When I was an urban studies student, I was always frustrated by statistics on urban areas. There were so many different ways to define a city’s borders — the city limits, the metropolitan statistical area, the region, etc. It’s very difficult to quantify an urban area or use numbers to define where a city starts and ends. A professor I once had told us a story about how they used to determine where a town’s borders were. City officials would simply look at the tracks leading in and out of people’s driveways around the edge of town. When most people’s tracks pointed away from the center of town, they assumed those people identified with another urban area.

This more human-scale assessment is related to the kind of thing Nico Larco writes about in “What is Urban?”. He doesn’t use thresholds for determining urbanity (ie: 1.56 people/acre), but defines dimensions like variety, public space (vs. community space) and memory. When one uses those dimensions to determine urbanity, it results in more human, common sense results. For instance, I grew up in a small town that geographers would consider rural. Based on Larco’s dimensions, the town is definitely urban. It’s still large enough that there are strangers, it has variety (different people, different building types), and so on. It’s a system of evaluation that just makes more sense.

I don’t think that defining urban areas using thresholds or numbers will ever disappear, but for designers, a more human approach may be more informative as we shape the urban landscape.

Density allows for public transit, like the Portland Streetcar.

Pioneer Courthouse Square during the 2006 World Cup

Parade in New York City

Rome has layers and layers of history.

It's not hard to imagine 8 million people living in New York City proper.

My wife and I often forget something when we make our weekly grocery shopping trip, and usually don’t realize it until we’re halfway through a recipe. Several times, we’ve forgotten more than one ingredient, but only realized the second (and even third) missing ingredient after we went out and purchased the previous ingredient.

I’m revealing this rather embarrassing tendency because I have a feeling we’re not the only people who forget eggs, milk, sugar, and other common ingredients. What might be different, though, is that for the last few places we’ve lived, we have been within a couple of blocks of a corner store. Each trip (while embarrassing when checking out with the same clerk) was fast and easy. We didn’t have to drive anywhere, either. Corner stores have been a livesaver, and I can’t imagine living far from one again.

Besides the obvious convenience, corner stores have secondary benefits. The corner store we live less than a block from now (pictured) serves as a landmark for our little micro-neighborhood. It’s where the bus stop is. The sidewalk in front of the store has benches and people are often sitting there. It’s well-lit, which is important because it’s open until midnight. It’s a little beacon of community on a street with small houses and apartment buildings.

I think a corner store can be more than just an independent store. Two of the corner stores we’ve lived next to have been Walgreens. One was a Trader Joe’s. The one we live next to now doubles as an organic grocery store. I get the sense that many true, independent corner stores have been overtaken by chain drug stores, convenience stores, and larger grocery stores. The ones that do remain have found a niche, like organic groceries. Even though we love the charm of our local, independent, organic store, we used to live directly across the street from a Walgreens and loved it, too. I could go to the store, grab something, and be back in less than five minutes. It still seemed to serve as a lively place in our immediate area.

My corner store

Right next to the Walgreens we lived across from was a local branch library. The library served a larger area than the Walgreens, but was yet another center to our community. Libraries are good neutral spaces; people from every walk of life use them. Libraries are probably my favorite type of civic building, and I miss being so close to one now.

It seems to me that local libraries and corner stores really add something to a neighborhood. They create gathering places that serve everyone. I’m not a coffee drinker, but I think cafés probably serve a similar function, too. Cafés are useful places for people to meet, and most cafés see quite a bit of traffic throughout the day. They are centers of activity, like corner stores and libraries. I think there could be arguments made for other types of establishments like these that serve a large number of people and fit into a neighborhood setting (ice cream parlor? hair dresser? diner?) but those three stick out for me as big ones.

I’m not sure what to do with this observation about these establishments, except to suggest that city governments and planners be aware that these places really make a neighborhood. Cities should occasionally allow the conversion of residential lots into commercial ones for the purpose of establishing corner stores and cafés. Most of the customers will arrive from nearby, so traffic wouldn’t increase significantly. Most of the time these places are located on one of the busier roads in the area, anyway.

I have some time off between my summer and fall terms, so I started reading a classic in the urban studies/architecture field, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander. I was drawn to the book because Alexander had previously written The Oregon Experiment about community planning at the University of Oregon, where I attend school. Several members of the architecture faculty are fans of his, too, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have some familiarity.

I’ve only read through pattern 20 out of 253, so I don’t yet have an overall view of the book, but I have been stopping to think after just about each of the patterns so far. Many of my thoughts center around one theme: Christopher Alexander’s view of cities is shaped by the 1970s. This is a really obvious statement, since the book was published in 1977. But so much has changed in urban America since the 1970s that many of his patterns that deal with cities seems dated.

Now, I wasn’t alive in the 1970s, so I don’t have first-hand evidence for what it was like, but I get the sense that America’s cities were in a state of upheaval. If you look at the time period from 1960 to the mid-1970s, cities in the US were dealing with race riots, urban renewal, high crime, and suburbanization. “White flight” was in full swing as the white middle class bought homes in the suburbs and left the urban core while the urbanization of blacks in America continued.

It was in this environment that Christopher Alexander was writing A Pattern Language and I give him credit for not being more pessimistic about cities. In fact, he rails against the suburbs, stating bluntly:

The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement.

His preference for human habitation is to spread the population throughout a region in small communities, with only a few larger cities. Furthermore, he thinks it’s best to split urban cores into smaller, more accessible cores.

I can’t help but think that some of his prejudice against large cities comes from the fact that urban cores in the 60s and 70s were nothing like they are today (maybe not all cities, but many). If he saw New York City (for example) in 2009, I don’t think he’d believe it was the same city. New York City of the 60s and 70s saw a blackout, garbage strike, transit strike, Stonewall Riots, and economic stagnation. Nearly a million people left the city during that period. If America’s flagship city was facing what must have seemed like irreversible decline, I’d also be suggesting that we all move to small towns in the countryside!

Alexander doesn’t explicitly say that the sorry state of cities in the 70s is why he recommends spreading people out. Instead, he offers up two fairly weak reasons for why people shouldn’t be living in cities. He thought that the migration to cities is unnatural and unsustainable (he was looking across 100 years, not 10 or 20). People are not meant to live far away from nature. Furthermore, if everyone moves to the city, nobody will be left to take care of the countryside. I find both of these arguments against urban living somewhat ridiculous, looking at it in 2009. Unless you’re living in a city with over 10 million in the metro area, like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, it’s hard to feel like you’re living in an urban prison with no escape to nature. Sure, you may not have your own garden, but it’s hardly unnatural to be living that way.

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