When it comes to cities, quality of life is a subjective measure. Some people may prefer a small city where homes are more affordable and commute times are negligible, while others may find the unique amenities of a big city more appealing — enough to outweigh the negatives.

Whatever the exact case, there are some obvious negatives that come with urban scale. The usual suspects are high housing costs, traffic congestion, noise and pollution, crime and safety concerns, and the list goes on. But is it universally true that quality of life has to decline as a city grows?

I don't think so at all. I wasn't able to find a good primary source on this topic, but the obvious example and outlier that comes to mind is Tokyo. It is both the largest metropolitan area in the world and a city that consistently ranks near the top of most quality of life indices.

So how do they do it?

There are lots of ingredients that go into a city like Tokyo, but I would argue that one of if not its most important, is its transit network. Tokyo has one of the highest rail modal splits and one of the lowest driving rates in the world. And it's the only way a city of this scale could actually function as efficiently as it does.

This is not me being an ideologue (which I am sometimes called); it is me being a pragmatist. Show me a big global city with more than 10 million people that is oriented around the car and does not have a traffic congestion problem, and I'll happily change my mind.

Cover photo by Leongsan on

So what did we uncover during yesterday's great urban design debate?

If I can extract one overarching takeaway, it's maybe this one: We need to be big and bold (have a compelling vision!), while at the same time getting out of the way of small-scale urban innovation. Joe Berridge, for example, felt strongly that Toronto is not taking full advantage of its waterfront. We've been too focused on bike lanes and parks, rather than on creating noteworthy global draws and aggressively marketing ourselves externally. Toronto needs its Sydney moment — something like a globally significant Opera House that attracts people from all around the world. I don't disagree. Cities need to do things that are remarkable.

At the same time, we spent a lot of time talking about the micro scale. Some of the most loved urban environments from around the world have the simplest built form: fine-grained and humble buildings fronting onto human-scaled streets — streets like Ossington in Toronto and seemingly every street in Paris. But that was then. This kind of built environment is mostly incongruent with how we plan and develop new communities today. We develop big, we impose top-down planning, and we no longer have the same inherent flexibility that our older building stock had.

Take, for instance, Toronto's East Bayfront, which is where this conference is taking place. It's a recently developed community with many or most of the hallmarks that constitute good urban design today: handsome architecture (including mass-timber buildings), pedestrian-friendly streets, well-designed public realms, and more. And yet, the area is largely void of any urban vibrancy. Other than the boardwalk along the water and a handful of restaurant patios, there's very little public life. Many of the buildings are also connected by bridges, which is not in and of itself a problem, but it further removes life from the street.

Here are a few photos of the area that I took while leaving the panel:

Compare this to a random street in Tokyo:

The buildings are ugly, or at least nondescript. None of the tenants are following a consistent signage standard. There are no sidewalks. And there's an overhead rail line bisecting the street. And yet, it's vibrant. It's a successful urban street. Most older cities have areas akin to this, but it's a real challenge to create it from scratch in new developments (see above). I'm very interested in this challenge and, as we have talked about many times before on the blog, I think part of the answer lies in allowing flexibility and ground-up change. It's impossible to predict what an area could become and, for that reason, top-down planning will never get it exactly right.

Thinking about it this way, urban design isn't dead; it just maybe needs a refocusing. And what I propose is approaching it along the lines of Jeff Bezos' old management adage: You want to be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details.