Can One Person Really Change the World?
A person will take an average of 216,262,500 steps in their lifetime.
Two hundred sixteen million, two hundred sixty-two thousand, five hundred steps.
That’s the equivalent of walking five times around the equator.
With every single step, you transform a place just by being present in it. That’s a lot of power. Simply by walking and breathing and interacting and taking up space, you are changing the world whether you realize it or not, through a process you’ll soon come to know as placemaking.
What’s in a Place?
In 2007, Ted Eytan moved from Washington state to Washington, D.C., to begin working as the Medical Director of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health. Initially, he had decided to walk to work every day — instead of driving or taking the Metro — in order to get exercise, clear his head, and benefit from the transportation mode’s enormous health benefits. However, he soon found that walking the same three miles to and from work every day was becoming monotonous.
Ted, an avid photographer, decided to start taking a picture every day on the way to work to capture a physical representation of his daily commute. When Ted started looking back at each of the commute photos, what initially had seemed to be a monotonous daily routine took on a new degree of meaning.
He no longer only noticed the same static concrete sidewalks and office buildings he passed by every day. While he had thought that the urban landscape itself was the central character of the city, he recognized that the city forms the backdrop while everything else occurring in and around the city composes the foreground.
In one of the commute photos featured on Ted’s website from January 2018, the Capitol Building can be seen sitting prominently at the end of a long boulevard. Cars are lined up heading down the road in both directions, and the headlights of some cars are still engaged, indicating that this must be a snapshot from his morning commute. Only a single cloud crosses the blue sky while the rising sun illuminates the Capitol, enshrouding the building with white light that fades into dark blue higher in the sky. A jaywalker near the foreground is caught in the act, while Ted observes from his standpoint on the median strip at the center of the avenue, presumably waiting for his own walk signal. The sun’s rays illuminate the buildings on the right side of the street, a red “For Lease” sign on prominent display on the first building in line, while the buildings on the left side of the street have yet to be touched by the morning light.
In another photo taken in January 2018 — likely just a few days after the previous photo — the Capitol is again featured prominently, also nestled between two lines of buildings at the end of an expansive boulevard. This time, however, a red traffic light is central to the photo, and a single pedestrian traverses a crosswalk one block away from Ted. Cars and their headlights are less prominently featured, as they are all stopped by traffic lights a few blocks away. While the Capitol is indeed visible, it is masked by foggy, soft yellow light radiating from behind the buildings on the right and left sides of the street. A large white cloud rests atop the Capitol Rotunda, connecting the tops of the buildings on one side of the street to the other. Above the cloud remains the remnants of the deep blue night sky, with long lines of white clouds cutting across the canvas.
While it would be easy to write off both of these images as “Pictures of the Distant Capitol Building from Ted’s Morning Commute,” that description does not acknowledge everything else that came together to formulate what Ted witnessed in the particular moment when he snapped the shutter on his camera.
Through his daily passion project, Ted noticed that everything about a city is dynamic. Think of all of the circumstances that had to occur in order for each of those photos to exist in its exact state. Every single person in every single one of those cars had to leave their point of departure at the exact right moment in order to make it into Ted’s picture. The clouds had to be moving and the sun’s rays had to be shining in just the right way to create the effect captured in Ted’s photos. Had he waited even a few more seconds to take either photo, that cloud might have floated away or those cars might have sped by or that pedestrian might have already traversed the street.
The Art of Placemaking
What Ted captures in his photos is the art of placemaking. Any city or town is so much more than just a collection of buildings and sidewalks. Through the dynamic process of placemaking, a community creates a location as a place with a life of its own.
“Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value,” states the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit that helps people create and sustain public spaces in order to build strong communities.
Placemaking allows you to re-envision the potential of everyday spaces to better serve your community. As a collaborative process, placemaking requires the participation of all of the people who live, work, and play in a space to recognize the potential for the place to grow and change — to be alive. From improving transit and promoting social networks to encouraging retail activities and facilitating aesthetic appeal, both tangible improvements and intangible characteristics define a place.
Walking in a place is the simplest way to participate in the act of placemaking. By walking, you can interact with your neighbors, become a more active community member, and brainstorm ways to improve the places where you walk. Being physically present in a space allows you to literally change the look and feel of the place, as the pedestrians in Ted’s photos did.
Walking gives you the opportunity to transform your world every single day. Placemaking is the foundation of walking for a better world.
While a city in its most literal sense is simply a collection of buildings, the buildings are just one part of the equation. When people take time to learn about and contribute to the communities where they live and work by walking, the collective power of people interacting in those places has the potential to change the world.
Want to join me in walking for a better world? Email me at crc107@georgetown.edu or connect with me on LinkedIn. To read more about how you can change the world by walking, check out my latest book It Starts with a Step on Amazon.
