Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (14 page)

Errors from Above

Unfortunately, when choosing how to live or move, most of us are not as free as we think. Our options are strikingly limited, and they are defined by the planners, engineers, politicians, architects, marketers, and land speculators who imprint their own values on the urban landscape. The city is as much a product of the psychological tics, status urges, and systematic errors in judgment of these powerful strangers as it is one of our own flawed choices or happenstance. Just as each of us makes mistakes when choosing a home or ideal commute time, city shapers have proved themselves to be masters at miscalculating utility on our behalf. Collectively, they make the same predictable cognitive mistakes the rest of us make.

An especially common trap is the tendency to simplify multifaceted problems. The world is wildly complex, and humans have always relied on simplification, metaphor, and story to make sense of it. The pioneering anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss discovered this when he lived among preindustrial tribes in Brazil. The forest people organized their knowledge of the world into myths that shared a similar narrative structure: everything was reduced into a system of binary opposites. This structure runs through just about every great myth ever told. There is the idea and its denial, good and evil, friend or enemy. Think about your own life and the way you remember it. Stories tend to get simpler with every telling because they seem to make more sense that way. It is difficult for us to conceive of in-between states, complex arrangements, or overlapping patterns, even though our lives are full of them.

Cities are especially full of contradictions, especially when you consider the complexity inherent in places that mix living, working, shopping, recreation, and other functions. Le Corbusier himself admitted that with all the possibilities and considerations that planners face, “the human mind loses itself and becomes fatigued.” Le Corbusier and his acolytes made a religion of extreme simplification. In their “sublime straight lines” and strict functional division, they made cities seem strikingly legible on paper. But cities refuse to behave like simple problems.

Take the most fully realized modernist city. Architect Oscar Niemeyer’s
*
plan for a new capital city for Brazil on a wilderness tabula rasa in the 1950s was meant to embody the country’s orderly, healthy, and egalitarian future. Early sketches of Brasilia resembled an airplane or a great bird with its wings outstretched. From above, the plan was exhilarating. Niemeyer segregated functions across the dual axes of his great bird’s body. At its head, the Plaza of the Three Powers, a gargantuan square lined with blocks of government ministries and crowned with the national congress complex. Monumental avenues were paved along the bird’s spine. Identical residential superblocks were stacked in orderly rows along its wings. The intention was to use simple geometry to free Brasilia of all the chaos of the typical Brazilian city: slums, crime, and traffic jams were banished by the architect’s pen. Pedestrians were separated from cars. There was exactly 269 square feet of green space for every resident. The principles of equality ran right through the design: all residents would have similar-sized homes. Everything had its place. On paper, it was a triumph of straightforward and egalitarian central planning.

Modernist Perfection

Residents of Brasilia’s modernist districts invented a new word to reflect their sense of disorientation and alienation in the perfectly ordered, spacious, and green city:
brasilite
, or Brasilia-itis.
(© Bruno Daher)

But when the first generation of residents arrived to live and work in Brasilia, the simple approach showed its weakness. People felt disoriented by the sameness of their residential complexes. They felt lost in their perfectly ordered environment and its vast, empty spaces. They missed their old, cramped market streets, places where disorder and complexity led to serendipitous encounters with sights, scents, and other people. Residents even invented a new word—
brasilite
, or Brasilia-itis—to describe the malaise of living “without the pleasures—the distractions, conversations, flirtations, and little rituals—of outdoor life in other Brazilian cities.” The simple, rational plan extinguished the intrinsic social benefits of messy public space and loaded the city with a psychological burden that was entirely new for its residents. (Eventually the city spilled beyond its plan, and now messy barrios spread like a tangled nest beyond the wings of the great bird.)

Focusing on Danger

The messianic certainty of the high modernists of the last century makes it easy to pick on them. But this tendency toward simplification of inherently complex systems also runs through the decisions of the people who plan the contemporary city, sometimes with disastrous results.

Consider the effort to design safer cities. This noble goal has been stymied by the essential ways in which people—including planners and engineers—assess danger.

The Nobel prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman argues that when making decisions about risk, we create simple rules—or heuristics—derived from experience. This makes sense. Get hit by a car or see someone else get hit and you will be more careful the next time you cross the street. The problem is, we generally do not remember the world accurately; nor do we get immediate and compelling access to all our memories; nor do all memories motivate us with the same force.

Think of something that might one day maim or kill you.

Are you picturing a plane crash, a gangster with a knife, or a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his belly? If such shocking images come to mind, then your brain is functioning normally but not accurately. Popular culture is awash with spectacular images and stories of violence and death. These kinds of dangers naturally stick in our heads. We can visualize them and recall them easily. They also carry more emotional wallop—we don’t calculate their dangers so much as we
feel
them. Vivid, emotionally charged memories come more easily to mind at moments of decision than mundane ones, and the more easily you can recall or picture a scenario, the more likely you are to think it will happen again. Thus, when making decisions, we tend to pay too much attention to spectacular but rare threats and too little to dangers that creep up on us over time.
*

So it’s no wonder that societies put tremendous effort into designing alternatives to the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. The dangers were salient. Lung-clogging smog, desperate crowding, dark tenements, poisoned water, and crime born of poverty: the images remain powerful today. But in escaping those horrors, we have built cities infused with new, invisible dangers.

“We’ve become the victims of our own success,” Richard Jackson, professor and chairman of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, told
The New York Times
in 2012. “By living far from where we work, we reduced crowding and improved the quality of our air and water, which drove down rates of infectious disease.” All of which are good. But the seemingly safe and healthy dispersed suburb offers systems of living that can reasonably be considered lethal.

The biggest danger is, by its nature, the least exciting. It is the sickness that comes from doing nothing. Public health experts have even invented a new word—
obesogenic
, or fat-making—to describe low-density neighborhoods like Weston Ranch. This is one of the reasons that, aside from sedentary Saudi Arabians and some South Pacific Islanders, Americans are now the fattest people on the planet. Fully a third of Americans are obese. Nearly one in five American children is overweight. So are more than a quarter of Canadian and 30 percent of British children.
*
More than three-quarters of obese adults have either diabetes, high blood cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, or coronary artery disease. The Centers for Disease Control warn that lifestyle-related diabetes has reached epidemic proportions. At the same time, living in low-density sprawl puts residents at greater risk of arthritis, chronic lung disease, digestive problems, headaches, and urinary tract infections. Some of these effects come from the toxic air we breathe while we are driving cars or living amid their fumes. But, most critically, they result from living in communities that force people to drive. Just living in a sprawling city has the effect of four years of aging.

Suburbia was once seen as a refuge. Dispersed communities were supposedly protected by sheer distance—and, more recently, gates, guards, and security walls—from people who might rob, steal, or kill. But if the goal is to avoid being hurt or killed by strangers, then the edge neighborhood is a terrible choice. University of Virginia architecture professor William H. Lucy revealed this paradox when he examined the statistics on “death by strangers” in hundreds of U.S. counties. To get a really accurate picture of the danger that strangers pose, Lucy combined the usual figures on homicides by strangers with statistics on traffic fatalities. The conclusion: killer drivers are so common in sprawl that the carnage they create far exceeds the damage done by killers who use other weapons. In fact, someone who walks out her door on the edges of sprawl suburbia is much more likely to die at the hands of a stranger than someone moving through most American central cities or inner suburbs. The only difference is that most of suburbia’s killers didn’t mean it.

Partly because sprawl has forced Americans to drive farther and farther in the course of every day, per capita road death rates in the United States hover around forty thousand per year. That’s a third more people than are killed by guns. It’s more than ten times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Here’s an image that sticks: imagine a loaded Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone aboard. That’s how many people die on U.S. highways every year. Globally, traffic injuries are the greatest killer of ten- to twenty-four-year-olds.
*
A rational actor would be terrified of suburban roads. A rational policy maker would wage war, not on other nations, but on traffic deaths.

The Emotional Engineer

Unfortunately, some of the most favored design responses to road danger have backfired. For decades, road engineers followed standards that strictly separate pedestrians from cars, remove distractions, and widen traffic lanes. Engineering theory long held as gospel the notion that wide, clear roads enhanced safety. The assumption was that cars wouldn’t crash so frequently if the things they tended to hit were farther away. In other words, they focused on an expensive but salient and simple solution.

Now the unintended consequences of pursuing seemingly obvious measures have started to pile up. The removal of pedestrians and other distractions from urban roads, a process begun by Motordom during the bloody 1920s, has actually made roads more dangerous. The problem was that the simple fix ignored the complex system of road psychology. By corralling pedestrians with fences, barriers, and dispersed crosswalks, engineers send drivers a message that it is safe to put the pedal to the metal. Road studies have found that most of us drive not according to posted speed limits, but according to how safe the road feels. We drive as fast as road designs tell us to drive. The result: drivers kill four times as many pedestrians on spacious suburban residential streets than on the narrow streets of traditional neighborhoods, because those spacious roads make driving faster feel safer. And it is not collisions that kill people, but
collisions at high speed
. A pedestrian hit by a car going 35 miles per hour is ten times as likely to die than if he was hit by a car going 25 miles per hour. Throw in some parked cars or add some trees on the median—just the stuff that was once considered dangerous—and we slow down to less lethal velocities.
*
Throw in a whole bunch of distractions, including lots of pedestrians, and drivers become so attentive that traffic fatalities plummet (a story I’ll return to in Chapter 9).

Another big mistake came with well-meaning efforts to deal with salient dangers such as house fires. Before World War II, the typical residential street in the United States and Canada was only twenty-eight feet wide. If cars were parked on either side, two drivers approaching each other in the middle could barely pass. This was deemed unacceptable, particularly for emergency service vehicle access. If regular cars were in danger of scraping each other on these narrow streets, imagine the spectacular tragedy that might occur if a fire truck failed to get to a burning house. Planners did just that, imagining the smoke, the flames, the children trapped upstairs—just the kind of risk images that hold attention and shape decisions. Consequently, road standards have gotten wider and wider since the 1950s, and pedestrian deaths have grown apace.

Now that many residential neighborhood roads have reached the forty-foot mark, researchers have discovered that this attempt to mitigate spectacular risks has precipitated its own storm of tragedies. Since those newer, wider residential streets encourage faster driving, they are associated with four times as many pedestrian deaths as narrower, older streets.