Being On One's Feet
Shortlist of interesting spaces
The Right to Roam
Take a Walk
Walking is a natural armature for thinking sequentially
Cities designed to facilitate walking
Let the body wander
A dot went for a walk
Who walks beside you?
20 Minutes in Manhattan
To Make a Book, Walk on a Book
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
A Book by Jean-Jacques RousseauWhat I Talk About When I Talk About Running
A Book by Haruki MurakamiWhy I Walk
An Article by Chris ArnadeOn my first day I literally walk across the city, to the extent it can be done…The next day I do another cross town walk, but in a different direction, filling in the blanks from the prior day’s walk.
Then, over the next week(s), I walk between 10 to 20 miles per day, picking and choosing from what I have seen before, highlighting what I like, what I want to know more about, refining the path, till by the end of my trip, I have a daily route that is roughly the same.
While that is certainly not the most efficient way to see a city, it is the most pleasant, insightful, and human. I don’t think you can know a place unless you walk it, because it isn’t about distance, but about content.
Walk Appeal
An Article by Steve MouzonWalk Appeal promises to be a major new tool for understanding and building walkable places, and it explains several things that were heretofore either contradictory or mysterious. It begins with the assertion that the quarter-mile radius (or 5-minute walk,) which has been held up for a century as the distance Americans will walk before driving, is actually a myth.
Both images below are at the same scale, and the yellow dashed line is a quarter-mile radius. On the left is a power center. As we all know, if you're at Best Buy and need to pick something up at Old Navy, there's no way you're walking from one store to another. Instead, you get in your car and drive as close as possible to the Old Navy front door. You'll even wait for a parking space to open up instead of driving to an open space just a few spaces away… not because you're lazy, but because it's such a terrible walking experience.
The image on the right is Rome. The circles are centered on the Piazza del Popolo (North is to the left) and the Green radius goes through the Vittorio Emanuele on the right. People regularly walk that far and then keep on walking without ever thinking of driving.
On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking
An Article by Jeremy DeSilvaYou are undoubtedly familiar with this situation: You’re struggling with a problem—a tough work or school assignment, a complicated relationship, the prospects of a career change—and you cannot figure out what to do. So you decide to take a walk, and somewhere along that trek, the answer comes to you.
Ri — The Distance Walked in an Hour
An Article by Craig ModA ri is a unit of measure, it’s about how far a person can walk in an hour at a reasonable pace. It clocks out at roughly 3.93 kilometers.
Remnants of the ri system are scattered along the old roads of Japan. During the Edo period, ri were marked recurrently by hulking earthen mounds that flanked the road — ichi-ri zuka, “one-ri mounds.” There are only a handful of “originals” left. When you pass one with an old cypress or oak growing from its center it becomes a tiny moment of celebration.
A Need to Walk
An Essay by Craig ModWalking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?
Walk and ride through London with Foster + Partners
An Article by Norman FosterWith outdoor activities being the flavour of the season, we have drawn up a few routes through the city that you could take on with friends and family. Suitable to bike or walk, each route features a selection of projects by the practice in the capital, introducing some of our ongoing work and reacquainting you with some old favourites.
Psychogeography
A Definition by Guy DebordPsychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as:
- "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
- "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life."
- "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."
New Public Sites
A Place by Graham Coreil-AllenNew Public Sites walking tours explore the history, design and uses of public spaces. Through walking tours, maps and videos, Public Artist Graham Coreil-Allen pushes pedestrian agency, interprets aspects of the everyday and investigates the negotiable nature of the built environment. New Public Sites invites you to practice “radical pedestrianism” – traveling by foot through infinite sites of freedom while testing the limits of and redefining public space.
Walking through doorways causes forgetting
A Research PaperEntering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away. Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.
Koya Bound
A Book by Craig ModKoya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.
We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.
Suburban Nation
A system for living
Unlike the traditional neighborhood model, which evolved organically as a response to human needs, suburban sprawl is an idealized artificial system. It is not without a certain beauty: it is rational, consistent, and comprehensive. Its performance is largely predictable. It is an outgrowth of modern problem solving: a system for living. Unfortunately, this system is already showing itself to be unsustainable.
The five components of sprawl
The dominant characteristic of sprawl is that each component is strictly segregated from the others.
- Housing subdivisions, also called clusters and pods
- Shopping centers, also called strip centers, shopping malls, and big-box retail
- Office parks and business parks
- Civic institutions
- Roadways
Subdivisions
Subdivisions can be identified as such by their contrived names, which tend toward the romantic—Pheasant Mill Crossing—and often pay tribute to the natural or historic resource they have displaced.
An unmade omelet
The successes of turn-of-the-century planning, represented in America by the City Beautiful movement, became the foundation of a new profession, and ever since, planners have repeatedly attempted to relive that moment of glory by separating everything from everything else. This segregation, once applied only to incompatible uses, is now applied to every use. A typical contemporary zoning code has several dozen land-use designations; not only is housing separated from industry but low-density housing is separated from medium-density housing, which is separated from high-density housing. Medical offices are separated from general offices, which are in turn separated from restaurants and shopping.
As a result, the new American city has been likened to an unmade omelet: eggs, cheese, vegetables, a pinch of salt, but each consumed in turn, raw.
Beauty and function
In truth, a lot of sprawl—primarily affluent areas—could be considered beautiful. This raises a fundamental point: the problem with suburbia is not that it is ugly. The problem with suburbia is that, in spite of all its regulatory controls, it is not functional: it simply does not efficiently serve society or preserve the environment.
Six qualities of traditional neighborhoods
- The center
- The five-minute walk
- The street network
- Narrow, versatile streets
- Mixed use
- Special sites for special buildings
Market segments
The segregation of housing by “market segment” is a phenomenon that was invented by developers who, lacking a meaningful way to distinguish their mass-produced merchandise, began selling the concept of exclusivity: If you live within these gates, you can consider yourself a success.
Cookie cutter
One term that gets a lot of play these days is “cookie cutter.” Developers are mortified about the way this term is used to describe their subdivisions, and they expend a good deal of energy—and money—avoiding it. As much as 20 percent of their construction budget goes toward the application of superficial variety—different shapes, colors, window types, different styles of tack-on ornament, French Provincial next door to California Contemporary. But these efforts are in vain, because beneath the surface articulation is a relentless repetition of the same building. The best way to create real variety is to vary not the architectural style but the building type. Indeed, in places like Georgetown, styles vary only slightly, but one never hears the term cookie cutter, thanks to the wide range of building types.
Worthwhile destinations
Pedestrian life cannot exist in the absence of worthwhile destinations that are easily accessible on foot. This is a condition that modern suburbia fails to satisfy, since it strives to keep all commercial activity well separated from housing.
The twenty-minute house
Despite the way that it sounds, the “twenty-minute house” is not a derogatory label. Quite the opposite—it refers to the fact that a house has only twenty minutes to win the affection of a potential buyer, since that is the average length of a realtor visit. The building industry has responded to this phenomenon by creating a product that is at its best for the first twenty minutes that one is in it.
Like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt
“Trying to cure traffic congestion by adding more capacity is like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt.”
Homebuilders
The term homebuilder describes the house as a product that exists independent of its context. This approach would be appropriate if houses floated freely in space, or in some other environment where actual interaction between neighbors was neither possible nor desired. But houses are not meant to exist in isolation, so to think of the individual house as the ultimate outcome of the builder’s craft robs that craft of its broader significance.
The cul-de-sac kid
In this environment where all activities are segregated and distances are measured on the odometer, a child’s personal mobility extends no farther than the edge of the subdivision. Even the local softball field often exists beyond the child’s independent reach.
The result is a new phenomenon: the “cul-de-sac kid,” the child who lives as a prisoner of a thoroughly safe and unchallenging environment.
This “isolation and boredom” is the outcome of an environment that fails to provide teenagers with the ordinary challenges of maturing, developing useful skills, and gaining a sense of self.
On-site parking
Most cities require new and renovated buildings to provide their own parking on site. This is probably the single greatest killer of urbanism in the United States today. It prevents the renovation of old buildings, since there is inadequate room on their sites for new parking; it encourages the construction of anti-pedestrian building types in which the building sits behind or hovers above a parking lot; it eliminates street life, since everyone parks immediately adjacent to their destination and has no reason to use the sidewalk; finally, it results in a low density of development that can keep a downtown from achieving critical mass.
Architectural mysticism
In response to their growing sense of insignificance, some architects have tried to regain a sense of power through what can best be described as mysticism. By importing arcane ideas from unrelated disciplines—such as contemporary French literary theory (now outdated) —by developing illegible techniques of representation, and by shrouding their work in inscrutable jargon, designers are creating increasingly smaller realms of communication, in order that they might inhabit a domain in which they possess some degree of control. Nowhere is this crisis more evident than in the most prestigious architecture schools.
Globally, locally, regionally
Think globally, act locally, but plan regionally.