Best of 2020: Walkable Towns
The Strong Towns focus on walkability, cycling, and public transportation often leaves people with the feeling that we have no love for rural places. But we have always found that the determining factor in whether a place is walkable isn’t whether it’s smack-dab in the center of a corn field or a city: It’s whether it was designed for walkability. In these two articles from 2020, you’ll find a number of examples of lovely, walkable small towns in rural areas.
The first, Walkable? Check. Urban? Check. Rural? Also Check., focuses on a few tourist towns in Ireland where you can literally walk from a thriving downtown into fairly undisturbed landscape without getting too winded. This sparked the Strong Towns community to inquire: “Are there any walkable rural towns in the United States that aren’t just upscale tourist resorts?” To which we responded: “Why Do We Think Walkable Towns Are Only for Tourists?”
“The reality is that rural America does have a widespread tradition of exactly the same kind of walkable urban form you find in European villages,” Daniel Herriges writes. The biggest take from this series is that we can have magical, walkable, vacation-worthy downtowns in our rural places, without the vacation. All we have to do is let go of the false assumption that rural places can’t be walkable, and start prioritizing a Strong Towns approach to development. — Lauren Fisher, Communications Associate
Walkable? Check. Urban? Check. Rural? Also Check.
Excerpt:
What we tend to do in North America instead is very different. Not only our large cities but our small towns bleed gradually into the countryside, with a large suburban area characterized by homes on large lots, wide roads and plenty of auto-oriented strip retail development.
The trade-off is stark. If “green space” is what you’re after, there's plenty of greenery in people's private yards that you can view from your car. But if you want to get out and enjoy nature, it's now at a much greater remove from the amenities of downtown. And if you're a regular reader here, you know that the trade-off in public finances is stark, too. The compact village pattern makes maximum use of existing public infrastructure, funding its maintenance with the taxes from a highly financially productive pattern of private development.
By contrast, the suburban-style pattern, which has been imported to far too many small North American towns and cities (in the form of zoning codes and building regulations, but also the general mindset toward development), is a dramatic money-loser. All those roads and pipes serving the periphery will never pay for themselves.
The lesson here is to let urban be urban and rural be rural. If we return to building more places according to that rule, we'll find we can enjoy the best of both worlds.
Why Do We Think Walkable Towns Are Only for Tourists?
Excerpt:
Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Image source.
My sense is that, in America, we do tend to associate traditional urbanism with tourism and not with everyday life. And it's unfortunate, because it prompts a kneejerk reaction by many of our neighbors against reforms that would, for example, slow down traffic on a small town's main street in order to promote safety and a livelier street life. "That just doesn't seem realistic," people think.
The reality is that rural America does have a widespread tradition of exactly the same kind of walkable urban form you find in European villages. You can see it, usually, in at least one or two blocks of a town's main street. The materials and architecture might be more American than Irish or English or Spanish or German, but the basic form—buildings lining the street forming a continuous wall, with shops on the ground floor and apartments and offices above—is the same.
The difference in America is that these places are usually in arrested development: the pattern abruptly stops when you leave Main Street and gives way to something much more automobile-oriented.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.