City Expectations and Appearances

Today I want to talk a bit about how a city shows you the expectations you should have about what existing in that city will be like.

In other words, how do I see the built environment setting up expectations about what the city is like--plus a bit about the way the people are or aren't interacting on the street. I'm going to walk through three city examples, and then say a little about how I see them coming together more generally.

1. Davenport and Distance

Let's start right in the Quad Cities with Davenport.

The big impression that I think Davenport gives you is one of distance: there's a lot of space between buildings, except in the very center of downtown; the roads are wide (see above); there are lots of open spaces near them that aren't filled with sidewalks or buildings at all. 

Sometimes this is great: Vanderveer is a lovely park right in the midst of the city, and we have a lot of parkland in general. That's a positive kind of space and distance: space intentionally dedicated to recreation, relaxation, and play.

Sometimes it's less positive though: just space dedicated to cars and pavement. There's always a reason for the cars to be there, of course, but the proportion is a bit odd. Everything is so far away -- and the parking lots mean it's even far away from itself once you get there.

2. Toronto and Towers

Now, obviously Davenport is smaller than Toronto. There are parts of Toronto, or at least the Greater Toronto Area, that are similar in build to what I just described in Davenport. But let's think about places a similar distance from the center (or centre) of the city.

Toronto has, I suggest, an impression of height rather than width.

Now, this particular shot is from a park, so there is certainly some space between the buildings. But look how high they are! 

Looking horizontally from a high floor you still get a similar experience. Look at the CN Tower in that shot--one of the tallest buildings in the entire world--and consider how not-so-tall it looks against the broader downtown. Now, obviously, given that it is literally that tall, it's visible from a lot more of Toronto than these particular towers are. But the angle still gives that sense that Toronto is pretty tall, at least in the downtown area.

And the other major impression there is that there are so many of them, layered together, that they don't look as wide as Davenport's streets do.

The distance visible here is a couple of miles (about 3 km, for those scoring in Canada or the rest of the world). And yet it looks jam-packed.

And this impression doesn't end with downtown; the Yonge St. corridor is full of high buildings, as this park up the Yonge St. Subway from downtown can attest. Again, they aren't always crowded together (though they often are) but the dominant impression in Toronto is height, not width. It just looks dense because of all the high buildings (even though it too has sections that are much more single-family residential than anything else).

3. Paris and Proximity 

But while Toronto's heights are high, they're not as close together as are the buildings in the dominant physical appearance of a place like Paris.

Like many European cities, Paris is famously tightly knit, with (as discussed last week) a great deal of midrise height along the street. 

This is true even near significant monuments or other spaces that might limit density in other cities.

Notre-Dame is being repaired here, but that's not my focus: look at the heights of the buildings on the right.

Or look at this second wall along the Seine, which is seemingly just as uniform and impenetrable as the river wall below.

The shopping district lit up at night (and oddly full of cars!) is likewise consistently dense and midrise. 

That sense of everything being cheek-by-jowl, dense, and tight gives a very different sense of the city than the Toronto or Davenport examples above. 

Even when the streets are somewhat wide, the density of the buildings gives a different feel than Davenport does with similarly wide streets.

The city just feels like everything is nearby. And it lives up to that: if you walk a couple miles in Paris, it feels much less demanding than walking the same couple miles in Davenport--as we can see by looking at walk share in the cities (Toronto is much more similar to Paris, and may actually exceed it in some places). 

But regardless of the realities of how the cities are used, the visible built environment is also massively different. Everything being closer together makes a marked difference in the experience of the city, not just in first impressions but in the moment by moment experience of existing within the space.

It's probably obvious from, well, everything here what my preference is, but I want here to simply focus on that basic fact: the built environment creates expectations and understandings of the city that are both immediate and lingering, and these different cities fundamentally feel different because of the changes--before we even consider questions like "is there a transit line" or "are there functional sidewalks" or "can you safely bike here."

Urbanism can be visible from the very moment you cast your eyes on a place, and the different feels of cities (especially the city center) are immediately remarkable.