Why Do We Think Walkable Towns Are Only for Tourists?
I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about Irish villages. It was intended to make the point that it's not only possible, but utterly normal in much of the world, for some of the best walkable urbanism around to be located in smaller cities or even tiny rural towns.
In such places, the village is compact, with bustling streets and little wasted space. However, if you walk to the edge of town, you are immediately in farm fields. There is a stark line between town and country, not the suburban-style blurring of the edges we often find in car-centric North America, where the edge of town consists of a mile or two of chain restaurants and gas stations.
This post provoked some discussion on the Strong Towns Community site. In particular, one reader started a thread with the question,
I'd like more examples of rural towns with walkable urban form in USA. Are they old "railroad" towns, mostly pre-industrial/pre-auto towns; mostly mining, fishing and agrarian communities? Are some left that are not upscale tourist resorts?
The thread is worth reading; there are some interesting responses. The answers, by the way, to the poster’s questions are yes, yes, all of the above, and yes-but-not-enough. (And check out the Strong Towns Community while you're there, if you haven't had a chance to yet!)
The last sentence in particular got my attention. 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. The following series of photos of Brainerd, Minnesota over time, which you've definitely seen if you've attended a Strong Towns presentation, illustrates the incremental development of a small Midwestern town over generations:
And the gut-punch is the last photo, from today, of the same street.
Brainerd is not unusual; there are dozens of examples like this in every state.
This happened, as well, to the downtowns of much larger cities. Perhaps the most stunning example I've encountered of a great urban place wiped completely off the map is Theater Row in Newport News, Virginia:
What's left gives us the false impression that these places were never lively urban streets where people walked in droves. But they were. Here’s Beckley, West Virginia—not exactly a state known for its bustling cosmopolitan cities—in the 1950s:
Beckley, of course, has weathered severe economic decline since the 1950s, a time when West Virginia’s coal industry was much stronger than it is today. However, Beckley hasn’t lost that much of its peak population: it’s down from about 19,000 inhabitants in 1950 to 16,000 today. A declining city can surely retain its urban form. But what we’ve done, all over America, is make the conscious choice to tear some of it down (often in favor of parking lots), and abandon much of the rest in favor of suburban expansion. Even in places where the population is shrinking.
And yet these old photos remind us that most of the attractive, compact, walkable towns built in America were designed for everyday life, not to be tourist resorts. Two things have happened since the onset of the Suburban Experiment, though.
One is that in many rural areas, the explicit tourist towns tend to be the ones that have survived most intact, because they have a strong economic foundation that has been able to weather deindustrialization, the decline of family farming and general rural depopulation. See, for example, Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for my money one of the most stunningly gorgeous small towns in the United States:
Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Image via Wikimedia Commons
Eureka Springs was always a resort town. But here's one that wasn't: Galena, Illinois.
Galena, nestled in the hills of northwestern Illinois near the Mississippi, was a lead-mining town that briefly rivaled Chicago in size. A host of prominent Americans lived there at one point, including Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War.
Downtown Galena, Illinois (Wikimedia Commons)
Today, however, Galena is mostly known as—guess what?—a tourist town, where people go for B&B weekends and browse antiques. The simple reason for this is that, while the mines are long gone, the town's charm and historic cachet are things it can still trade on.
In other words, beautiful urbanism is so rare in North America that places that didn’t tear theirs down have found it an easy path to become tourist towns even if that was never their economic base in the past.
Perhaps the ultimate American example of that particular evolution is the French Quarter of New Orleans, of which I wrote last year, "We used to do this everywhere." Americans will pay a fortune to go on vacation to a place where they can take a morning stroll on a beautiful street with no fear of being hit by a car. Then they'll go home and insist, "We could never do that here. Think of the traffic!"
I suspect shedding our association of walkable places with tourism is an essential part of learning to demand better, and realizing that nothing but ourselves is stopping us from enjoying the benefits of such places year-round.
(Cover photo: Dahlonega, GA from Wikimedia Commons)
Want to connect with others focusing on making their towns more walkable and safer for pedestrians (locals and tourists alike)? Check out the Safe Streets forum in the Strong Towns Community: