It’s no secret that I’m an avid proponent of “good” urban design, walkability, and dynamic cities. I’ve bemoaned the lack of those elements in my hometown (Miami) loudly and repeatedly (see my rant about the bright blue Public Storage building at the corner of my mom’s block).
So the fact that ever more planners, government officials, developers, and investors have begun to consider the role of the built environment in economic development and to understand that the State of Place™ impacts a city’s success is reassuring.
Not long ago, we urban design “geeks,” pedestrian advocates, and active-living proponents were the only people using urban-design terms such as “walkability.” Today, my Google News “walkability” search (yes, I’ve automated this!) returns several articles daily, from publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist to US News & World Report, USA Today, and the Huffington Post.
Twitter hashtags – #walkable and #walkability – yield countless tweets from the businessman looking for #walkable restaurants near his hotel, the realtor boasting how many listings she has in #walkable neighborhoods, and from the latest study showcasing the benefits of #walkability.
The idea of, desire for, and benefits of walkability – living within a safe, comfortable, and pleasant walk of basic amenities – has hit the mainstream.
All good news … except that walkability has recently been accused of approaching “buzzword” status (see, for example, here, here, and here). This is a fate I never would have predicted given the blank stares and perplexed shrugs I got from my Miami friends and family when I told them 13 years ago that I was moving 3,000 miles away to study urban design, behavior, and walkability.
For more than a decade, I’ve worked tirelessly to identify the empirical links between urban design and walkability and to guide evidence-based policy and practice that makes healthy, sustainable, and thriving environments possible. As much as it’s great that more people “get it,” the last thing I want is for the meaning of “walkability” to degenerate into fluff.
More concerning: the risk that city planners, policymakers, and stakeholders will look to “walkability” as a “cure-all” for city ills. In other words, I fear we are dangerously close to “environmental determinist” thinking – or the idea that X built environment intervention creates Y impact (be it economic, environmental, health, or otherwise). I cover environmental determinism in the first or second lecture of my urban-design class and like to use my riff on the Field of Dreams metaphor to explain the concept: It’s not “build it and they will come,” but rather build it and they might come.
As much as it behooves me as a consultant and entrepreneur to extol the benefits of walkability and good urban design, the built environment can only do so much. Many factors influence “Y” besides just the built environment, including individual preferences, attitudes, and behaviors; societal norms; the global economy; geography, climate and topography, and more. Not to mention that the city is faced with numerous other “Ys” – issues including poverty, inequity, crime, disinvestment, unemployment – that cannot be addressed by the built environment alone.
To give a concrete example of the complex relationship between the built environment and behavior (including economic “behavior”), take the case of one of our customers, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, which is using the State of Place™ index to inform their strategic investment plan for the D.C. metro region.
We recently ran an analysis to understand how State of Place™ impacts a variety of economic indicators, including office rents. We found that controlling for average household income, a one-point increase in the State of Place™ index is tied to a $0.334 increase in office rents; however, other factors also influence real-estate performance. Take, for example, Tysons Corner and Silver Spring – 47.4 percent of the difference in their office rents is attributable to their State of Place™ index. So while the State of Place™ index is a sound predictor of economic performance, the remaining 52.6 percent of the difference is due to other factors outside the index.
The bottom line is that while:
- Walkability, as measured by State of Place™, is an important factor in a community’s economic performance
- Increasing the State of Place™ index can facilitate economic development, and
- Using State of Place™, one can reasonably predict the return on investment of built environment interventions, which helps to guide policy and practice.
We must also consider that:
- Concerted policy, planning, and urban design efforts leading to built environment interventions and investments that bolster a community’s State of Place™ and address relevant regional and local factors can enhance that community’s triple bottom line.
And while moving forward:
- We can quantify the impact of our interventions and investments (by collecting before and after data) to better understand the relationship between State of Place™ and economic development, as well as other factors.
We cannot assume that:
- If we improve Tysons’ State of Place™ by X, it will automatically lead to increases in Y.
Ultimately, while I am encouraged by the enthusiasm around walkability and the increased acceptance of the built environment’s contribution to the triple bottom line (believe me, my life’s work has focused around understanding this relationship), it is important to be wary of anything labeled a panacea for all city problems.
As Jane Jacobs poignantly pointed out in her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, you cannot just plan your way into a utopian ideal; cities are messy, organic, dynamic. And predicting what factors will impact cities and human behavior – and to what extent – is complicated!
Tools like State of Place™ must be part of a holistic, concerted effort to improve communities’ quality of life. Although walkability is certainly an urban-design ideal to strive toward for multiple reasons across the triple bottom line, the path toward a livable, sustainable, thriving city is not merely a walkable one.
This article is excerpted from Urban Imprint.
Photos courtesy of WalkArlington.