The below Twitter thread, initiated by Brent Toderian, is a great collection of some of the "best streets in the world." https://twitter.com/brenttoderian/status/1153742040221356032?s=21 I would encourage you to click through and have a scroll. The one thing that you'll likely notice about almost all of the contributions is that the streets tend to be fairly dense/urban and they tend to be oriented around the pedestrian. No surprise there. My only qualm with some, but not all, of these streets is that -- while beautiful from an urban design standpoint -- many of them can feel quite touristy and/or commercially generic. They are the street you go to when you're visiting the place, but they are perhaps lacking in urban authenticity. I don't mean to take anything away from the beautifully designed streets in the above thread. In fact, some of them aren't at all commercial and are simply magical places to be -- period, full stop. See, for example, La Condensa (neighborhood) in Mexico City. My argument is simply that the natural cycle of cities and neighborhoods sometimes means that the best streets for new ideas and small businesses are maybe not the most beautiful ones. Part of this is a function of rents and part of this is function of the fact that the best cities are constantly reinventing themselves.

Last week I went for a tour of Sidewalk Labs' "307" workshop here in Toronto. In it they have a generative urban design tool that allows you to toggle things like density, building shape, building height, the amount of green space, the distribution of green space, and so on.

Perhaps some of you have seen it or used it before. The controls look like this:

After you're done playing around with the dials, you are then able to provide feedback on the design that you've birthed through two very simple feedback buttons. One is a happy face. And the other is a sad face. (I wonder if the placement of these two buttons has any impact on responses.)

What I like about this tool is that it immediately imposes a certain degree of reality and it forces you, the participant, to acknowledge the various trade-offs that need to be considered when you're designing and planning a city.

For example, if you want lots of parks and public spaces, but you want to hold population density constant -- perhaps because you're trying to make use of an investment made in transit infrastructure -- well then you'll need to accept taller buildings.

A very similar thought process goes into each and every development pro forma as we all try and manage the myriad of competing interests. But I guess this is also true of life in general. There are gives and there are takes.

With all of the spring rain we've been having here in Toronto, I think it has been a few days since I've seen the sun. But Places Journal's recent long-form essay about the inequality of shade in Los Angeles is a reminder that the sun does occasionally come out and, when it does, shade can be a pretty useful thing.

Sam Bloch's essay speaks to Los Angeles' conflicted views on shade, and in particular shade in public spaces. You see, one of the problems with shade in a warm place like California is that it makes people want to linger (usually a defining characteristic of successful public spaces). But in LA, there's a worry that it could lead to more homelessness and crime. Trees create places to hide.

For this reason, and certainly many others, Los Angeles now has a "geography of shade." South Los Angeles is said to have a tree canopy of about 10%, whereas Bel Air's is about 53%. Shade has become a kind of luxury. As a point of comparison, the US national average is somewhere around 27%.

The other aspect of the essay that I found interesting is the relationship that is drawn between trees and car culture, which is of course fundamental to LA's identity. Here's an excerpt:

Despite that early fame, palm trees did not really take over Los Angeles until the 1930s, when a citywide program set tens of thousands of palms along new or recently expanded roads. They were the ideal tree for an automobile landscape. Hardy, cheap, and able to grow anywhere, palm trees are basically weeds. Their shallow roots curl up into a ball, so they can be plugged into small pavement cuts without entangling underground sewer and water mains or buckling sidewalks. 

Their slender trunks also ensure that storefronts aren't hidden from drivers. In 1391 alone, the city planted some 25,000 palm trees. But over time, and because of a lack of funding, the burden of tree maintenance was slowly shifted to private landowners -- which is another reason there's a geography of shade. It reflects who had and has the means.

Photo by Viviana Rishe on Unsplash