Envisioning Better Cities

1/ Introduction

Take an Inspired Global Tour

You are about to embark on an exciting tour of useful, feasible, and novel ideas for making cities more livable and sustainable. You will visit cities of all sizes and locations to see what people are doing to improve their communities.

Cities around the world face common global challenges: climate change, population growth, income and health disparities, natural resource degradation, pollution, and social isolation. Each city also faces its own set of local challenges. This might include budget pressures, NIMBYism, provincialism, outdated regulatory structures, lack of political courage, or public resistance to change. We trust that you know these challenges as well. So, rather than elaborating on the negatives, the purpose of Envisioning Better Cities: A Global Tour of Good Ideas is to promote positive change. We focus on successful steps that people around the world have already taken in hopes of inspiring other change agents, like you.

Several key themes guide this journey:

It’s all about people

Cities are for people to live, work, socialize, and play. The best cities inspire a sense of belonging, pride, joy, equity, and spirit of cooperation. They make

Inviting People

A livable and sustainable city needs people of all ages and means who participate in city life for more than work. In the best cities, people enjoy exploring the streets, relaxing with their family at a park, or checking out this week’s festival. They are proud of where they live.

Urban designer Jan Gehl believes that a city must invite people to enjoy its public spaces. In his book Cities for People, he writes that too much urban planning focuses on just moving people through the city. Instead, cities should entice people to linger, explore, and engage. According to Gehl, people will do what you invite them to do. If you build more roads, they will drive more. If you create more pedestrian and bicycles pathways, they will walk and bike more. If you provide more inviting public spaces, people will visit and enjoy them.

We start this book’s global tour by insisting that inviting people is a prerequisite to more involved types of engagement covered in subsequent chapters, such as promoting inspiration, connection, and communication among people. In crafting attractive urban invitations it is useful to consider three key ideas: atmosphere, activity, and inclusivity.

Set the Atmosphere

What entices people to want to stay in a neighborhood or city? Here, we’re not talking about the housing, businesses, and services that are essential

walk almost three times more than those who must shop along the kind of major arterial roadways that dominate most U.S. cities. This finding is true regardless of economic or demographic characteristics of the people or place. This, of course, is not news for Europeans where many walkable, mixed-use areas exist such as the Friedrichshain neighborhood in Berlin (2-42) or downtown Bitola in the Republic of Macedonia (2-43).

and children for play (2-58). Other programs, such as cicLAvia in Los Angeles offer opportunities to groom future urban cyclists. This excited three-year-old races along on a street that is car-free for this event (2-59).

of our brain. For example, a dog on a skateboard is an unexpected combination of ideas, which according to scientists, activates our imagination. Exploring a new place adds variety to one’s day, offering new visual inputs that can promote creative thinking. And research shows that if that place exposes a person to nature, it enhances that possibility even more. And checking out the sidewalk art? Research reveals that experiencing others’ creative expression—whether art, poetry, or music—inspires our own creative thinking abilities.

It turns out that researchers know a lot about the conditions that promote creative thinking in individuals or groups: the conditions that inspire individuals to write, play music, paint, or innovate. We call these creative catalysts. Creative catalysts are visual prompts or environmental conditions that fire up the parts of our brain known for creative (versus more analytical) thought processes. Understanding creative catalysts offers valuable insights for making better cities because when the parts of the brain more associated with creative thinking activate, people tend to feel

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Uncommon Spaces

Another type of unexpected association is to place a function, activity, or behavior in an unusual location. This creative combination offers a sense of delight for those using these spaces in a different way. The Ponyfish Island bar and restaurant, located on a floating pylon under the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Yarra River in Melbourne, is a popular and unusual spot that provides a unique perspective of the city day and night (3-14).

Sandy beach, lounge chairs, and palm trees in the middle of Berlin or Paris? Why not? Paris Plages is a popular summer happening, conceived in 2002 by Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, that creates a series of artificial beaches along the River Seine during July and August (3-15). Visitors lounge on beach chairs, enjoy free evening concerts, kayak, and socialize. Like Paris, Berlin is nowhere near an ocean, but the city trucks in artificial sand to create beach settings at various spots along the River Spree, complete with beach bars, restaurant, and beach volleyball.

Or, why not go surfing on that urban river? In 1972, the city inserted some concrete blocks to break up the current on Munich’s Eisbach River

Plan for Variety

Do you eat the same thing for breakfast each day? Go the same way to work? Get your news from the same source? While humans often feel safe in their daily routines, research overwhelmingly points to the importance of variety as a catalyst for creativity. Conversely, a lack of variety dulls our senses and diminishes an awareness of our surroundings. Applying this knowledge to cities, we all know what happens when variety is lacking. We’ve seen this in the failures of suburban tract housing or rows of tenement housing in city planning. If one’s environment is too dull, repetitious or static, it loses its appeal – and our pride in it. In his book Happy City, Charles Montgomery offers examples of how efforts to simplify cities through rational design and order most often fail. Using the example of Brasilia, he found that people preferred their cramped market streets and the complex disorder of typical Brazilian cities. So, for a city to inspire people, it must abound in variety.

Variation in Setting

City Layout. First, one can express variety in city layout. Dover and Massengale, in their book Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns, advocate against a dominance of grids and classifications and for variation in a city’s overall street design and layout. Some grids make sense, but overall cities should contain streets of varying widths, ranging from alley to street to boulevard. Cities should have streets designated for different speeds and purposes – some that are fast and car friendly, others that are slow and bike friendly, and yet others that meander with interesting elements for pedestrians to enjoy.

Neighborhood Variety. The variety of shops, services, and housing that characterize a mixed-use neighborhood offers multiple benefits for cities and its residents. Mixed-use areas encourage walking, reduce traffic and pollution, and increase a sense of community and social interaction. In the U.S., studies show that mixed-use neighborhoods have lower crime rates. Kensington Market is a diverse Toronto neighborhood. It boasts a mash-up of wide and narrow streets, Rastafari stores, a farmers’ market, bars, restaurants, a synagogue, clothing stores, and a vibrant music scene. On a Sunday in Bellevue Square Park, shown here, people might be dancing, kicking soccer balls,

Connecting People

A sustainable city is one that improves the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems. We like this definition because it suggests sustainability is more than preserving our environment for future generations; it’s also about improving people’s lives. It reflects the “three pillars” view of sustainability, emphasizing the need for cities to pursue environmental, economic, and social sustainability.

This chapter focuses on social sustainability: the capacity of current and future generations to create and maintain strong communities. Communities that are cohesive, equitable, cooperative, healthy and resilient. Communities where diverse people have the ability and commitment to work together toward common goals. To achieve this requires connecting people to each other and to the place where they live.

Unfortunately, just as cities face environmental and economic challenges, they also grapple with social challenges. While the exact figures vary depending on the source, in the United States the percent of citizens who report feeling socially isolated has increased from 10% in the mid-1980s to 25% of all citizens today. Twenty-five percent! And, researchers find that feelings of social isolation intensify in communities that experience racial, cultural, or ethnic divides, marginalization, discrimination, or threat. This weakening of social cohesion is a trend that cities simply must work to reverse, as without social sustainability we have little chance of achieving

Neighborland, or Citizenspace to collect opinions, ideas, or engage in conversations on specific topics or general queries. Using this approach, city agencies can ask citizens to just “give a minute” to post their thoughts by text message, Twitter, Facebook, or at a website. For example, Give A Minute Chicago posed this question to residents: “Hey Chicago, what would encourage you to walk, bike, and take the CTA more often?” The messages and responses appear at a central, online project space in the form of virtual post-it notes for anyone to view. This makes people’s input accessible to city agencies, non-profits, civic groups, and citizens themselves. To encourage participation, a large advertising campaign accompanied the roll out of Give a Minute Chicago.

Employ the Language of Change

Many years ago, David C. Korten wrote a powerful essay in Yes! magazine titled “Change the Story, Change the Future.” Korten argued that how we talk about issues, the stories and language we use, can place constraints on our ability to enact change. Others have also argued this same point. Albert Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

George Ferguson, the former mayor of Bristol, UK agrees that language matters. In one small, but powerful example, he introduced a program in Bristol called ‘Make Sunday Special’ where neighborhood groups host a community activity, such as a festival, dance party, or kid’s play on their street. City transportation officials, accordingly, placed “Road Closed”

from trash dumping and a lack of maintenance. Local scientists predicted that about 70% of Seattle’s forested parkland trees would be dead by 2025. In the past, individuals, community groups, and the city had worked independently and haphazardly to remove invasive species and conduct clean ups without knowledge of each other’s activities. The problem didn’t go away. To save the parks, it became clear that a cross-sector collaboration was necessary. In 2004, with the city’s support, a non-profit called Green Seattle Partnership formed with the aim of arming citizens to help the city’s trees. In partnership with the Department of Parks, Green Seattle Partnership is now the largest and most successful urban forest restoration project in the country, involving key city departments, over 150 businesses, local universities, environmental groups, schools, and hundreds of volunteers participating in programs, conducting research, and sponsoring events such as the annual Green Seattle Day tree planting (5-30). Today, Seattle is on track to restore all 2,500 acres of its forested parklands by 2025 and oversee their long-term maintenance for benefit of all who live here.

Moving People

Cities throughout the world are grappling with too many cars producing too many ill effects: traffic jams, lost time, frustration, expense, noise, pollution, respiratory diseases, increased greenhouse gasses and more. Another huge impact rarely considered is the amount of physical space cars take up in cities to drive and park – particularly when transporting just one person. This photo shoot organized by i-SUSTAIN, a sustainable development consulting firm, shows 2nd Avenue in downtown Seattle with 180 people in 200 cars. This number represents the known average number of people per car in this city at the time (6-1). The second photo shows the same street with the same 180 people sitting in the same spatial configuration as they would be in the cars, but without the cars. This photo makes it easy to see just how much space the car takes up to transport the people (6-2). The third photo is the same number of people in the space of one light rail car (6-3). The message here is that when city transportation departments reframe their role from one of moving vehicles to moving people, options increase. This is an important shift because most cities cannot create more streets.

In much of the United States cities grew up around the automobile. Metropolitan areas with room to spread were a welcome relief from older, industrialized cities that had become dirty and congested. A car meant freedom. The workplace no longer needed to be near home. With lots of

plenty of other people on the street, and shops and residences whose windows provide “eyes on to the street.”

Also important is having relatively even surface materials, even when using bricks and cobblestone, maintaining the street surface for cracks, removing snow or slippery leaves, and insuring that there is a clear pathway without obstacles. This is particularly important for the blind, elderly or wheelchair bound. Safety and comfort are very closely related, but comfort also includes protection from the elements such as shade trees in hot climates, awnings in places where it is gets hot or rainy, a place to sit such as attractive public benches or outdoor café tables, and smaller blocks. Here, a bench in Washington, D.C. provides mobile phone charging through a solar panel (6-12).

When people visit Washington, D.C. they are often surprised by how much walking they do. This is because the District is inherently walkable, the legacy of the first urban plan by Pierre L’Enfant in 1791. According to the District Department of Transportation 12% of the District’s residents walk to work, which is nearly twice the national average. In a commitment to prioritize walking and bicycling at the same level as driving, the District drafted its first Pedestrian Plan in 2009. An important contributor to the walkability of the city is that traffic light timing allows pedestrians ample time to cross the oftentimes broad boulevards without feeling hurried. This results in fewer pedestrian-vehicle collisions. Signals display exactly how much time remains to cross the street (6-13).

Some other approaches to pedestrian safety can be found in the Brummen municipality, Netherlands where crosswalks light up (6-14). Or in Madrid, where Bulgarian artist Christo Guelov’s series of crosswalk art (called Funnycross) is not just an attempt to brighten the day of local Madrileños, but to slow traffic and increase pedestrian safety by highlighting crosswalks (6-15)

Some cities are even installing 3-D crosswalks. This example from a small town in Iceland creates an optical illusion so the drivers see a raised crosswalk with people seeming to float across (6-16), causing them to slow down. The local commissioner in charge of the project got her idea from another successful 3-D crossing painted in New Dehli, India.

In La Paz, Bolivia cebritas roam the street. The zebras are part of a city program to keep wild drivers in line and protect pedestrians. Based on a similar—and very successful—program in Bogotá in the 1990s where the city employed mimes to shame drivers who broke traffic laws, in La Paz the herd of zebras can’t issue tickets but they can dance, gesture, and assist pedestrians across the street (6-17). The program started with 24 zebras in 2001. In 2017, there were 265 zebras in La Paz (plus more in other cities). Another innovative twist to the award-winning cebritas program is that many are students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are given the chance to work part time as fun-loving, people-protecting zebras. One of the program organizers confirms local drivers are more careful and courteous since the zebras arrived, and that the general mood on the streets has improved.

Sound area of Washington state accommodates bicycles (6-45 and 6-46). In a robust system, bicycling and public transit work together to provide a complete network that oftentimes is faster and less expensive than driving a car and far better for the environment and public health.

Washington, D.C. provides a great service to bicycle, train, metro, bus commuters, and tourists at Union Station, the region’s largest transportation hub. The contemporary bike services structure provides indoor secure parking spaces, lockers, showers, pumps, tools and a full-service bike repair shop (6-47). Just outside of the building are private rental bikes and bike share bikes.

In the Seattle area, King County added do-it-yourself bike repair and pump stations outside of 10 branch library locations (6-48). In addition to basic tools to do common repairs, the stands also feature QR codes. A quick smartphone scan provides access to short videos for bicycle repairs.

Bring Nature into the City

As should be apparent from the examples above, nature protects, supports, and nourishes a city’s environment and its people. The co-benefits of bringing nature into a city are extraordinary. Trees, parks, and greenery help to clean the air and water by trapping particulate pollutants such as dust, ash, smoke, and pollen and absorbing carbon dioxide and other gases, then replenishing the atmosphere with oxygen. Nature in urban spaces cools cities by reducing the “heat island” effect caused by an abundance of concrete, steel, and asphalt. Urban greenery dampens noise, reduces wind speeds, and provides habitat to wildlife and pollinators that are part of larger regional ecosystems. Nature is the perfect partner in water management, retaining and filtering stormwater through the daylighting or creation of more surface creek channels, rain gardens, swales, planted curb extensions, green roofs, and other techniques.

A great example of this partnership is Dockside Green in Victoria, B.C. This mixed-use urban neighborhood boasts an environmentally sustainable infrastructure that not only integrates nature, but educates people about water management in the process. Residents and visitors see how water absorbs into rain gardens, green roofs, and permeable pavement and flows through a system of terraced ponds and creeks that together create a central neighborhood greenway and attractive public space, rich with wetland plants and attractive to wildlife (7-36).

And there’s more. People are healthier both physically and mentally from cleaner air and from increased activity such as walking, playing in the park, and urban gardening, all of which green spaces encourage. Researchers have also documented an array of social and psychological benefits that being around nature and greenery promote. These range from lower stress levels, higher creative output, more social interaction and children’s play, as well as a greater appreciation for the natural world, in general. Urban trees and greenery can add character, define spaces, create intimacy, and even protect us from cars.

We know, for example, that city residents with little or no access to greenery have higher rates of psychological problems and stress hormones than people who live closer to nature or have ready access to parks, gardens,

In Seattle, an innovative project raised public awareness while building a key corridor for struggling non-human residents of that city: pollinators such as butterflies, birds, bats, and certain insects and bees. The Pollinator Pathways project started as a vision by artist and designer Sarah Bergmann in 2008 to highlight the loss of pollinators in urban environments. What resulted was the creation of a mile-long functioning pollinator pathway, designed and supported through a non-profit community effort (7-41, 7-42). To launch this project, Bergmann drew a line on a map that connected two large green spaces in Seattle (a pesticide-free university campus and a