twin city sidewalks

Cartoons, drawings, and illustrations have always been central to architecture and design, both ways of knowing based on observing the urban landscape and reducing it to basic principles. Nothing does that better than a great drawing or illustration.

So here are some of my all-time favorites, along with brief explanations of why I think they're so keen!

#1: The "road space" cutaway (by "Todorovic")


I love this drawing because it captures the inequality inherent in our street design priorities. Cars are climate controlled, hermetically sealed bubbles of private space. In general, we give over a huge percentage of our streets to people traveling in relative luxury, while forcing everyone else to share the street's table scraps.

Whenever our cities equivocate between bike lanes, transit, and sidewalks... Whenever we fail to prioritize shared or active mobility, we're propping up privilege. This illustration perfectly shows that fundamental dynamic.

#2. The LOS bulldozer (by Andy Singer)


Saint Paul-based cartoonist and my friend, Andy Singer, is one of this world's car cartoon geniuses -- a small group, to be sure -- and there are so many great Singer cartoons to choose from. If I had to choose just one, my favorite is probably this one, because it connects the dots in a very specific and important way.

(DOTs... get it?)

It's not often that cartoons can capture a structural problem so elegantly, including specific nerdy data like average annual daily traffic (AADT) and level of service (LOS) to prove a point.

For more on how this works, check out my podcast with Andy Singer about his book, Why We Drive.

#3. Daily "suburban mortar-fire" (by Leon Krier)

[The original caption reads: NOT THE CAR BUT THE SUBURBAN HOME IS THE DEADLY WEAPON; DAILY SUBURBAN MORTAR FIRE AGAINST CITY CENTERS.]

Architect, urban philosopher, famous Luxembourgian, and overall design gadfly Leon Krier's books are chock full of excellent illustrations that skewer modernist architecture and planning. This one is my favorite, though, because it elegantly captures the violence of sub-urban car priorities and how damaging they are to older, walkable cities.

In a way, suburbs and cities are literally at war with each other, and speeding cars are the weapons of choice. As long as cars are around, no walkable city is safe.


#4. City streets as cliffs (artist unknown by Karl Jilg)


I don't know who made this amazing drawing of a city street as a giant canyon, but it perfectly captures the *feeling* of walking through a car-dominated city.

In many downtowns, and certainly most other urban places too, the danger of the street is everywhere. Technically the street might be "safe" according to modern engineering standards, but being anywhere near a street with cars going at 40 miles per hour just a few feet away feels terrifying. The streets might as well be cliffs, and your kid tugging on your arm might as well be about to fall into a bottomless pit. Crosswalks feel like the bridge in an Indiana Jones movie, and your dog is always in peril.

I love how this drawing captures that feeling so perfectly. This is probably my favorite sidewalk illustration of all time!

That's it. Those are my top four.

But just for kicks, here are some extras that didn't quite make the cut.


Honorable Mention

[A good illustration from Victor Gruen, father of the indoor shopping mall.]

[Another Andy Singer cartoon that is all-too-true.]

[A Tom Toles masterpiece on white flight, including an all-time-great pun.]

[This speaks for itself.]

[Great illustration of bike politics from my friend, Ken Avidor.]

[An excellent New Yorker piece.]

[And what list would be complete without the worst cartoon ever?]

Speed was of the essence, the joy of sitting in the car and hurtling himself forward through space. That became a good beyond all others, a hunger to be fed at any price. Nothing around him lasted for more than a moment, and as one moment followed another, it was as through he alone continued to exist. He was a fixed point in a whirl of changes, a body poised in utter stillness as the world rushed through him and disappeared. The car became a sanctum of invulnerability, a refuge in which nothing could hurt him anymore. As long as he was driving, he carried no burdens, was unencumbered by even the slightest particle of his former life.

[A spring respite.]

There is a particular feeling after bicycle touring that sinks down into your legs. It grounds you, connecting  your feet to the earth, the floors of your rooms, the dirt in your yard, the concrete and asphalt streets all offer purchase of a different kind. The topography is alive with the possibility of a distant place, not just the knowledge the remnants of a lived encounter between your body and the world around you.

"I traveled this far on my own, carried myself into and across a landscape," it says mutely.

You don't think this thought so much as feel it, the distance fills your limbs, the lingering horizons tracing an unbroken curve between here and there, an aura of peace equal parts physical and mental that changes the feeling of chairs or paper. Everything tastes bigger somehow.

The richness of traveling by bicycle is rooted in vulnerability, the sheer act of carrying weight, the intensity of each hill, or the infinite randomness of the weather. This recent trip, to and from a small farm outside Stillwater, Minnesota, began in a deluge, hours of rain that seemed to swirl on the radar and stop overhead, dropping rain all morning long and making sure my socks would we wet for hours. Back and forth the rain drops toyed with gravity. Bicycling demands and rewards the patience and thick skin, but then just as much the sky settles down and by nightfall first a single star appears and then a dozen and then a hundred. And the next day is completely new, blue sky and white clouds and sunshine falling through the trees. That's the beauty of bicycling, that you never know.  Exposure making each hour or mile more keenly felt, the intensification of the everyday, the adventure of the mundane.

[Bridge relativity.]

A friend once send me a letter describing a journey not on bicycle but on foot, walking a pilgrimage through Spain. He wrote:

We're averaging just nine miles a day but this is plenty so far. It takes your feet and body a week to get used to getting up every morning at seven AM, eating a little breakfast and coffee, walking eight or nine miles with a break here or there and repeating this day after day. After seven days, I'm finally used to it. We get to our next destination by noon or one PM. We wash stuff, shower, or chill for a bit, then I go draw for a few hours. Then often communal dinners, sleep, repeat.

The main thing that strikes me is how you could drive this 180-mile distance in three hours on a freeway but, in 'shortening' distance, the car makes human transit (moving through space) into a drab affair that destroys the space through which it moves. We both know this but a long walk puts the modes in stark contrast -- drive for three hours in a boring mundane way in diminished space at great expense (personal and planetary) or take twenty days to walk it in what can become this highly detailed, fantastic adventure.

So much is written about the glories of speed, but speed is a relative concept. It has no inherent meaning. I still keenly remember my first trip in my first car, driving alone from Saint Paul to Massachusetts and, afterward, contemplating the space I had crossed. The rubber tires touched every mile between my homes, tracing a line across the landscape. I felt I had learned something important about the scope of the terrain between.

Yet compared to the car, bicycling grants rich dimensions of topography, climate, and the experience of air itself, and unfathomable intimacy with the land. Yes, driving offers the transcendence of space by seemingly limitless energy. But bicycling -- or walking! --  is to immerse your limited body in the great variety of Earth. Soon afterward, a rich feeling sinks into your limbs, the knowledge of distance, weight, movement, the wealth of space itself.

[Stillwater in the distance.]

["Pay Attention to this Sign!"]

Since I started this blog in 2005, I've taken pictures of a great many things: detritus, idiosyncratic signage, shop windows, doorways, lampposts, temporarily abandoned dogs...

There are also lots of sidewalk pictures that don't make it: interesting buildings, random sunsets, etc. For a photos to graduate to an actual blog category, there are two basic requirements.

First, the object, infrastructure, or situation has to grab the eye. The truly mundane -- think of doorknobs or gutters -- is not visually interesting enough to merit photographic documentation.

Second, that visual thing has to reveal something about how infrastructure affects our daily lives. Our built environment typically sits in the background. All around us things are silently "doing work" from the corners of our eyes. What happens when we look?

Oddly enough, once I acquired a dgitibal camera, one of the first things I began taking pictures of were 'sidewalk closed' signs. Why 'sidewalk closed' signs?

It all began with this photo, taken in 2006 near Hamline University in Saint Paul:

[The original 'sidewalk closed' sign.]

I remember like it was only yesterday when I happened on this scene. It seemed to sum up so much about our city streets and daily life.

There was one simple reason...

Everyone Ignores These Signs

[They also tend to ironically block the sidewalk even when not used.]

There is little on this earth more functionally useless than a 'sidewalk closed' sign. A fence? Now that's useful. Concrete barriers are semi-useful.

These signs? They make a mockery of signs.

If "freedom" is the degree to which people are able to overcome their environmental obstacles, pedestrians are by far the most liberated mode of travel. In a car, one little orange barrel can keep you from your destination. On a bike, a well-placed set of stairs might force you to dismount.

On foot, it takes one hell of a fence to stop you from walking where you want to walk. Hence desire paths, razor wire, parkour.

Almost everywhere that 'sidewalk closed' signs exist, people ignore them. They walk around. They walk in the street. They push the sign to the side.

For the most part, people walk where they want to walk. People walk where they feel safe, and along the most direct path they can find. Unless you're German, no amount of signage will stop you if you think it's the best way.


 

[The only conceivable purpose of these signs is to provide liability relief.]

Abstract v. Lived Space

The difference between expected theoretical behavior of people and actual real world behavior of people is akin to what urban theorists call "abstract vs. lived space." The concept comes loosely from French sociologist Henri Lefebvre (also quoted in my recent Minnpost column).

Basically, abstract space describes the theoretical spatial relations between people, buildings, technology, etc. Abstract space is how we think of things operating in maps, models, and stories we tell about ourselves. Typically these stories are relatively simple, "rational", efficient, hierarchical. Think of the rules the rules of a highway: keep right unless passing, zipper merge, don't speed, etc. That is abstract space.

Lived space on the other hand is what actually happens in the real world. Lived space encompasses the everyday resistances of actual behavior, the various ways that buildings or people or technologies escape their stated intentions. In lived space, people speed. Buildings fall apart. Pavement cracks. Machines stop working. The world fills with conversations and daydreams.

In this example, the 'sidewalk closed' sign perfectly illustrates the difference between these two conceptions of space. In theory, all pedestrians obey all signs. If the "sidewalk is closed" for whatever reason, people cross the street and continue on their way using the adjacent sidewalk.

In the lived space of the real world, people are tired when they walk, can see the sidewalk right in front of them, don't want to cross the street, and can easily step around the meaningless sign.

[A stop sign on the transitway that most people will ignore.]

[A "pedestrian stop sign" that most people will ignore.]

And This is Why We Must Walk

As designers, we ignore lived space at our peril. I often see design approaches that seem to dwell completely in abstract space, where the actual behavior of people seems irrelevant to the stated goals of an urban situation. This might be bike racks, architecture, street design, or whatever.

Almost always in these cases, "desire paths" form around the poor design. People vote with their feet. If you design a space or situation contrary to the actual behavior of most people, you'll find yourself ignored.

And this is why engineers, architects, decision makers, and planners must actually use the things they are building. If you don't take the bus on a regular basis, you probably have no idea how the bus is used. You don't see how people sit, interact with each other, use the payment devices, or negotiate the bus shelters. You can't do a good job designing or planning a bus system unless you actually use it.

The same is true for sidewalks, crosswalks, bumpouts, and pedestrian signals. Unless you actually walk around regularly (not just once), you won't understand how people walk and use streets in workaday lived space. And you'll end up designing things that are completely ignored... like 'sidewalk closed' signs.

[Down the hill to downtown.]

In wintertime, I end up walking more. A lot of it has to do with the sub-standard transit system where I live, some of it has to do with being a cheap bastard, and some of it has to do with the simple stubborn pleasure I get from adventure. But I end up walking more, for example, I’ll routinely walk the two mile distance from my house to downtown Saint Paul, or the mile and a half to the coffee shop on West 7th Street, or what have you.

One of the nice things about walking is that you end up with a strong sense of the physical relationships between things, the geography of your city. You notice the gaps in the urban fabric, the topography of the land, the tucked away homes or blank walls or bridges. You get a great sense of what I call the contiguity of space.

[The view from the High Bridge sidewalk.]

This contiguity is something I'll also notice when in a big city with a great train network. For example. If you take the subway everywhere in New York City, you miss out on the actual distances and contiguity between places. When I used to live there, I'd occasionally walk over one of the East River bridges, and it was a completely new experience of the city. You noticed the contiguity, the river, and the parks in ways entirely bypassed by the subway's tunnels and speed. 

A similar thing happens when you take the train a long distance. Flying from city to city is not contiguous. You've literally got your head in the clouds, and plop down in a completely new world without much sense of the flyover land beneath you. (Protip: It's called the Midwest.) On the train, you can look out the window and see every house, town, and river valley from start to finish. It's a much better sense of contiguity, of the actual distances and geographies between places.

Cars and bikes are somewhere in between. Cars offer a level of contiguity, but the monotony of the interstate freeway system  is difficult to underestimate. Basically, the experience of space in a car is reduced to time and traffic. "It's seven hours to Chicago, depending on traffic," is a thing you'll say. You might stop for gas, but all gas stations are the same. (Driving on back roads, as a good friend of mine insists on doing, is another matter.)

Bicycles are probably the next most contiguous mode of travel after walking. For one thing, you experience the hills and valleys. But there are also the smells, sounds, and the many other ten-mile-per-hour sensations. 

Anyway, here's a rough spectrum of travel modes (real and imaged) ranked according to contiguity. Enjoy, and feel free to suggest additions or subtractions in the comments.