Anywhere Can Be Somewhere (and Other Walking Lessons)

One of the things I miss most about childhood—and will admit that I hope to find lots of excuses to recapture now that I'm a parent—is how effortlessly a child can turn nowhere at all into the most interesting place in the universe for a short span of time. A single tree can captivate a kid for an hour, learning the texture of its bark and the pattern of its leaves, surveilling the canopy for birds, following the lines of the roots like ancient roads from Rome to the hinterlands. Kids haven't learned to be either bored or habituated to things yet. It's all new; it's all cool. 

My 1-year-old spends much of the day either outside or begging me to take her outside. And so one of our rituals is to walk the neighborhood almost every evening after dinner, me pushing her in the stroller. We stay close to home, and have traversed the same blocks dozens of times.

These nightly walks have not only introduced me and the kiddo to some of our neighbors—the "regulars" we encounter more often than not on our rounds. They've also given me the opportunity to start to see the kinds of things you see when you pass a place on foot, not in a car, and for the twentieth or fiftieth time, not the first.

When it comes to creating strong neighborhoods, there are some valuable lessons to be had from slowing down the pace and seeking novelty in the ordinary. Here are three of them:

1. Anywhere can be somewhere.

I would never describe the neighborhood I live in as having "good urbanism." We chose to buy a home here for a variety of reasons from budget to location, but not exactly because it's a dazzling urban jewel. It's a quiet neighborhood of eclectic, mostly smaller and older, single-family homes with yards. Not too homogenous, a little rough around the edges. My neighbors are very diverse in age, income, and race. We've got a couple parks, a college campus, and some chain stores and run-down strip-mall retail on the edge.

It's ordinary. Nowhere in particular. I like living here, but I've never really written about it. I suppose I've just never thought of it as holding many lessons for Strong Towns readers.

But I will say that thanks to my walks, my mental neighborhood map is a lot richer these days than it was even six months ago. A lot less of it is "nowhere" to me, and a lot more is "somewhere." There are now two or three places on every single block that I would map out as noteworthy evening-walk landmarks.

Having a toddler along means I am constantly looking for things to pay attention to and point out. There's a corner where someone has hung wind chimes in a curbside tree. A power line half-swallowed up by live oak branches that plays host to a seemingly permanent bird convention. The cluster of tall pines where I taught my daughter about pinecones, while I marveled at the way the evening light filtering through the branches hit the little burnt-orange cottage behind them. The chain-link fence on a possibly abandoned property swallowed in sweet-smelling honeysuckle. A disused boat on cinder blocks. A drainage ditch where we look for frogs.

There's a statue of a lion one neighbor has erected outside his fence as a sentry watching the corner (I like to think for speeders). A ghoulish figure cobbled together from found objects stares at us from one front porch, someone's art project or Halloween decoration become permanent.

We know the neighborhood animals now. What once seemed a pile of junk outside the home ("compound" is perhaps more accurate) of an odd, reclusive neighbor turns out to be the perfect little drawing room for an ever-present cat.  There's a front yard with two ducks (and a skittish guard dog), another with four chickens (and a skittish guard dog), and one with a "Beware of Wolf" sign.

A lot of the landmarks have to do with ways people have chosen to mark and delineate space on their own property, turning nowhere into somewhere. Many of my neighbors have clearly sought to create destinations or pleasant hang-out spots out of next to nothing. A statue adorns a little alcove between a house and garage. There are windmills, decorative mailboxes, flowerbeds that frame a patio or something as simple as a circle of lawn chairs. Several neighbors have made makeshift front porches out of their attached carports (as have we). One neighbor has more or less turned her yard into a tropical-themed outdoor bar complete with iguana, toucan, and palm tree decorations.

Most of these spaces are improvisational and low-budget. This is not a rich neighborhood: nobody's hiring a landscaping service here. But these are places that someone could care about. I know because I care about them now. They're destinations where we stop and I say, "See, look!"

My neighbors don't think they're practicing urbanism, but in a way, they are. Urbanism is all about taking space that doesn't intrinsically mean much to anyone and giving people reasons to linger there, turning it from nowhere to somewhere. In truth, we all know a lot more about urban design than most of us think we do, because we do it in our private spaces all the time.

The difference between an inner-ring suburban neighborhood like mine and a truly urban one is that there's very little "somewhere" going on in our public spaces. But we could change that, if enough of us wanted to and the city would allow it. Walking around with eyes peeled makes it obvious that dozens of my neighbors already know how.

2. There's much more going on out there than you can see from a car. Or a map.

Walking gives you a glimpse into the lives happening near, and in parallel with, your own. You see how people get around (hint: a lot more of them aren't driving cars than you would ever notice when you, yourself, are behind a steering wheel). You see how they don't get around, as when I watch a dismaying number of people struggle to cross the road from Walmart Neighborhood Market while using wheelchairs. You get glimmers of what people do for recreation. Different living arrangements are evident: the extended family members living in the hard-to-spot shack of a backyard ADU; the college-aged roommates sharing a house; the perpetual party house with such a constant stream of comers and goers I still have no idea who actually lives there.

As I walk, a startling number of people greet me from front porches, often set back 20 feet and somewhat obscured from the street by shade and screens. I'd never have known there was anyone watching. But there they are.

Moving at car speed abstracts all this into a blur: houses that are, in fact, very different from each other become homogenous "little boxes," lives become statistics. And the same thing happens when you view a neighborhood through the abstraction of maps and statistics, as planners and policy makers do. Of course, the information on maps and in statistics is important, too. But it's incomplete. There is so much happening everywhere that is inherently illegible to someone operating at that remove.

That illegibility matters. Consider the question of "neighborhood revitalization." What is the low-hanging fruit thing that you could do in or around your own home that would raise its value by, say, 2% this year? The thing that would make it an incrementally better place? I bet you have ideas. Okay, now what is that thing for your next-door neighbor? Do you have any idea?

When it comes to improving private space, what we observe is that it happens through a thousand different small interventions by a thousand different people, none of them coordinated, and it's more effective for that. The people doing the work are the people who care about that tiny little patch of ground they have a plan for, even if nobody else in the world cares about it.

When it comes to improving public space, the number of decision makers is much smaller, and the attention to detail is thus much less. We need approaches to public investment that are detail-oriented and led by community members, and that thus harness that same power of care and attention that people exhibit in their private yards. 

3. Seeing each other matters.

I have met and am friendly with far more of my neighbors now than I was before I started my nightly walks with the baby. Importantly, these are people I would not have sought out a connection with. They are a random assortment of "regulars" who tend to be out and about when I am.

The neighbor at the corner stopped me to introduce herself and share her delight at the fact that I've been planting trees. There are the two women who meet up every night to walk four dogs; my route almost invariably criss-crosses theirs such that my toddler has a chance to start screaming "WOOF WOOF WOOF!" at the sight of them two blocks away. A little girl living in a duplex with who I'm guessing is a grandmother clammed up nervously after running up to me to say hi, then lit up with delight when I (taking my cue from her abuela) switched to Spanish to ask her name. I know the guy who rummages through recycling bins on my street, and I gave him my old broken lawnmower at his request. I've met the president of the neighborhood association while out walking; it turns out he is an occasional Strong Towns reader. He now picks my brain on affordable housing while my daughter pets his dog.

Ties like this are different from the ones we intentionally cultivate with people we consider close friends. Spontaneous, unplanned interaction is what binds us together with people not at all like us, around the common cause of living in the same place. And it gives us a reservoir of goodwill we can draw on when hardship strikes (say, here in Florida, the never-totally-forgotten threat of a major hurricane).

In a truly urban place, a 15-minute neighborhood, a lot more people walk to accomplish daily tasks, and so these spontaneous interactions are more regular and involve more than just the people who've chosen to make walking part of their lifestyle.

My neighborhood isn't that. Yet. I'd like to help us get there. But walking it nightly has made me feel more connected to it, and has made me understand it much more as worth caring about in all its detail.

Anywhere can be somewhere if you make it somewhere.

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