Abstract
In the race to plan and retrofit cities for a more livable, sustainable future, details matter. And while travel behavior research has provided planners with a wealth of information about the spatial characteristics required to encourage walking and transit use, the knowledge needed to help transform a walkable place into a memorable one may still be lacking. Practitioners and students alike are well aware of the need to encourage dense development, diverse land uses, destination accessibility, and short distance to transit service. But one final D variable, design, is a bit more elusive. Unlike the others, getting the design balance right requires knowledge of not just the optimal physical layout of urban space but also how people perceive, navigate, and evaluate that space. Planners also need concrete examples of how these principles have been put into practice, and how they have been written into local codes. This is where Pedestrian- and Transit-Oriented Design fills an important gap. This text, written for both practitioners and students, provides an introduction to the effect that urban design has on walking behavior, along with abundant examples of policies that cities in North America have implemented to turn design principles into desirable, walkable places. The text is concise and accessible, providing enough detail to introduce the basic concepts of urban design while pointing the reader who wants more detail to important works in the field.
Chapter 1 (Introduction) briefly lays out the overall goals of the book and promotes the need for dense, pedestrian-oriented design. Ewing and Bartholomew state that the book sits at the intersection of urban design and planning, leaning more toward the former in terms of its emphasis on pedestrian scale and functional aesthetics. The intent is to draw together aspects of urban design and research results from seemingly disparate fields like travel behavior, real estate economics, and traffic safety. However, the focus of the text is on the smaller scale that concerns designers—the street, park, or transit stop—as opposed to the neighborhood, district, or region.
The remainder of the chapter is devoted to making the case for walkable urban spaces. First, the authors point out that demand for walkable communities is growing, based on housing and travel surveys that show a preference for more walking destinations and a desire to drive less. This is a trend that has been well documented in news stories and research about the preferences of the Millennial generation. Ewing and Bartholomew also make a case for walkable neighborhoods as a needed reaction to an aging population, citing the Baby Boomer generation and the mobility challenges that will need to be overcome to allow aging in place. Although the book was published in 2013, some of the surveys cited were conducted before the housing crash of 2008, and during a time of high gasoline prices. However, the demand for high-quality, walkable urban spaces seems to have weathered both the housing turmoil and a return to lower fuel costs. Continued demand, the ongoing climate crisis, new transportation services, and technologies are all trends that point the continuing need for planners to be able to skillfully apply urban design principles alongside spatial planning concepts.
At the end of chapter 1, the authors provide a bibliography of classic urban design readings and a shorter list of works that might be more accessible to practitioners, policy makers, and the public. This section also includes a description of five appendices that are available online. Each appendix comprises a comprehensive literature review pertaining to areas covered in the text. These include travel behavior, visual preference, hedonic pricing, traffic safety, and transit-oriented design. Providing this information at this point in the book seems a little bit awkward, but at the same time, it makes the reader aware of the large body of empirical evidence that exists before the material is introduced in subsequent chapters.
In chapter 2 (Urban Design Qualities), the authors succinctly lay out eight characteristics of urban design related to walkability. These characteristics, identified through a literature review and input from an expert panel, form the basis for the recommendations that follow in the remainder of the book. These eight qualities are synthesized from classic urban design texts, such as Image of the City (Lynch, 1960) and A Pattern Language (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, 1977), along with the ideas of Allan Jacobs, William Whyte, and many others. In short, the authors state that good urban space has a distinct character, which is simultaneously complex and coherent. It provides a roomlike, human-scale environment that can be easily navigated by users. Though presented only briefly at the beginning of the chapter, the authors also lay out a conceptual framework that relates physical features (roadway cross-sectional dimensions, building height, landscaping), urban design, and individual perceptions of space (safety, comfort) to urban walkability and ultimately to individual walking behavior. This framework helps to tie the items included in walkability audits often used by planners to the theoretical constructs they attempt to measure.
Though this introduction to urban design is brief, it provides sufficient information for the practitioner or student without a background in urban design to understand the fundamental elements of good urban design. The remainder of the book fleshes out the policy prescriptions that the authors recommend and that cities are using to achieve the goal of obtaining high-quality walkable urban space. Chapters 3, 4, and 5, which comprise the heart of the book, walk the reader through checklists of features that the authors deem important in pedestrian- and transit-oriented urban spaces. The features are presented in order of importance, from essential, to highly desirable, to worthwhile additions.
Chapter 3 (Checklist of Essential Features) begins with what planners will immediately recognize as the “D” variables associated with walking and transit use. These include density, diversity of land uses, design, destination accessibility, and distance to transit. Added to these are basic physical characteristics that facilitate pedestrian movement. These include continuous sidewalks, relatively short, safe street crossings, and protection from traffic. In addition to rough guidelines on the thresholds for walkable, transit-oriented development, the authors provide local code examples that are embedded within each section. These text boxes contain excerpts of codes from cities around the United States, along with a brief background paragraph about the development goals the code is designed to achieve. These examples, along with ample photographs and diagrams that show examples of good design, help the reader to connect theory and research findings directly to policy.
Chapter 4 (Checklist of Highly Desirable Features) describes the functional characteristics that make a location an attractive destination for pedestrians. These features include commercial uses, shade, lively public space, and attractive transit stops that promote interaction between and among people. Again, visuals are used to effectively show both good and bad examples of these features.
Chapter 5 (Checklist of Worthwhile Additions) is devoted to mainly aesthetic features that are designed to make a place memorable. These include significant landmarks, public art, water features, street furniture, and pavement textures, along with the absence of unsightly signs and above ground utilities.
In the sixth and final chapter of the book (Conclusion), the authors state that “urban design is the part of the built environment most overlooked” (108) by the architects and planners responsible for urban space, and I agree with this statement. However, it is exactly these details that can make or break a place. By bridging the gap between the policy- and larger-scale spatial orientation of planners and the field of urban design, Pedestrian- and Transit-Oriented Design helps to fill an important gap. It combines a very accessible introduction to the urban planning literature with practical examples of municipal code designed to encourage high-quality urban space. Though it as a good stand-alone text, perhaps its most important contribution is as a starting point for the practitioner or student wanting to dig more deeply into the design literature and push the quality of urban space forward.