Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1254

I am sure that a lot of you know where the title of this post comes from. It’s a riff on one of the most important and influential books in the world of city planning: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961).

But when Jane Jacobs first wrote this book, there was no such thing as smartphones and nobody was “checking-in” to hipster dive bars on Foursquare . 

So instead of leveraging big data, her analyses and arguments were based on observation. She walked the streets of New York and Toronto and figured out what made cities thrive and what made cities die. That was her brilliance.

Today, however, we have data – lots of it. And so recently, a group of researchers set out to test Jane Jacob’s theories using mobile phone data. The study was called,  The Death and Life of Great Italian Cities: A Mobile Phone Data Perspective .

More specifically, they set out to test the following 4 essential conditions:

“She [Jane Jacobs] argued that, to promote urban life in large cities, the physical environment should be characterized by diversity at both the district and street level. Diversity, in turn, requires four essential conditions: (i) mixed land uses, that is, districts should serve more than two primary functions, and that would attract people who have different purposes; (ii) small blocks, which promote contact opportunities among people; (iii) buildings diverse in terms of age and form, which make it possible to mix high-rent and low-rent tenants; and (iv) sufficient dense concentration of people and buildings.”

To accomplish this, the team assembled and studied data from the following sources:

• Mobile phone activity (specifically internet activity)
  

• OpenStreetsMap Data
  

• Census Data
  

• Land Use Information
  

• Infrastructure Data
  

• Foursquare Data (Venues API)
  

Ultimately, they determined that Jane Jacobs knew what she was talking about. The above conditions are essential to urban vibrancy and they apply to Italian cities, just as they did and do to American cities. But this test was valuable, because the more that we can measure and quantify cities, the better I think we’ll get at creating and promoting urban vitality. 

Now imagine if you overlaid the findings of their report with residential and commercial rents. I bet you’d also find that there’s a strong business case for urban vitality.

I’ve heard a number of people say that, eventually, every company will be a software/technology company. And I don’t think we’re far off from that reality. To me, this study feels like an early example of what that might look like for city building.

On a side note, the picture at the top of this post is of the Spanish Steps in Rome. I took it on a weekend trip in 2007. I was living in Dublin at the time.

Tom Gardner and Morgan Housel (The Motley Fool) recently published a LinkedIn article called, Why Does Pessimism Sound So Smart? (Especially When Things Are So Good.)

Here is the gist of it:

If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize.

Part of the reason for this is that we, as humans, respond more strongly to losses:

There’s clearly more at stake with pessimism. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for showing that people respond more strongly to loss than gain. It’s an evolutionary shield: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce,” Kahneman once wrote.

The behavioural economic theory being referred to above is called Prospect Theory. I wrote about this back in the fall of 2013 and made the argument that Prospect Theory might explain why NIMBYISM is so common in city building. 

Change to our communities is perceived as risky. And in the face of these uncertain situations, we tend to place more emphasis on the potential losses (traffic, congestion, shadowing, and so on) rather than the potential gains (increased vibrancy, improved streetscape, creation of more housing, and so on). It’s human nature.

Having said all this, I show up here every day and try to make this blog a positive place on the internet. Sure, I make suggestions about things I think we should do , but I generally focus on them as opportunities. Hopefully that comes through, because I’m a big fan of optimism.

A few of us had a really great discussion on Twitter recently about pedestrian-only streets. It was kicked-off by a tweet about Spark Street Mall in Ottawa, which many argue needs a rethink.

One of the comments was that a lot of people tend to overvalue their worth. And I will admit that I am probably one of those people. If you’ve ever visited places like Grafton Street in Dublin, Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, or Kensington Market in Toronto on a pedestrian Sunday, you can’t help but think to yourself: why don’t we do more of this? They’re such great places to be.

But the research suggests that these success stories are few and far between. 

Below are the key findings from a report that was shared on Twitter during our discussion. It’s by Cole E. Judge and it’s called, The Experiment of American Pedestrian Malls: Trends Analysis, Necessary Indicators for Success and Recommendations for Fresno’s Fulton Mall .

- Pedestrian malls in the United States have an 89% rate of failure. Most have been removed or repurposed. Only 11% have been successful.

- Of the 11% successful pedestrian malls, 80% are in areas with populations under 100,000.

- Certain indicators need to be present for a pedestrian mall to be successful in the United States: near or attached to a major anchor such as a university, situated in close proximity to a beach, designed to be a short length in terms of blocks, in a town/city with a population under 100,000, and/or located in a major tourist location such as Las Vegas or New Orleans.

- Cities that have embraced the Main Street and Complete Streets models have experienced turn-arounds in their downtowns with more investment, higher occupancy rates and more pedestrian traffic.

Though the report lists proximity to a beach as helping pedestrian malls, this is more about having a strong anchor than it is about climate – which is a commonly held excuse for why they don’t work. The report cites lots of failed pedestrian malls in California.

Furthermore, if you look at the list of successful pedestrian malls, about half of them are in colder climates. And if you search the report for the word “weather” it only comes up once. The word “climate” doesn’t come up at all. 

So I don’t believe that they’re not possible in colder climates. Ski resorts, for example, usually have great pedestrian-only spaces because they have a strong anchor – the mountain.

But I do agree that pedestrian-only streets aren’t possible everywhere. And the more I think about this topic, the more I agree that we are overvaluing pedestrian-only . I guess that’s why our focus today is more on complete streets .