Future Here Now: The New Human-less Urbanism

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Sometimes the act of someone else missing the point is more illustrative than any treatise I could write.

On the Reddit thread r/urbanism, this showed up:

The remainder of the comments in the thread below the screen shot mocked “The Fight Against Anti-Car” for its unbelievable stupidity. Emphasis on?mocked?and?unbelievable?stupidity. Reddit threads aren’t known for their nicety, but these sounded like lifts from the script of?Mean Girls.

When I looked at this picture (on my phone, so yes, smaller than you might be seeing), I didn’t even see the one person sitting there. I saw a whole lot of tables and trees, and very little sign of humans.

So despite my AICP, I saw the point of the zombie apocalypse question. Which was apparently lost on the commenters ready to tear it apart.

In the urban design world, there’s an almost religious belief in?if you build it, they will come. As though the mere act of putting out tables and chairs and trees will draw people, like the cantaloupe rind someone dropped in my yard draws ants. It’s an ipso-facto, an article of faith. Build that nice “pedestrian-friendly” space, and the pedestrians will come.

Sometimes it works. But a lot of times it doesn’t. I can show you a hundred streetscapes that were re-designed and re-re-designed to attract people. And they might be very pretty, but they also very often look like…this. With very few people in sight.

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(We could also bring up the fact that the people who use the public space because they have few other places to go get interpreted as “undesirable.” But we’ll go there another day.)

Here’s my theory as to why the Zombie Urbanism happens, even when it’s pretty:

Urban designers, and the people who give them the funds to do the urban design, are usually building what?they?want. They want bucolic, nature, some variant of the street cafe life they’ve seen in old cities in Europe.

But that’s not necessarily what the people who live there want. And since any public engagement that happened with the project didn’t go much deeper than a Santa Claus list, the designers applied?their?filter, their interpretation, to what people meant— as well as unexamined assumptions about what kind of behavior the space should encourage. Sitting at a table drinking lattes from an imagined nearby cafe…that’s the kind of behavior they envision. Hanging out for hours playing dominoes and beer (the regular kind, not micro-brew) and laughing?very?loudly. Nope. That’s when you start seeing things like over-policing, or lack of maintenance, or installation of subtle features to keep the wrong people from getting?too?comfortable.

It’s as if we built a lovely set for the locals to stage?The Music Man,?but when they show up, they’re ready to stage?Hadestown.?And when it becomes clear that the set is all wrong, and that People Who De Facto Own that Space don’t want their show, the set gets abandoned. Or used, awkwardly and with a lot of tension, for the show that the locals want to stage.

Just because it looks good doesn’t mean it works.

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