What does a city look like? OK, the obvious answer to that question is descriptivist, not prescriptivist: a city looks like whatever a city looks like. Anywhere that people have gathered in sufficient quantities and political organization that we can call it a city, that is what a city looks like, from Çatalhuyuk to the shores of the Great Salt Lake.
So the actual question I'm asking here is: what does it matter what a city looks like? Why should we care how a city has chosen to express itself?
There are infinite answers to this as well, but I want to highlight three of them.
1. Urban Canyons: Dense, but Too Dense?
One urban form we might be quite familiar with in urbanist spaces is the canyon: the city that's made up (or at least whose core is made up) of super-high-rise office buildings and condos, creating a deep valley effect in the streets between.
This kind of effect.
Now, there are cities where this is more true, and cities that might be described this way that are less so in practice. New York is the canonical classic example, especially downtown Manhattan, and there's a reason for that: it's because you can get effects like Manhattanhenge, where the sun has to peek through the buildings (for in this case a beautiful effect). But lots of downtowns get described this way, even if they don't have the full canyon on display.
Is this, for example, an urban canyon?
Seen from above, there's a case for Michigan Avenue in Chicago as one, isn't there? But you can see lots of lower density peeking through, and that's true even at street level.
And this is the question that urban canyons raise: on the one hand, they seem to be the confirmation of those who decry too much density, shutting out the sun and enclosing humanity in something like a prototype version of The Caves of Steel. But on the other, they don't actually usually do that. And they allow lots of people to work and live in small areas, because one key thing about high-rise density is that it is high and dense. So are they worth it?
It will probably surprise no one who reads anything on this blog that I think they are.
It helps when there is something interesting to look at in the canyon, or when there are distinctive buildings within it, as the above and below London examples show.
Urban canyons are like other urban forms, in that they can be better or worse: a flat undifferentiated block fifteen stories high is one thing; a vibrant cityscape that happens to be very tall is another.
Fortunately, in my experience, a lot of cities that get criticized for this are the latter, and not the former. So a city that looks like an urban canyon is, to me, a positive rather than a negative.
2. The Midrise: Is It Enough?
Stepping down a size, there are many cities that are iconic for midrise height: from Paris and Montréal in the Francophone world to, for example, Amsterdam in the Netherlands). This is of course questioned by some in the same way that urban canyons are, in terms of it feeling monotonous, or imposing, or inhuman on the street level. But if I don't think that about canyons you probably can guess I don't think it about the midrise. The more interesting question is whether it can be enough: can a city really have midrise density and still fit all the people who want to live there?
The obvious answer is "not entirely, but it's better than nothing." After all, all those cities I just mentioned are experiencing huge housing crunches.
Amsterdam is lovely, but there literally isn't enough housing here.
Paris is iconic, but again: prices rise and people are pushed to the margins of the urban area.
You'll never believe what I'm about to say about Montréal...oh yeah, it also has a housing crisis, though not as bad as the other two. And since the housing crisis in its province has its own Wikipedia page, that should tell you something.
Of course, the counter to this is that not all of the city has been allowed to be this kind of height; it's iconic and typical, but not actually consistent.
It does have major advantages: it tends to feel much less overwhelming on the street level than higher-rise development, and it often lends itself well to active streets and Jane Jacobs-style eyes on the street.
It's also beautiful, I think.
It's a key part of effective city-building; there's a reason that cities that lack this kind of development are referred to as having a "missing middle." The middle is a sweet spot for density without huge skyscrapers (which are both expensive and have their own other issues). It's not enough, but it's a dang sight better than our third category.
3. Single Houses: Automatically Car-Dependent?
The last we will look at is the classic American development: single family houses.
That's most of what you see in this picture. Now, to be fair, not all single family zoning is cul-de-sacs like you see here. But a lot of it is, in the US especially, and that has a distinctive look. Even in more close-set settings, single-family homes, like the one I grew up in, have a very different street-level view than the other two we've looked at.
I like this house's urban setting. It's on a major bus route or two; it's walking distance to multiple grocery stores, a library, multiple parks, and other amenities.
It's a good urbanist example of a single family home, is what I'm saying. And I think the answer to the question above has to be that it's not automatically car-dependent: after all, I grew up in this neighborhood with my parents both commuting by bus and bike and myself taking the bus to school and walking around after getting home. There were certainly places we went by car, but it wasn't required; and when it was, it was because of the place we were going to, not coming from, or a function of bad connectivity in the transit network.
As a larger matter, there has to be a space for single family homes in any vision of the city, because there is a clear and marked demand for such housing in the lived behavior of human beings all over the world.
But it doesn't have to be as much as it is. Seattle (or at least its county) is 70% housing like this. That's a lot, and not all of it (not even most of it) is as urbanist as this one is.
To go back to our original view (or rather, another angle from the same photoshoot from the same vantage point), Chicago is also heavily made up of this housing, and you can see it stretching out away from the urban canyon into the distance.
A city needs all of these, but the mix is key: a city should look like all these things, but if it looks too much like the house I grew up in it's going to have a hard time getting a lot of people into it, because there just won't be space. It needs some midsize housing, and even some urban canyon-like elements, in order to accommodate the sheer number of people who make it up.
And when we design and plan our cities, we should perhaps nudge it a bit further up this particular page whenever we can--even as we keep a space for single family homes.
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