Traditional Cities are Well-Adapted Human Habitat

For good reason, the first chapter of Strong Towns: a Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, by Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn, is called "Human Habitat." The book doesn't start with stroads, or with municipal finance and the Growth Ponzi Scheme: it starts by laying out the understanding that for thousands of years, we've adapted our cities through trial and error. And the result has been certain commonalities among cities throughout the world and throughout human history. Compactness, narrow streets, human-scaled architecture, and a fine-grained mix of land uses are the norm from Jerusalem to Japan. It's because our cities are an adaptation to the kind of creature we are. They're human habitat. They're as human as an ant hill is, well, antlike.

These commonalities comprise the traditional development pattern. Its defining feature is simple. It is perfectly adapted to the prevailing transportation technology of human history: two legs.

And two legs are never going to be obsolete. There's no particular reason to think that humans a couple hundred years from now will get around in anything that resembles today's trains, let alone the weirdness that is the car: a 2-ton hunk of metal about 6 feet wide. There's a lot of reason, though, to think they'll walk.

When we depart from the wisdom of the traditional pattern, we run into trouble. American car-dependence is clearly a factor in our obesity epidemic. The loss of Third Places in our communities impoverishes civic life. The increasing separation of people by income and class (a result, in part, of monocultural neighborhoods built all at once at a grand scale) accelerates the decline of collective empathy. Mental illness has even been associated with the stress of existing in environments that don't conform to time-tested human-scale design principles. Not every experiment is a failure by any means, but we have certainly built places in the past century that are psychologically immiserating in ways no centuries-old, winding European alley is.

On the flip side, we can observe the positive social effects of traditional development nearly everywhere it exists. The casual interaction fostered by the likes of front porches. Places where kids can play in the street, the "natural surveillance" that comes from the constant presence of people in public spaces. The community cohesion enhanced by a strong local business community. The case for the various versions of the traditional development pattern, quite simply, is that we know it works.

There are caveats to all those linkages, both positive and negative. Reality is messy and defies simple cause-and-effect explanations. But the patterns are clear. Places that have endured not for 10 or 20 years but for centuries seem to have a set of things in common. We'd be foolish not to humble ourselves to learn from that.

The Traditional City Offers Resilience in an Age of Crisis

Traditional, walkable neighborhoods—not just transit-served cities—will be even more important in the face of crises to come, whether those stem from climate instability, political upheaval, an energy or food shortage or economic recession.

We live in a world in which we have spent ourselves into a debt-fueled illusion of wealth and are struggling to keep the party going. In the next few decades, some level of serious disruption to life as we know it is almost certain. And what we will need to weather it is not to play either God or (Robert) Moses and reshape the whole world (again!) to optimize it for what we think is the best way to confront today's crises. Rather, we need places that are readily adaptable to needs we haven't yet anticipated. Hubris won't solve our problems. Humility just might.

When we build neighborhoods that allow us to meet many of our basic needs within walking distance of our homes, and arrange a city out of many seamless connections between such neighborhoods—what Leon Krier calls expansion through duplication—the result is a low-tech sustainability through redundancy. It's not so reliant on complicated systems of control with potentially catastrophic points of failure. When the power goes out, the "smart" city doesn't look so smart, but the traditional city can still function. If Walmart or Amazon's supply chain, with its enormous carbon footprint and many externalities, is disrupted, the decentralized model of, say, the local farmer's market is likelier not to be.

But We Can't Go Back... Right?

It's true that we can't and won't just reverse-engineer a world that was built for a different economy and technology, and the future will not look like a simple return to the past. Even in a world in which we drastically cut our energy budget, we will have cars. Our big cities will have rail. We are unlikely to return to living life at the local scale to the full extent our great-grandparents did, barring a tremendous economic or civilizational disruption—and nobody here is wishing for that.

We should, however, continue (and in some cases rediscover) the practices of the past that are relevant to the present. Often where we don't, it's because we've "innovated" planning regimes over the past few decades that forbid such basic things as walkable communities. We can, and should, undo those regimes.