Welcome to our first midweek CityBracket 2025 post! The goal of this post is to say something about how the bracket will actually work, and what the goal is here.
The purpose of CityBracket is to think about what makes a city feel urbanist to an individual in the city--visitor or resident--rather than to think about the kind of formal urbanist elements that might show up in a list of architectural or urban planning criteria. I'm not aiming for the spreadsheet-driven work of someone like CityNerd (whose work I greatly enjoy and respect, to be clear!). So no mathematical formulae of density, WalkScore, or cost of living here. But it isn't just going to be arbitrarily picking a winner each time either. Rather, I want some qualitative (rather than quantitative) measures to compare across cities as we go through the bracket.
I'm going to evaluate the cities on eleven criteria across two main categories and a miscellaneous one: the ability to visit and to live there without a car.. And because urbanism isn't just about banning cars, a lot of that miscellaneous section is pretty important as well.
The criteria:
Category 1: Visiting Without A Car
a) How can you get to the city?
Is there an airport with good transit links, or in the downtown core itself? Is there one or more significant train stations? Can you at least take an intercity bus?
b) How do you get around?
Does the transit system connect to the places a tourist or visitor is likely to want to go? How frequently? Are they close enough to walk between? How much empty space is a tourist going to have to cross to get places, and how can they do that?
c) What are the limits on a visitor without a car?
Even if (b) is a win, sometimes there are important places or things you just can't do without a car. Maybe the tourist areas are fine, but there are whole areas of the city that you couldn't visit a friend in; maybe there's a main area that's easily accessible but one notable tourist attraction that for some reason isn't accessible without a car.
Category 2: Living Without A Car
a) Can you expect to get to work?
Like it or not, we live under capitalism, and so people will generally have to get to work. Can you expect to find a job and housing that allow you to work without a car? Or will you need one for your commute, either because the jobs, the housing, or both are in places that are car-dependent?
b) Can you live the rest of your life?
Besides jobs, of course, there are lots of other things we need: groceries, schools for our children or ourselves, medical care. Can you expect to be able to access these without a car, or is the entire transit system organized solely around job commuting?
c) How are the basic amenities?
Are there even sidewalks if you need them? Could you go play in a park, or is there no green space? Can you go pee without paying someone? Is there shade, or cover from rain, or other protections from nature as you go about your day?
Category 3: Miscellaneous
a) Are there people on the street?
This is inspired by the Jane Jacobs' theory about cities needing "eyes on the street." But I'm not necessarily concerned about crime; I'm more interested in the idea that the experience of a city is, in my opinion, better when you actually see other people.
b) Where is the city's urbanism going?
This is about trajectory: sure, there may be cities that are more urbanist now, and they'll quite reasonably score higher on other elements, but they're not interested in expanding or intensifying their urbanism. Some American cities, for instance, have legacy systems that might be quite good, but getting anything new is like pulling teeth; others don't have as much legacy work, but are actively expanding urbanist elements in the city today.
c) Is it functionally diverse?
Good urbanism should mean that people of different classes, races, interests, etc. mix and connect; so a city that is highly segregated along any of those lines is missing something. So too is a city that does not attract or actively drives out people of a certain type: a sundown town could in theory have great transit, but it doesn't meet my urbanist ideal.
d) How do people there react to knowing you're not using a car?
Independently of how easy or possible it actually is to not use a car for visiting or living, how do people react? Is that seen as odd, strange, or rare? Or is it seen as normal or praiseworthy?
e) How do people react to people living close together?
Again, independently of actual density (though of course they're related), how do people respond to the idea of density in this place?
Obviously, my judgement of these eleven criteria is going to be subjective, and I make no bones about that. But I will try to think beyond my own experience (especially for cities where I've never been a tourist because I've only lived there and vice-versa). Get in the comments if you think I've biffed something badly, or to share your own experience!
Next up: our first matchup, in the upper left corner: Seattle vs the Quad Cities!
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