Fine grain design - the permeability remedy

Laneway in Langley - flowers, color, and personal touches

Yesterday I walked another small town, this time the village of Langley in Washington State, and found a gem. It reminded me of themes from the book Happy City and what my social planner friend Wendy Sarkissian says about making spaces work well. "We must pay careful – and loving – attention to the fine grain. The divine dwells in the details."

That was true last week in my blog on Brandon where high-density, low income housing so dramatically outshone nearby low-density suburban sprawl. And it was true yesterday in Langley where plants, paintings, murals, and all sorts of personal embellishments adorned laneways, alleys and the walkways between them. More importantly, those adornments were installed and maintained with loving attention by the owners of adjacent shops and residents living nearby.

Walkways need attention - plants, windows and natural surveillance 

Wisely, the town council did not regulate away these informal design details in some regulatory panic. That was wise. It is a step towards the fine grained urban design that will succeed where design guidelines will not. And it looks beautiful. (They were busy too! I waited for ages to take pictures without people walking in the alleyways). People say they don't like alleyways and high density until they see how well it can work.

In her 2012 presentation What's Psychology got to do with NIMBY? Wendy reminds us in order to show residents how it works "we must retrieve and embrace our lost sociological and psychological wisdom about what makes good housing and good neighborhoods."

In Langley lanes were decorated with flowers and windows looked down upon those flower-strewn spaces. Beauty and natural surveillance work better when they go hand in hand.

Decorations, landscaping, clear sightlines and windows - details matter

Skillful attention to the fine grain is precisely why the permeability-is-bad crowd miss the point. They believe more people walking and driving through an area increases crime risks because more potential criminals can access crime opportunities anonymously.

We don't need gated communities to be safe. What places inside Brandon and Langley show is that even places with plenty of flow-through can be made safe with the right kind of density, fine grain design, and locals who care.

The city: A happiness project?

Montgomery's new book - Happy City - provides an antidote to dispersed cities

During a hectic month of business travel with little time for blogging I  read the recent book by Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design.

Montgomery says "If we are to escape the effects of dispersal, then dense places have got to meet our psychological needs better than sprawl."

That idea resonated during an afternoon walk in the prairie city of Brandon, Manitoba where I worked this week. Brandon is one of those mid-western cities with wide streets and sprawl suburbs. Yet even here I found an interesting (and dense) lower income multi-family townhouse project that Montgomery would appreciate.

Play areas inside the lower income multi-family housing. Good visibility, easy access

There is a tendency to think of low income, multi-family housing as crime-ridden. Yet this attractive, well designed multi-family complex had plenty of social mojo. Kids enjoyed a playground in clear view of nearby windows, walkways and grounds were clean, and dozens of people enjoyed their small front yards, barbecues, and common garden areas.

Interior courtyard, green and clean

Police told me there were few calls for service here even though it housed 300 residents in a hundred units, very high density compared to the nearby sprawl.

Nearby, as Montgomery might predict, a traditional suburb was vacant, graffitied, and sparse. In my hour-long walk there I uncovered only a few people, mostly working on cars. Few streets had sidewalks and I saw no one on their front lawns.

A few blocks away in a traditional suburb - Millennial messages

The New York Times says about Happy City, "It was only a matter of time before someone figured out that if there were new things to say about happiness and a new interest in the evolution of urban life, the two subjects could be linked together." Montgomery has chapters on How to be Closer, Convivialities, and Redesigning for Freedom. They fit what I saw here.

Adjacent streets - no sidewalks, fencing to isolate the road