Designing Urban Places that Don't Suck (a sense of place)

Have you ever walked through a great city and thought, wow, I love this place? Places that are unique and interesting. Places where you feel like grabbing a drink and sitting down to enjoy yourself. Places you purposely go to on vacation. Places that are memorable. And of course, there are urban places that are miserable. Places you go to only if you have to. Places you leave as soon as you can. Places that are forgettable. What is it that makes some places great and others, well, not? One key factor is what urban planners call a sense of place. When you get it right, you know it. And when you get it wrong, you end up feeling like you're in no place at all. When you're somewhere with a strong sense of place, it feels unique. The Great Market Square in Bruges doesn't look like Santorini's Ia Street, which doesn't look like Rosio Square in Lisbon. That makes it hard to generalize about great places, but still, there are a few characteristics that most of these places share that can give us an idea of how to build better urban places. The first is a sense of enclosure. Some planners think of spaces like city squares and streets as public rooms, and to make a room, you need walls. There are no hard and fast rules for enclosure for streets, but one rule of thumb that's often mentioned in urban planning documents is to have no more than a 3 to 1 ratio of street width to building height, or the other way around, and no more than 6 to 1 for public squares. And for what it's worth, many of the best examples of great streets do have this kind of ratio, and many of the best examples of terrible streets don't. That being said, there are examples where this doesn't fit at all. Saint Peter's Square in the Vatican definitely has a great sense of place, but it's also very wide with about a 12 to 1 ratio of width to height, though it does have an obelisk to break it up in the middle. Of course, these extreme cases only work when they don't have cars in them. This would entirely lose its sense of place with Toronto's Highway 401 running through it, which would actually fit, though you'd have to bulldoze the basilica. Regardless, feeling like you're in a specific public room helps define an area's sense of and makes it distinct from other places nearby. If you're on a particularly wide street or large square, there are other ways to create a sense of enclosure. Planners might use trees on the sides or in the median of a road, or awnings and banners. There are lots of examples of these kind of places that I travel through on a regular basis. Here on Apollolan in Amsterdam, this street has an extremely wide right of way, but there's only one lane for cars, and the line of trees breaks up the space into multiple places, making it feel more inviting. Trees that grow out enough to touch each other are called a kissing canopy, and this can be used to give a place a roof. These are some of the most cozy streets you'll find anywhere. There are actually lots of creative ways to create enclosure. At the Market and Dolat Square in Zagreb, they used matching umbrellas as a sort of makeshift roof. And Rotterdam really took the whole enclosure thing literally when they built this enormous covered market. In car-dependent suburbia, the wide open spaces don't contribute to a sense of enclosure, and you don't have a sense of where the place you're in begins or ends. Ultimately, it's hard to give an area a sense of enclosure when there needs to be ample free parking. This makes everywhere feel like one sea of mediocrity. As you travel through these areas, every place feels like every other place. What makes this crappy strip mall any different from this one thousands of kilometres away? They feel like the same place, which is to say, no place. At least this one in LA has palm trees, but it still sucks. This lack of place is why standing in a parking lot like this feels so depressing. Places with lots of surface parking lots totally lose their sense of enclosure and end up feeling lifeless and empty. Of course, the cars and asphalt everywhere don't help either. Compare this suburban shopping area in my hometown to this recently renovated downtown street in the same city. And to be clear, this doesn't have to be a downtown vs suburbs thing. This street and this street are the same distance from their respective city centres, but one is designed primarily for people, while the other is primarily designed for cars. So one is an interesting and memorable place, while the other is a car sewer surrounded by a sea of asphalt. With a strong sense of place, you'll also have eye-level interest, or what normies call stuff to look at. If the street is a public room, this is what goes on the walls. There are shop windows, stalls, outdoor cafes, and public art. This is where little details can make a really big difference. When you're on foot, you really notice things like the mosaic facade on the Café Biard in Paris, or the intricate concrete details on the Diamant House in Prague. You're not going to notice this stuff when driving. Compare that kind of visual interest to a typical suburban facade. This looks like the walls of a prison. If you're unlucky enough to have to walk next to this, you'll get to look at cigarette butts and cheap aluminum siding. Most people don't want to live in a room that looks like this. So why would we want to be constantly surrounded by places that look like this? Another element of great places is entrance frequency, the number of other places you can access from a street. You want to be able to stop off at a variety of businesses at regular walkable intervals. The best example of this done wrong is suburban power centers like this one. The entrances to these places are so far apart that most people get back in their cars and drive to them. Entrance frequency is also really important for public squares and plazas. If you want to go to a place, you have to be able to get to the place. Dolat Square, the one with the umbrellas, is a fully enclosed area, but there are multiple entrances. Those entrances connect to nearby streets and public transit options. But if this were built in suburbia, you'd need to completely surround this plaza with parking, like at a shopping mall. All of a sudden, it's harder to get there unless you drive your car and your sense of place is erased. What seems like a more attractive place to hang out? This or this? See, when a city considers a sense of place, it has to make choices about what the place means. What are the city's values? What are its unique attributes? How does it serve the community? Defining a sense of place means defining your own identity. Are you a city that values dining and cafe culture? Or maybe you used to be an industrial city, but you're reshaping your identity with art. Are you a city that takes pains to preserve its history? Or is your city rapidly modernizing? How you design a place is how you design your identity. This place says nothing about identity except that they value cars more than they value people. One of the few examples of a strong sense of place in most US and Canadian cities are ethnic enclaves like Chinatowns, Little Havana in Miami, or Old Quebec City, which immigrants use to recreate the unique places of their home countries. And those places have been kept this way for tourism purposes because people want a sense of place. Since they're in North America, however, these places still cede way too much space to car traffic, but they're generally better than other nearby areas. To recreate the sense of place from the towns they're based on, they have frequent entrances to specialty shops and restaurants, street-level details that are specific to that area, and a sense of enclosure that separates them from the world outside. The walls of the public room are decorated and interesting to look at, and you can't mistake them for any other place in the same city. This is what it looks like when you're specifically designing with a sense of place in mind. Though even great places can start to lose their distinctiveness when they become the same as everywhere else. For example, it's hard to guess where you are if a place becomes filled with the same chain stores as every other place. Paris is famous for its unique streets and architecture, and what planning experts call Frenchiness. I'm sure that's the technical term. But the Champs Elysees is starting to become more generic as major brands move in, which risks turning this unique place into just another mall. This is why Amsterdam has been recently controlling the types of shops that can open in the city center. Sorry, five guys will need to open somewhere else. So of course, the 17th century canal ring of Amsterdam has a strong sense of place. There's nowhere quite like it, which is why it's flooded with tourists from all over the world and most locals avoid it. But it sure was nice during the coronavirus lockdowns. But really, almost every place I visit in Amsterdam has some sense of place. All of these places feel unique and different, and I've noticed a very remarkable difference in how I navigate here. In North America, I think about streets and roads. My mental map is based on major streets and cardinal directions. But in Amsterdam, I think about places. I'm in one place, and I think about all the places I need to pass through in order to get to another place. My mental map is full of the best routes from one place to another, and I think about the city as a series of unique places. This strong sense of place makes the city mean something to me. I actually care about these places, and I like being in them. There's a common response I get when showing video from car-dependent places. People say, this looks just like where I live, but I know it's not. Because when you design a place for cars, everything starts to look the same. This could be anywhere. And after living somewhere like this, I'll never be able to go back to car-dependency. Because a place that could be any place, is no place at all. I'd like to thank my supporters on Nebula and Patreon who pay me to travel from place to place. If you'd like to support the channel, visit nebula.tv slash notjustbikes, or patreon.com slash notjustbikes.