I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff?

But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built.

It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the widespread use of the car, and there's a lot of truth to this. (This makes me wonder if self-driving cars will eventually create a similar "pre and post" divide in our built environment.)

However, not everyone sees it this way. I just read an article about how residents in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are vehemently opposed to the construction of sidewalks in areas where there are currently none.

Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention to the suburban sidewalk wars, but this is the first time I've seen this level of opposition. Some people view sidewalks as a feature, and some people view them as a bug. Clearly, there are residents in the Twin Cities who view them as the latter.

Why? Because they interrupt large front lawns:

“I chose my home with the nice big lawn out front,” Edina resident Melissa Cohen told the mayor and City Council at a Dec. 8 hearing about proposed sidewalks for streets in Prospect Knolls. “We are in a quiet neighborhood. This does not require a sidewalk.”

And for some people, they're unsightly:

In 2007, a Golden Valley resident named Charles Upham told the Star Tribune “sidewalk is a four-letter word. U-G-L-Y.”

You could call it a kind of rural ideology, where sidewalks symbolize the opposite: the city. I suppose there are also practical considerations, like the fact that snow removal on sidewalks often becomes the homeowner's responsibility.

But it appears to me that a large part of this opposition stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of pastoral exclusivity, even if we're talking about higher-density suburbs and the opposition is masquerading as an environmental preservationist movement.

On the flip side, there are practical benefits to sidewalks. They give you a safe place to walk. So, what I wonder is to what extent are the people opposing these sidewalks also anti-walkers? Or is it that the traffic flows in these neighborhoods are so low that people simply feel comfortable walking on the street, like here?

Not surprisingly, there's lots of data to support that people who live in neighborhoods with sidewalks are significantly more likely to walk and be active. If you want people to walk more, build sidewalks. If you want people to ride bikes more, build bicycle lanes. And if you want people to drive more, build roads and highways.

This is how this behavioral stuff works. We're not completely independent actors; we're products of our environment.

Cover photo from The Minnesota Star Tribune

Tokyo is a city of contrasts. It is both hyper-modern and steeped in tradition. It is known for art, architecture, design, and fashion, yet it's also a city that — through its built form — makes the argument that architecture is irrelevant.

While the city certainly has countless examples of remarkable architecture, the vast majority of its buildings are arguably just that — buildings. They are a nondescript part of the urban fabric that give back through their siting, scale, rhythm, and mix of uses rather than their raw architectural qualities. Sometimes you may not even be able to see the building past all the signage.

If you were looking for a city to support the argument that urbanism matters more than architecture, I think Tokyo would be a good place to start.

What Tokyo does so successfully is ground-up urbanism (as opposed to top-down master planning). Flexible permissions, mixed-use zones by default, and an orientation around rail have allowed Tokyo to organically evolve into one of the most livable global cities on the planet.

In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any city of this magnitude that is simultaneously this livable. Which makes me wonder: Are we spending too much time worrying about architecture?

It is common for big cities to have design review processes. These typically consist of a panel of experts who evaluate new development proposals based on their architectural and urban design qualities. The comments that come back might suggest that a long facade be visually "broken up," or that additional stepbacks be introduced in order to mitigate the impact on the street and improve sky views. It's a process that can be lengthy.

But what Tokyo tells us is that, while architecture matters a great deal, it may not be the most important thing to focus on from a city-building standpoint. What matters more is the space and relationship between these buildings, the uses and permissions granted to their occupants, and the overall relationship to transit infrastructure. Here, urbanism is more critical than architecture.

If you buy this argument, then design review panels aren't actually our most pressing priority. Instead, what we should have is a kind of urbanism review panel. But rather than react to new developments, its job would be to go out and proactively identify and fix bad urbanism: this street is too narrow, this street is too wide, OMG what were we thinking here, and so on.

Then, when a new development proposal comes along, this panel would get out of the way and let the market decide what it wants to be. It would trust that it had done its job and laid the right preconditions for good urbanism to emerge.

Sounds weird and unsettling, doesn't it? Except, we might be pleasantly surprised by what it would lead to.

Cover photo by Fred Nassar on Unsplash

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.