I just got back from a few days in New Orleans, where I stayed—as most tourists to that city do—in the French Quarter. The name is actually a misnomer from the particular perspective of an urban planner: most of the historic architecture in the French quarter dates to a period of Spanish rule from 1763-1801, and much of the urban design suggests a strong Spanish influence.

The French Quarter is one of the North American continent's most treasured tourist destinations. Tennessee Williams once said, “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” (Apologies to Cleveland, which I hear rocks.) The Quarter, to many visitors, feels as impeccably master-designed and curated as Disneyland. This perception is understandable but wrong.

It brings me to something I find North Americans in particular need to remind ourselves of. We're accustomed to environments built at the scale of the automobile, and to places where everything about the buildings suggests impermanence. When we vacation somewhere like the French Quarter, many of us slip into the false belief that a place like this—oriented to the pedestrian, with lavish attention to detail in public spaces and an overwhelming sense of place—is by necessity a tourist destination. It's a novelty. You visit it, you love it, but who would ever try to replicate it in the places we go about our everyday lives? Impractical, surely. Too expensive, surely. Pretentious, even.

That view says so much about where we've gone wrong in how we build—and maintain—our places.

Is This a Place for Tourists? Was It?

The name for the quarter in French, Vieux Carré, just means “old square.” These 78 blocks were nothing more or less than the original city, before anything else existed around it.

The stuff in the French Quarter is of course extremely tourist-oriented. There are dozens of antique shops and galleries but no grocery store. There are bars aplenty, but a library is harder to come by. Relatively few people actually live there—you’d have to meet a lot of your practical needs outside the neighborhood if you did.

But the placemaking, the urban design, is a tremendous part of the appeal, and let's take a minute to appreciate the development pattern itself, irrespective of what's occupying those buildings:

The most striking thing about the French Quarter is its immediate legibility and sense of place. On our Strong Towns Strength Test, Question #2 is "If the revolution came to your city, would people intuitively know where to gather?" In the French Quarter, the focal point is Jackson Square. This central plaza faces the dramatic St. Louis Cathedral, and lies on the Quarter's axis of symmetry. A grid of streets extends out from it, on which everything is profoundly human scale.