M. Solof - Public Affairs Writing & Editing

How do you create streets that are walkable and bikeable, part of lively downtowns and neighborhoods?

Planners and city officials need to take a careful look at how people actually travel in their communities and use public spaces. That is the guiding insight of what amounted to a revolution in the field of urban planning that began in the 1950s.

In earlier decades, academic planners sought to use their visions of orderly and rational living arrangements to inspire the reshaping of cities and towns. The results could be disastrous. Urban planner Le Corbosier's 1930s plans for modernist skyscrapers surrounded by parks led to urban renewal programs in the United States with high rise housing projects built in the midst of concrete plazas. Many of the buildings were eventually blown up and replaced with low rise housing less prone to crime and more in tune with the needs of residents and communities.

At the center of the revolution was urbanist Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities pointed to lively, bustling streets with human scale architecture as the key features of healthy cities. Creating them called for close observation.

"The best way to plan for a downtown is to see how people use it today; to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them," Jacobs wrote in a 1957 essay Downtown is for People. "There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans."

In urging to make streets "more surprising, more compact, more variegated and busier," she railed against remaking cities with "monumental" buildings and cultural centers. Jacobs favored new buildings scaled in size with others around them and mixed with older structures. She praised "the ingenious adaptations of old quarters to new uses. The townhouse parlor that becomes a craftsman's showroom, the stable that becomes a house, the basement that becomes and immigrants club, the garage or brewery that becomes a theater…"

Planner William Whyte took up Jacob's admonition for observation to guide planning with camera in hand. Whyte used time lapse photography to document how public spaces — streets, plazas and parks — are used by people day-in and day-out. Among many design standards in use today, his research is responsible for moveable chairs and tables often found scattered around public parks. They allow people the freedom to sit where they want, moving to favored locations or joining with friends. Just moving a chair can be a "declaration of one's free will to oneself, and rather satisfying," he noted in his 1988 book City: Redefining the Center.

In that book, he devotes a chapter to combating the blank walls then increasingly lining the streets especially of small- to mid-sized cities.

"Walk past one of these brutal hulks. Whatever is going on inside, there will be little going on outside," Whyte wrote. "There will be few people on the sidewalks and few in the blocks beyond. The blank walls, the lack of stores and activity have killed off the life that might have been."

Planners have gotten the message. Giving people what they want, in spaces that they will use, has become a primary motivation for today's planners. Following Jacobs, Whyte and others who took part in the revolution, planning for the people is now the norm.