Review: The Walkable City - Mary Soderstrom

I'd been looking forward to the publication of The Walkable City: from Haussmann's Boulevards to Jane Jacobs' Streets and Beyond since seeing it advertised last summer. While waiting for it, I read the predecessor, Green City - a study of the relationship of people and nature in highly "built" environments, focusing on a dozen or more cities around the world. So I was familiar with her style and her background.

Soderstrom is a novelist by trade and a Canadian by citizenship. And, obviously, perhaps, but not insignificantly, a woman. All three of these attributes give her a perspective that differs substantially from that of the body of people who have authorized, designed, and built the cities of the western world - Haussmann, for instance. In comparing and contrasting the design of Paris under Haussmann with the work (both in writing and in community activism) of Jane Jacobs, then, Soderstrom comes out on the side of Jacobs - a mightily influential woman who did not have a college degree (she took courses that interested her) nor a steady career in any of the fields that would qualify one as an "expert" in urban design.

Like Jacobs, Soderstrom's qualifications include a lively sensitivity to what it means to live - not only in the epitomized sense of those whose pictures populate magazines, but especially for the great majority of people who work. People who, particularly before Karl Marx, were invisible to the world of culture and politics. The pedestrian life has always been of paticular interest to those who cannot afford or are not entitled to any other form of transportation, whether horses, carriages, or trains, planes, and automobiles. It is in this respect that Soderstrom's training as a writer of fiction is crucial to her ability to write this book, because in seeking to understand what life in a pedestrian city was like, she turns to novelists - notably Victor Hugo and his depiction of life in Paris for working class people. The novel is, perhaps, the best vehicle for chronicling what the mundane in any given place is like. Not even a great painting can show us what the walk to work is like, or the walk home.

This perspective also informs the way in which Soderstrom analyses the "improvements" of cities. In neighborhoods ostensibly based on the principles of the New Urbanism (which seeks, among other things, to restore walkable scale to cities), she finds that the neighborhoods are walkable - but there's no place to walk to. Who walks nowhere but those with leisure time? Furthermore, what happens to all the people who used to live in the now improved developments?

Her book whetted my appetite for more of Jane Jacobs, and for a stroll in some of the newer experiments in Paris. It also confirmed my suspicions of many "developments", which, in order to make people famous and get politicians re-elected, are executed on such a scale that only the wealthy can afford to live, work, and start businesses there; but that lasting neighborhoods have a mix of old and new, expensive and inexpensive, businesses and homes. Finally, I found the intermittent musings on density - how many people per square mile are required to make a viable walking culture? - to be a helpful guideline for testing what sounds good but may not actually work. Outside of more technical works, such hard data can be hard to come across.

The Walkable City also contains an extensive bibliography for further reading.