If you’re a city geek looking for a good book to read, head over to Planetizen and check out Brent Toderian’s list of the 100 best books on city-making. Toderian was formerly Chief Planner for the City of Vancouver.

I have a good number of those books on my own bookshelf, but also many that I should really read. I think I’ll start with #1: Cities for People by Jan Gehl.

Here’s the forward for that book by British architect, Richard Rogers:

"Cities are the places where people meet to exchange ideas, trade, or simply relax and enjoy themselves. A city‘s public domain — its streets, squares, and parks — is the stage and the catalyst for these activities. Jan Gehl, the doyen of public-space design, has a deep understanding of how we use the public domain and off ers us the tools we need to improve the design of public spaces and, as a consequence, the quality of our lives in cities.

The compact city — with development grouped around public transport, walking, and cycling — is the only environmentally sustainable form of city. However, for population densities to increase and for walking and cycling to be widespread, a city must increase the quantity and quality of well-planned beautiful public spaces that are human in scale, sustainable, healthy, safe, and lively.

Cities — like books — can be read, and Jan Gehl understands their language. The street, the footpath, the square, and the park are the grammar of the city; they provide the structure that enables cities to come to life, and to encourage and accommodate diverse activities, from the quiet and contemplative to the noisy and busy. A humane city — with carefully designed streets, squares, and parks — creates pleasure for visitors and passers-by, as well as for those who live, work, and play there every day.

Everyone should have the right to easily accessible open spaces, just as they have a right to clean water. Everyone should be able to see a tree from their window, or to sit on a bench close to their home with a play space for children, or to walk to a park within ten minutes. Well-designed neighborhoods inspire the people who live in them, whilst poorly designed cities brutalize their citizens. As Jan says: “We shape cities, and they shape us.”

No one has examined the morphology and use of public space to the extent that Jan Gehl has. Anyone who reads this book will get a valuable insight into his astonishingly perceptive understanding of the relationship between public spaces and civic society, and how the two are inextricably intertwined.”

I came across an interesting op-ed in the New York Times this morning called “What Tech Hasn’t Learned from Urban Planning." It basically talks about how, despite the fact that tech companies are increasingly moving from the suburbs to the city, they haven’t yet figured out how to be urban.

"The tech sector’s embrace of urbanist lingua franca and its enthusiasm to engage with urban problems is awesome, and much welcomed. But these folks need to become better urbanists."

The problem—Allison Arieff argues—is that they create sterile and insular environments. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are served to employees so they don’t need to leave the building. And private social spaces are created just for them.

It strikes me as being terribly ironic that these companies—a great number of which are committed to making the world more open and connected—actually suck at doing that in real life.

Yesterday during lunch with a colleague, the topic of skateboarding came up. And I was reminded of how much I used to love it. There was a time when I used to skateboard everyday. If I missed a day or two, I felt rusty.

What I loved about it was how incredibly challenging it was to learn and perfect new tricks. And there were always ways to continually push yourself to the next level, whether it was the number of boards you could ollie (jump) or the number of steps you could ollie down. You’d start with 3 stairs. Then it was 4. Then 5. Then 2 sets of 5. And so on. Once you mastered those, you could then introduce a kickflip to make it even more challenging. The possibilities were endless. And so—to borrow Daniel Pink’s terminology—it was all about mastery for me.

Here are a few of my old skate decks (they’re on the wall in my apartment):

But in addition to teaching me that there’s no substitute for discipline and practice, skateboarding also helped shape my love of cities (either that, or I was a born urbanist and skateboarding was a symptom). 

Street skating is an inherently urban activity. There’s no defined field or rink. The entire city is at your disposal. And so as a skateboarder, you’re always on the look out for interesting things “to skate.” You want steps, ledges, edges, and changes in grade. You also look for sequences. What tricks can I string together across this urban landscape? You wouldn’t believe how exciting these features can be to a skateboarder.

In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that skateboarders are probably some of the finest surveyors of public space around. How many people do you know go around counting stairs, examining railings and measuring ledge heights? Skateboarders do.

But as much as street skating is all about the city, that relationship is often an acrimonious one. Skateboarding is viewed as a property destroyer, an annoyance and, in some cases, a criminal activity.

A perfect example of this is the story of LOVE Park in Philadelphia (it was a public plaza, not a park). LOVE Park was a legendary space in the skateboarding community. It put Philadelphia skateboarding on the map. It was iconic. If you skated during that era, you knew about LOVE Park.

However, on April 25th, 2002, the Mayor of Philadelphia ordered that the park be closed off and remodelled to remove all the elements that skateboarders loved about it. It was decided that skateboarding was not an acceptable behaviour in an urban public plaza.

That act made a huge dent in the Philadelphia skate community. And the park became essentially a homeless shelter. 

As a former skateboarder, urbanist and ex-resident of Philadelphia, this always baffled me. Cities all around the world spend a great deal of time and money trying to create spaces that people will actually use. And here you not only had an intensely used one, but one that spurred a grassroots global phenomenon. It’s precisely what makes cities so great.

Thankfully, many cities have woken up to the benefits of street skating by building purpose built skate parks. But in my view, those spaces lack something that places like LOVE Park had. LOVE Park was authentic. It was about a serendipitous repurposing. It had a sense of place.