Ever wonder why our lives are so different now than they were for our grandparents, and our parents? Even with our amazing technological leaps, medical bounds, and floor-low crime rates, it seems our society’s stress levels have skyrocketed. Our daily lives involve a view of our city mainly from behind our steering wheels rather than along a shaded sidewalk. Our children’s area to roam and explore is now confined to our backyards. Our grandparents lose their independence as soon as they lose their ability to drive a car.
Seventy years ago, after World War II, we began shaping our cities to escape the fast pace of the city center and to live a quick drive away in the suburbs. In most American cities this ideal has evolved into a requirement rather than an option. So, instead of us shaping our cities to accommodate our ideals, it is our city infrastructure and layout that dictates our customs, habits, health, expectations, and even our relationships.
We seem to have forgotten that it is we who should mold our environment into the places we want to live and not vice versa. Plan Viva Laredo has sought to revive the empowerment that we all must have to shape, craft, and make our city into the place where we can fulfill our ideal way of life. We should all become placemakers.
Over the next few weeks, we will be writing about the key concepts Laredo can expect to find in the comprehensive plan that citizens helped author this summer during our ten-day workshop and through tens of thousands of comments and online insights.
Cities are for people
In our first installment, we discuss the quality and use of our most ubiquitous and heavily used public spaces: our streets. Streets make up the elemental structure or matrix of our city. They connect and organize all of our human activities. Streets preceded the automobile and have almost always hosted all kinds of varied human activities other than driving. Historically, besides providing a way for people to get around, streets served as everyday meeting places, markets, eateries, impromptu playgrounds, civic, and cultural venues. As a consequence, they also enabled a more hidden prerequisite of societies by making spontaneous and casual interactions among strangers commonplace. This mingling between strangers who then become acquaintances, and perhaps later friends, provides a social awareness that creates safer and more engaged communities. Streets were our public living room.
Today, our streets have become more efficient at moving vehicular traffic and less accommodating to all the other human activities they once hosted. As a result, the societal fabric of our community has become fragmented and in some cases is vanishing.
As we reexamine our built environment, we must recognize that because we have assumed we all need a car to get around, we created the reality that practically all of us do, in fact, need a car. The side effects of our automobile dependence are apparent in many ways that our community has told us they find unappealing, stressful, non-productive, and many times dangerous. And for all those who can’t drive a car like kids, senior citizens, and the underprivileged, the situation is unacceptable. For them, the majority of streets are places that only serve as a barrier.
Because streets play such a profound role in our daily lives, and because streets are the most frequent public space we create, building streets that can serve a more complete set of functions would have potentially the most meaningful and widespread improvement to our lives. Therefore, the practice of place-making should begin there.
Complete the Streets
Sure, our newest streets are designed with sidewalks, but for various reasons, the only comfortable way to experience them is in a car. So what do complete streets look like? They must of course convey our automobile traffic efficiently and safely, but they must also serve the physical needs of those on foot and on bikes. In his book Walkable City, Jeff Speck explains the General Theory of Walkability which states that (1) walks must be useful, (2) walks must be safe, (3) walks must be interesting, and (4) walks must be comfortable.
Let me briefly explain how we achieve each one of those points, starting with the “useful walk.” This means pedestrians need to have a useful place to go within walking distance. Current prevalent zoning concepts place different uses far away from each other. Retail, professional offices, schools, and residential uses are thus segregated. This puts them outside of walking distance from one another. In order to make a walk useful, we must intermingle these compatible uses so they are within a quarter-mile to a half-mile from each other.
Safety is achieved by calming traffic, usually via narrowing of driving lanes (we call this right-sizing), separating the pedestrian from moving cars with a strip of planting between the sidewalk and drive lanes, and allowing parallel parking along the road. The barricade that is created serves the pedestrian well both physically and psychologically. Buildings along the street should also be designed to encourage casual onlookers through windows, porches, and placement closer to the street. This provides a sense that the sidewalk is a communal space to be shared and respected by all.
Comfortable and interesting walkable streets include tree shading along residential areas, and trees, colonnades, and awnings along more commercial or mixed-used blocks. The blocks must be short enough to provide a human-scale network of routes to get us to our destination.
Design matters in more ways than we think
These more complete streets enable more of the community to use them. They help us make our most prevalent public space become fully useful to youth and the elderly, and provide the underprivileged a way to get around without the burden of car ownership. Complete streets can begin to re-activate all manner of human activities and begin to mend our often disconnected neighborhoods.
Furthermore, national trends tell us the places we would create with complete streets are quite necessary to attract and retain young professionals who usually make the choice of where to live based on the quality of life a city offers. And to them, quality of life is defined by how walkable a city is.
Beyond these benefits, a city that walks daily is a much healthier city for all ages. Daily walking and biking would offer a vast improvement to the lifestyles of many Laredoans. Given that our obesity rate is 33%, that diabetes is at a crisis level, and a full 38% of our adult population does not participate in any physical activity, our own Health Department has recognized that completing our streets is one elemental solution to these mounting health problems.
Although this plan and its forthcoming implementation were spurred by our elected leaders and city officials, they have recognized a concept best stated by the author and Urbanist Jane Jacobs, who wrote that “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Everyone present at the ten-day design workshop witnessed a Laredo poised to author the next few chapters of our history. Although these concepts are now being re-applied in cities across the country, we should all look forward to seeing how our little-big city with such a unique history will begin remaking itself.
In the next installment of the series, we’ll discuss why the benefits of complete streets cannot be fully enjoyed without effective and varied transportation options. We’ll tell you how providing they can create an upward mobility ladder for our poorest citizens, as well as serve as a key contributor to our economic vitality.
Stay tuned.
Looking forward to the next review. I hope all ideas were incorporated into the plan. I encouraged the young generation to attend the meetings to provide input.