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.

The street in front of our hotel is about 8.3m wide. (I actually measured it.) And this is generous for Palma's Old Town. The building directly in front of us is also 6 storeys tall and has exactly zero setbacks and stepbacks. It is one straight elevation all the way up. In other words, it is an urban condition that does not follow any of today's generally accepted rules of planning. The street should be wider. And the building should have a bunch of stepbacks, right? Maybe not. Lots of people seem to love this kind of dense, unplanned, and walkable built form in Europe. Eating outside on a narrow street is a feature. But for whatever reason, when people return home, many don't seem to want it anymore, or worse, they actively oppose it. It's an interesting dynamic that I don't fully understand. Because personally, I enjoy visiting places that I could see myself living in. What about you?

I was speaking with our lawyer in Park City this week, and he commented to me that he wouldn't be going into the office next week because Old Town would be too hectic with the Sundance Film Festival going on. His office is right on Main Street.

When small mountain towns host major international events, there are going to be spillover effects. This is true of Sundance in Park City (population ~8,500) and it is true of the World Economic Forum, which was hosted in Davos (population ~10,000) this past week.

Perhaps the most obvious impact is that people can rent out their homes for large sums of money. And so lots of people both do that and try to profit maximize while doing it. Here are some anecdotes from Davos (via NZZ):

Ten days before the WEF, there are still 25 listings on the Airbnb internet platform. The prices here range from 8,000 to 56,000 Swiss francs. The son of an apartment owner says that his family receives 12,000 francs a week for their three-room apartment, which is quite close to the convention center. However, he says he assumes that they could achieve significantly more. The family rents out the apartment through an intermediary.

Another interesting impact in Davos happens on the retail side (also via NZZ):

According to expert Robert Weinert, the average rent per square meter of retail space in Davos is 248 Swiss francs. A businessperson renting a storefront of 80 square meters must therefore pay almost 20,000 francs in rent per year. However, if that business vacates the store during the WEF, it can earn 60,000 francs – three times the annual rent for the facilities.

What this means is that some retail spaces remain vacant all year, just so that they can be available for when the WEF arrives and people need temporary commercial spaces. And why wouldn't this be the case: 20,000 francs for the year or 60,000 francs for a week. If I'm the landlord, I'll take the additional 40,000 francs and not think about the property for the rest of the year.

Of course, if you're trying to create a vibrant community with things, like, occupied retail spaces, then this isn't ideal.