Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.
This post appeared originally in Caos Planejado and is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.
Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.
However, since the pandemic, technology has made it possible to live a whole life in the city without leaving our homes. Many people can work full-time remotely, connecting online to attend meetings and get information. They can have their food delivered to their home, meet friends online, and have their preferred entertainment streamed to a device while sitting on their couch. They can exercise on a stationary bike, guided by a coach on their screen.
This online life can be wholly planned, and, like anything fully programmed in advance, it soon becomes tedious and inefficient, similar at the personal level to the Gosplan, or State Planning Committee, that guided the planned economy of the Soviet Union. The pleasing randomness, long provided by active city life, is missing.
Randomness makes city life exciting and productive, and how we design cities can multiply or reduce the chances of serendipitous encounters of people and ideas. Creativity and innovation, two of the most desirable traits of metropolitan environments, depend on unplanned meetings between people of different skills, tastes, and backgrounds.
In cities, most trips, even if they involve a car, bus, or subway, start and end with walking. As we move through a city at a walking pace, we collect unexpected visual information about the areas we cross. Simply traversing the pavement exposes a pedestrian to unexpected, diverse inputs. Jane Jacobs described this process in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, writing, “The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”
Let’s look at how urban designers can increase the acquisition of random information by multiplying chance encounters.
Cities are divided between two fundamentally different areas: streets and private lots. Planners and engineers design streets, while households and firms design what is built on private lots. Planners, through land use regulations, often severely constrain the design of private lots.
Private commercial establishments where people usually meet, like cafés, bars, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, clubs, and churches, are essential to the creativity of cities. The openness of commercial establishments toward the street is the best way to transmit information on what they have to offer. This is why cafés and restaurants with outdoor seating are so attractive. Municipalities should allow cafés and restaurants to expand into the public space when the width of the sidewalk permits it.
Active frontages—streets lined with colorful entrances, windows, cafés, and shops—give people reasons to stop and engage, leading to more chance encounters. Conversely, blank walls or inactive street frontages (often found around large, single-use buildings like parking garages or warehouses) can discourage pedestrian activity and social interaction.
City dwellers usually love walking through an open-air market, because the display of goods for sale maximizes the amount of random information they encounter. Food markets’ variety of colors and fragrances provides visitors with unfamiliar, stimulating sensations. Establishments that cannot be open on the streets, like concert halls, theaters, and department stores, can still provide information to pedestrians through posters and elaborately designed shop windows.
Urban planners can follow a few rules to increase the richness of information collected by pedestrians.
- Do not segregate commercial or cultural use from residential use through zoning regulations. Do not restrict commercial establishments to a single use. For instance, a gym or a bookstore should be allowed to open a bar or a restaurant on its premises, because a city benefits by maximizing chance encounters.
- Do not oblige businesses to have parking lots between the sidewalk and the building. Walking along a parking lot impoverishes the information collected. While private, off-street parking is often indispensable, the parking should be underground or in the back of the building, not in front.
- Do not impose setbacks in residential streets on the ground floor. The setbacks often need to be protected by monotonous fences.
The Corbusier-inspired “towers in the park,” the high-rise, single-use slabs surrounded by green space, are the ultimate urban design sin. This layout sanitizes streets from random information, because sidewalks are too distant from buildings to provide information to pedestrians. Randomness enriches urban life and ought to be fostered at every opportunity.