This is a guest post by Culture Critic.
Uplifting architecture is one thing that can make a place come alive. But what about urban design itself?
Throughout history, our streets (even dense urban ones) have been places where community has formed, and the place of life has slowed for a moment.
Perhaps above all, this happened in the children's play street. It might have started in antiquity, but it came to a grinding halt in the 20th century — and the loss is immense.
Here’s why, and how a new approach to urbanism can fix it…
Some people are actively trying to transform America’s urban fabric — my friend's company is bringing traditional urban design back to our cities: walkable streets, children's play areas, and an uplifting public realm.
Their free newsletter is eye-opening — give it a read. You can even invest directly in reviving America's built environment through their work.
When Kids Ruled the Streets
The concept of a play street, where children can freely engage in unstructured play, originated in ancient Rome and was embraced by cities like New York in the 20th century as a pushback against the car.
They were vital for children's development: as Joseph Lee, President of the NYC Playground Association, said in 1916, “Play is not merely a good thing for the child; it is an essential process of his growth… it is for the sake of play that infancy exists.”
After the movement began in wealthier neighborhoods (cutting off car access to certain streets for a short period during the day), play streets soon spread to low-income strips of New York.
Ordinary streets underwent delightful transformations: from street pianos to folk dance festivals, play streets made space for music, movement, and joyful recreation. Kids could co-exist with the urban environment.
It was a cultural phenomenon that eventually spread from Philadelphia to Seattle.
Today, with the rise of car-centric urban planning in the US, these spaces have all but disappeared. Even in New York, where the hold-out has been strongest, some 70 streets will be shut off from traffic across the city this month. 20 years ago, there were three times as many.
While we might lament the loss of play streets, we have to ask: why were they necessary to begin with? Shouldn’t cities have spaces that children needn’t battle with motorists for control over?
Well, the lack of human space in the modern city has its roots in design…
A Brave New World
The focus of urban design in America shifted dramatically over the past century to prioritize vehicles. It began in 1939, at an exhibition sponsored by General Motors — Futurama.
Norman Bel Geddes presented a radically futuristic model of what the US could look like in a few decades. The basic idea: quick access in and out of cities via automated highways, live in vast suburbs, and commute to the city center for business.
Futurama sought to predict the future, and it did. Its ideas can be summarized in two words: urban sprawl.
Put plainly, that’s humans moving farther from central urban areas into low density ones dominated by vehicles, planned neighbourhoods and sprawling suburbs. Urbanists believed the innovations of Futurama would help solve the problem of crowded, noisy and crime-ridden centers — eliminating the chaos of city streets.
But in many cases, this grand vision became a concrete reality at the expense of communities that the great highways were meant to clean up. Atlanta and Kansas City were among those gutted for the interstate, losing entire districts in the process. Inner cities lost their tax bases, and spiraled into decline.
The new separation between suburban living and downtown working meant that everything in between was organized around the convenience of the commuting motorist.
The American aversion to density went too far — and the lifeblood of inner cities (pedestrian activity) was lost.
So, with all that’s been lost in the age of the motorist, what can we do now?
How can we reorient urban design and master planning to prioritize children's needs for play, imagination, and creativity — and create spaces that are profoundly human?
A New Urbanism
That’s where New Urbanism comes in: a philosophy grounded in walkable streets, accessible amenities, and human-scale design. It’s trying to re-learn how to compose public spaces for the benefit of people.
Some of this, inevitably, has come at the cost of the car. Lancaster, CA recently transformed its main street into a tree-lined boulevard, reclaiming road space to create a small boom of pedestrian commercial activity.
But urbanists recognize not everything can be blamed on cars. The more foundational problem is the lack of mixed-use communities: those lively, medium-density areas where people live, shop and work in the same area don’t really exist in America.
And it’s not for lack of demand. In most cases, strict zoning laws simply don’t allow them to be built. Modern zoning accommodates single-family homes, high-rise developments, and hardly anything in between.
What can New Urbanism do? It can create those places…
Take this example in Denmark. Danish architect Jan Gehl’s planning firm (Gehl People) just produced a waterfront community in Aarhus: a great example of New Urbanism. The innovation is that they designed the public realm first: plazas, pools and shop-lined walkways — then the private realm was shaped around it.
This philosophy is now edging its way into the US. Gehl is working on a development in Milwaukee (alongside my friends at Neutral) that will see a whole block in the urban center shaped around a public plaza: outdoor dining, promenades, and, of course, children's play areas.
Truthfully, there’s nothing “new” about New Urbanism. It’s only the return to a more traditional form of city design, a version of which used to exist in the US prior to the motorcar revolution. In Gehl’s words:
“Modernist planners and architects lost the sense of building to the human scale. No profession was asked to look after this. Everything was done too big as if it was not for people anymore. The most important scale is the people scale. The city at eye level and at 5km/hour.”
What American urbanists forgot, amidst the frenzy of mid-century efficiency, was that meaningful public places are far greater than the sum of their parts. The benefits of an energetic civic plaza does more to maximize human value than any commercial use of that space one might imagine.
Of course, the United States doesn’t have millennia-old cathedral squares to make the beating hearts of its cities. Instead, it’s going to have to re-learn what good urbanism looks like, and apply it to the modern world.
Here’s a great podcast that goes deeper on New Urbanism and human scale design — give it a listen here:
