A Walkable City
Where you live influences how you live in more ways than you might imagine. Take the walkability of a neighborhood, for instance. If you are within walking distance from work, school, the store, parks, transportation or other daily errands, you are far more active than an individual who lives in driving distance from all of those things. Additionally, if you live in a walkable area, this is likely a benefit to your physical and mental health. As cited in the article, “Walking for just 30 minutes five days a week has been shown to have a significant impact on everything from obesity to depression and colon cancer.” As Malchik described, “humans have evolved to walk”; to traipse. We are meant to stroll around at a leisurely pace, take in our surroundings, be stimulated by our environment, and be mentally and physically active and aware. The detriment to mental and physical health when walkability is taken away is unfathomable. Walking, however, seems to be on a clear decline in America — and has been ever since middle-class white families began moving to the suburbs. In America we have this strange fascination with gated communities and the idea that somehow we need to keep the odd pedestrian away from our residences. Authors like Malchik and Loerzel would argue, however, that making neighborhoods feel comfortably walkable and eliminating this stigma set in place would create a series of benefits for the residents of walkable neighborhoods. The best way to reclaim the streets and bring walking back is simply to do it. Go outside, explore, learn, observe, and get lost. The more we walk, the more other people will too. The more we walk, the more corporate America is going to notice and want to market products and lifestyles around walkability. Walking is what we are meant to do, and we simply need to take the initiative to do it more. We make neighborhoods walkable by walking more. With enough pedestrian activity, city planners and architects and infrastructure designers will learn to design areas to be more pedestrian friendly. As we enter an era of being increasingly conscious of our carbon footprint, I think more and more cities will invest in walkability over motor transit — but only if enough people take the initiative to walk. This is how cities will become more walkable.
But what is walkability? What makes a city walkable? To find out, I went to Lake View East, a Chicago neighborhood that is often described online as “walkable.” As I walked down the main commercial drags on Broadway and Clark, I looked around and took note of what I saw. The busy commercial streets were occupied by low and high density stores, which I found interesting. There were big-box stores like Target and Marshalls right next to small mom-and-pop clothing stores. The residents of the neighborhood did not have to drive to a strip mall or something of the sort of a Target, but they also were not robbed of smaller and more quaint local stores and restaurants. Any sort of store you needed to visit was within a block or two of the residential streets. Additionally, there were also corporate offices on the main streets. This gave residents a place to work in the neighborhood — they did not have to take a commuter train from the suburbs or drive from miles away. I also noticed that the sidewalks and pedestrian walkways were well maintained, pretty, and functional. Thought was put into the design of the walkways and what it would feel like to walk the neighborhood. It was almost as if the designers wanted people to walk. There were also several community resources such as a hospital and several schools within walking distance from the residential areas of the neighborhood. This also made the neighborhood feel as though things were accessible by foot. (611)
For my Chicago field guide, I would like to give a tour of defunct places. That is, attractions or points of interest that were once functional, occupied, or standing — but are no longer. I think it would be nice to take a look at the way this has impacted different communities or demographics. Who has been hit the hardest by Chicago’s expansion? Who was hurt the most when a certain highway was built or a certain building was torn down? As I learned today from the readings, “Construction of the Eisenhower Expressway, for example, destroyed long-established, flourishing, seemingly permanent Italian and Jewish communities on the West Side, robbing the city of part of its ethnic diversity.” I would like to explore more stories like that, because something as seemingly simple as road construction can have a heartbreaking and world-bending affect on a lot of people.
