Walkability is not about walking

My love of walkability has little to do with actually walking.

Walking can be exhausting, slow, over-stimulating, inefficient. Walking in itself is not necessarily the best mobility option for certain people, places or situations.

So why then, have I dedicated almost all of the last 90 posts on my Instagram to the topic of walkability?

• Partly because I miss New York City where I lived for almost a decade and where I walked for nearly everything.
• Partly because I like walking. Walking makes me feel good. I enjoy walking more than driving.
• Partly because I will never tire of lamenting the fact that walking is an option unavailable to most Americans.

But mostly because walking is a proxy for a certain kind of place, a social place where people are visible.

In this way, walkable cities are places that do best what cities are meant to do: contain and display human life with all of its variety, tension, diversity, struggle and beauty.

And perhaps this is why I think so much about walkability. Because I miss seeing people. I miss inhabiting a social place.

The display of human life is critical for our flourishing on various levels. Observing our fellow humans is what will drive us into civic and political action, into art-making, literature-writing, business-starting and the further refinement of our own beliefs, values and goals.

Seeing other people also reminds us of a central truth to being human: we are social creatures as such, we are designed to exist not just as individuals but as part of, and participant in, a social community.

Compare this to the narrative proposed by the isolation and individualism of the suburb. The design of the suburb with its subdivision, stroads and shopping centers suggests that it is, in fact, our individual goals, preferences, needs and interests that are top priority. Your civic duty in this kind of place is not to collaborate with your fellow-citizen to build a better place. Your duty is to not bother your neighbor, to not make eye contact. To not bother anyone.

Walkable places also challenge our expectations about what to experience in the world once we leave home. I find non-walkable places to be organized around predictability, certainty and the minimization of surprise. I hate this. I want variety, intrigue and adventure. Adventure is uncomfortable but discomfort is good for us. The messiness of the city with all of those strangers is a starting point for thinking deeply about who we are as an individual, what it means to be part of a particular community, how our community can be better and at the very least, strengthening our resilience. In this way, the city (town, village, neighborhood) invites us to wrestle with the line between being an individual and being a member of a particular community.

In other words, I am proposing that we need to literally see people in order to understand how to be human. The answers to our deepest questions are spiritual but they are also social. We find answers to the meaning of life partly in how we collaborate and co-create with others.

The less philosophical version of this is simply that cities are more fun when you can see other people. They are more vibrant, more interesting, more amusing, more provocative. I think about my years in Brooklyn and I think about...

• Watching children run with their sleds to the park after a snowfall
• Watching people gossip over brunch at cafés with outdoor seating
• Watching couples nuzzle on park benches
• Watching street musicians jam out in the subway stations
• Watching older men play chess in the park
• Watching skateboarders show off their tricks
• Watching vendors hawk goods
• Watching very cool hipsters do their thing, whatever it is they do.

Walkable places are where you live in the magic of anything being possible because people are everywhere and they are endlessly interesting. You can walk the same route in Brooklyn everyday and always see something new and in this way, you expand your picture of what it means to be a human. Some of it good, some of it bad.

By organizing a place such that people are not visible, we create places that tell half-truths about what it means to be human.

So perhaps the point to all of this is that walkable places where humans are visible tell a more complete, if uncomfortable truth that we are not just individuals. We are, whether we like it or not, part of a community.