Here’s a post on ‘walkable urbanity,’ or ‘walkable urbanism,’ Christopher Leinberger’s term for those characteristics that set successful downtowns apart from unsuccessful ones, or from suburbs, etc. During the Planning Commission meeting in November, when I heard the term raised, I was surprised that it was used in connection with Whitewater. I briefly mentioned the concept briefly when I wrote that
By the way, when Brodnicki mentions the term ‘walkable urbanity,’ she’s referring to a term that urban planner Christopher Leinberger coined in “Turning Around Downtown: Twelve Steps to Revitalization.” His paper’s available from Brookings.
What neither Brodnicki nor Bowen demonstrated is how the proposed project [specific first floor residential housing] would prevent or appreciably inhibit walkable urbanity. If they want to contend persuasively that walkable urbanity is threatened, they owe it to others to show how that would measurably happen in this case. Otherwise, all they offer is unquantifiable, measureless speculation, wrapped in a clever term. That’s not what Leinberger had in mind.
I left aside the question of whether the walkable urbanism that Leinberger mentions in his 2005 paper, and elsewhere since, is really for a place of our size and scope. I think that the answer is ‘no,’ and that its application to our circumstances conflates the needs of a metropolitan downtown with those of a small rural town.
I will make three quick points.
Leinberger on Walkable Urbanity. Leinberger’s famous for use of the term as part of a downtown revitalization plans. His 2005 paper, “Turning Around Downtown: Twelve Steps to Revitalization” is well-known and regarded. Considering his paper, and use of the term, I think it’s clear that he has large cities — nothing like ours — in mind. I thought that then, but I didn’t explain the point. (Since then, someone wrote and chided me that my criticism in the area of development needed a fuller explanation. I agree.)
The term itself implies a large urban area — it is, after all, walkable urbanity. Far more significant, all of the examples that Leinberger cites in his paper are large municipalities. He cites just over a dozen cities, and they are all far larger than we are: Manhattan, Albuquerque, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Atlanta, Baltimore, Portland, Chattanooga, Denver, San Diego, Santa Fe. Phoenix , and Kansas City. From this list, even the closest city in size to us is over five times our size (Santa Fe), and most are between ten and one-hundred times as large as Whitewater. The smallest of these cities (Santa Fe) has a population of seventy-two thousand, the largest (Manhattan) over 1.5 million.
There are no examples anywhere of small towns, anything like ours.
Although Leinberger contends that his suggested principles might work anywhere, he cites no town like ours. He does, candidly, offer many criteria that cut against application of walkable urbanity to an area (and this could easily include an area so small as ours):
While any approach must be customized based on unique physical conditions, institutional assets, consumer demand, history and civic intent, the paper lays out the fundamentals of a downtown turnaround plan…
That’s a lot of qualification, and the absence of any town of our size in the paper is telling.
Size and Scale for our Downtown. I thought in November that if some felt that a first floor apartment here or there was too much, she should show why — why would one or two, etc. be too much to bear? But I would have been skeptical even if Leinberger’s paper did not so evidently apply to another size and scope.
However one wants to describe the distances for walkable urbanism — fifteen hundred, twelve hundred, one thousand feet, etc. — are simply, I think, ill-suited and too doctrinaire for our small town. The concept seems more like an ideological view that ignores the small size and challenges that our entire city faces. Ou entire downtown is smaller than even a section of the downtowns that Leinberger discusses.
Inhibitions, lack of attractions, etc. on how far a downtown person might walk apply far less when the entire downtown requires transit in a fraction of the time that an urban downtown would require. People will simply not find scale and size as daunting here as they would in the thirteen cities that Leinberger cites.
The principles of walkable urbanity, like ideas about pedestrian malls or sports arenas (also ideas that Leinberger considers elsewhere), are not concerns of our own small town.
Whitewater is smaller, and our obstacles different from those of the Leinberger’s large cities.
Jacobs. Finally, a few remarks about Jane Jacobs, from whom I think that Leinberger has occasionally, and subtly, borrowed. She, too, discusses the same effect of going from one attractive point to another, without a dogmatic estimate of distance. The second chapter of her Death and Life of Great American Cities, entitled, “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety” is alone better than anything one will find from Leinberger.
Jacobs, unlike Leinberger, is candid about the limits of her work; she makes plain that she’s talking about cities, not towns. She notes that
This task [sidewalk safety through diverse kinds of tenant] is totally unlike any service that sidewalks and streets in little;e towns or true suburbs are called upon to do. Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways…
Jacobs didn’t get everything right — she harshly criticized an Adam Smith she understood only imperfectly — but she did well-understand spontaneity. The idea of a spontaneous order, over municipal planning, pours soothingly from her pages. It’s why libertarians generally find her work supportive. Something else pours forth, too: an honest assessment that some ideas apply to cities, and not small towns. Leinberger would have done well to be so clear.
Our city is too small to have a downtown that should be subject to standards suitable — if they are at all — to far larger places. There’s an (unwelcome, I think) orthodoxy, a rigidity, in application of Leinberger’s ideas to our place of far smaller size and scope.