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Journal of Urban Design

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Cities Afoot—Pedestrians, Walkability and Urban Design

ANN FORSYTH & MICHAEL SOUTHWORTH
Published online: 08 Feb 2008.

To cite this article: ANN FORSYTH & MICHAEL SOUTHWORTH (2008): Cities Afoot—Pedestrians, Walkability and Urban Design,
Journal of Urban Design, 13:1, 1-3

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 Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 13. No. 1, 1–3, February 2008

Guest Editorial: Cities Afoot—Pedestrians, Walkability

and Urban Design

ANN FORSYTH & MICHAEL SOUTHWORTH

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Over the past century pedestrian access has declined steadily in most cities. With
some exceptions, such as underground metro systems, each advance in
transportation technology—from horse-drawn streetcar, to electric streetcar, on-
grade and elevated railways, automobile and superhighway, airplane and
airport—has degraded the pedestrian environment. High-speed traffic broke up
the fine-grained pedestrian network and imposed barriers to free movement on
foot. In ignoring the pedestrian experience, the street lost its intimate scale and
transparency, and became a mere service road, devoid of public life. Modernist
planning and design separated pedestrians from the automobile, shunting them
off to raised plazas, skywalks, barren ‘greenways’, and sterile pedestrian malls.
Alternative designs such as the pedestrian/automobile separation of post-war
new towns such as Vallingby and Cumbernauld were eventually dismissed as
failures or at best quirky examples from a past time. Downtown pedestrian
spaces—from pedestrian malls, to festival market places and indoor shopping
centres—either failed to attract pedestrians or when they did, were attacked as
disconnected bubbles of activity.
The automobile-oriented values of classical modernism have been codified in
the transportation and street design standards that we struggle with today. Street
patterns of most residential areas in the US built after 1950 (and emulated in new
development worldwide) are based on the discontinuous cul-de-sac or loop
pattern rather than the interconnected grid. Block sizes are too large to permit a
range of route choices and land use patterns are coarse with activities widely
spaced and segregated by type. Streets are over-scaled and frequently lack
sidewalks in order to reduce construction and maintenance costs. Pedestrian
linkages, present in classic designs such as Hampstead Garden Suburb and
Radburn, are absent. Even in Asia and Europe, traditional centres of non-
motorized transportation, automobile use is on the rise.
For decades urban designers have advocated more walkable cities but
without much success in most locations. Finally, with new health research,
governmental incentives and new regulations, as well as increased activism by
pedestrians and bicyclists, the situation has begun to change. The case for better
design and planning of the pedestrian environment is strong. Walkability is the
foundation for the sustainable city. Like bicycling, walking is a ‘green’ mode of
transport that not only reduces congestion, but also has low environmental
impact, conserving energy without air and noise pollution. It can be more than a
purely utilitarian mode of travel for trips to work, school or shopping, and can
have both social and recreational value. It is also a socially equitable mode of
transport that is available to a majority of the population, across classes, including
children and seniors. Many recent health studies have demonstrated that walking

1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/08/010001-3 q 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13574800701816896
 2 Editorial

can promote mental and physical health including cardio-vascular fitness,

reduced stress, stronger bones and mental alertness and creativity.
This focus on health has perhaps deflected attention from other types of
walkable environments and meanings of ‘walkability’. What are these other
definitions of walkable, apart from walkable ¼ encouraging physical activity? They
include:
. Walkable ¼ close: A walkable environment involves a short distance to a
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destination, particularly where driving is inconvenient or people are without

cars—this is the perspective in transportation planning. This definition has a
great deal to do with an individual’s cost-benefits calculation—are the costs of
driving or taking transit great enough to provoke an individual to walk?
. Walkable ¼ barrier-free: A walkable environment is traversable, without major
barriers. Walkability can be refined to mean traversable to children, elderly,
handicapped or those wearing high heels.
. Walkable ¼ safe: A walkable environment is safe in terms of perceived crime or
perceived traffic.
. Walkable ¼ full of pedestrian infrastructure and destinations: A walkable
environment visibly displays full pedestrian infrastructure such as sidewalks
or separated trails, marked pedestrian crossings, street furniture and street
trees.
. Walkable ¼ upscale, leafy, or cosmopolitan: A walkable place is somewhere that
the pedestrian environment is pleasant for upper middle-class professionals,
who have other choices for getting around. This is the perspective in much
popular and architectural commentary. Such places have several of the
following dimensions: an area with coffee shops and interesting stores; a mix of
housing types including apartments and condominiums; a grid street pattern
and full pedestrian infrastructure including pleasant tree-lined or architectu-
rally interesting streets; well-maintained or scenic green spaces with clear
pedestrian paths; a lack of litter, graffiti and obviously down-and-out people.
Finally, there should be transit or taxis in case interest lapses. This type of
walking is not necessarily brisk.

From the perspective of urban design, what qualities should a walkable city have?
Researchers are now grappling with the concept of ‘walkability’—what it is, how
to measure it and what it might mean for the design of cities. Several papers in this
special issue study the relations between varied attributes of the built
environment and walking behavior. Baran et al. use space syntax to investigate
walking behaviour, finding significant relationships between both recreational
and utilitarian walking and the space syntax concepts of control and integration.
The impacts of urban design variables on self-reported walking behaviour of
adults are examined by Alfonzo et al. in 11 California neighbourhoods. Remote
sensing and GIS are used by Lindsey et al. to study the effects of design features on
multi-use urban greenway trails. The question of how far people walk to light rail
stations and what environmental factors influence their route choice in the San
Francisco Bay Area and Portland, Oregon is the focus of the paper by Agrawal et al.
Tahrani and Moreau compare visual perception of a real urban path in Nantes,
France with several virtual representations. A phenomenological consideration of
the walking experience and its relationship to sense of place and urban design is
offered by Matos. Finally, issues of health, safety and social justice in planning for
 Editorial 3

child pedestrians are discussed by Johnston based on his experience as a

pediatrician in Seattle.
These papers demonstrate a variety of important new analyses that take
advantage of new technologies in remote sensing, virtual reality and computation.
Several also deal with the experience of place from the perspectives of visual
perception and phenomenology. However, there are still many unanswered
questions. Would the results be the same with other types of users in different
kinds of places and cultures? How much does design matter in encouraging
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walking, and which factors are most important? How can existing auto-oriented
environments be retrofitted for pedestrian access? How should design and
planning standards be revised to support pedestrian access? How transferable is
this work on pedestrians to cyclists who have not been such a focus to urban
designers.
While the benefits of increasing walking are now recognized, to encourage
walking designers and planners need to go beyond utilitarian access. It is necessary
to address the character of the path network, while being aware of the social,
economic and policy factors that are key to the overall decision to walk. Combined
with these other dimensions, design can make a difference.