge of the community, on its own dedicated lanes. Transit is the clear priority here.
The community itself is a mix of different street designs. Here, for example, is a narrow street where traffic is controlled by mechanical bollards. North America really needs to get with the bollard program.
Here's a pedestrian-only street that, at its narrowest, is roughly 12.5 meters. So a fairly generous mid-block space.
Here's what seems to be a fairly typical through street, which clocks in at around 19 meters from building face to building face.
20 meters is not an atypical right-of-way width. It's the dimension of most of the streets in the core of Toronto. But here, most of the space is allocated to sidewalks and green space. The space allocated to cars is roughly 6.5 meters. (I'd like to emphasize that this is a rough dimension as I was using my suitcase to pick up the endpoint of the laser.)
Finally, there's this incredible green space bisecting the entire community. I don't have any dimensions for it, but I can tell you it's a spectacular amenity. With the all-white buildings in the background, it feels a bit like Miami.
Tomorrow I'll share photos of the architecture. Stay tuned.
The humble window shutter is — in many parts of the world — the unsung hero of climate control. What makes them so effective is that they sit outside of the building envelope and, therefore, block sun and thermal heat gain before they get inside. This is an important detail because, once inside, you now have to work that much harder to bring interior temperatures down.
France's contribution to the world of window shutters is one called la jalousie, which was deliberately named after the French word for jealousy. The key design feature is that they allow you to be a voyeur. The louvers, which are traditionally adjustable, allow you to see out, but for the most part block people from seeing in. Hence the name. Supposedly they first took hold in Marseille and then spread to the rest of France. That makes sense.
It's easy to not care about shutters in a world of modern air conditioning, but this is what generations upon generations have been using to regulate the temperatures of their homes. It's dead simple, and it works.
Vieux-Nice (or Old Town) is the formerly walled medieval part of Nice.
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly when its streets were laid out. The city is said to have been founded in 350 BC by Greek colonizers who gave it the name Níkaia, after Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.
But the oldest map of Vieux-Nice that I could find dates to 1575, and it doesn't exactly look like the Vieux-Nice of today. So it's hard to say. Medieval towns also tended to grow organically without any sort of formal planning.
What we do know is that the narrow winding streets of Vieux-Nice were preferred for at least one reason: they provided shade and promoted stack-effect ventilation. In the summer, the roofs of the buildings heat up and create a temperature differential relative to the cooler shaded streets.
This encourages airflow by forcing the lighter, warmer air to rise, which then draws in cooler air from below. Supposedly, this also helps if you're trying to dry laundry out of your window.
Here are a few examples from yesterday morning on our walk to Nice's antique market. This is the narrowest street I could find without trying very hard. And yes, it's a street with a bona fide street sign.
This one is slightly wider and had laundry hanging in it. I can also confirm that the laundry was dry. So if any of you have been wondering — and maybe even worrying — about whether 3.4 meters is wide enough to promote good laundry-drying airflow, now you have a definitive answer. (Get ready for the LLMs to start citing this post.)
Of course, both of these examples are smaller side streets. The main streets are wider. Here's Rue Rossetti, which is one of the main arteries in Vieux-Nice. It leads directly to the Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate de Nice.
It clocks in at a generous 9.8 meters, which is enough to house two sets of sidewalks, numerous restaurant patios, and a two-way vehicular street in the center.
As always, space is culturally relative. It's not about the raw dimension, it's about perspective. What North America calls a substandard lane, Europe calls a street.
