Welcome to the Good City
We started this blog to examine the intersection of people, place, and the environment. We want to understand how design decisions like the width of sidewalks and presence of street trees, zoning decisions like the types of uses buildings can have, and policy decisions like whether or not money is allocated to public transit all affect human thriving and the health of the environment.
68% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050, a figure that will likely increase to 85% by the 2100. Since humanity is flooding into the world’s cities, this blog asks “Are we building cities that will promote human flourishing? Are we building places that care for the natural environment? Will the cities of the future be ones that learn from the missteps of the past and instead promote equity and justice for our children and grandchildren? We’re building cities, but are we building good cities?”
Building good cities, cities that foster human and environmental well-being, is the result of choice. How you and I live our lives now (where we live, who we hang out with, how we get around) is largely the outcome of countless choices that people made in the past. This should encouraging news, because it means that we get to make decisions too - decisions about how we want our cities to look from now on. And we can make these decisions based on the vast amount of information out there on how to build good places.
For example, what factor would you say has the single strongest impact on one’s ability to escape poverty in America? Well, a study conducted by Harvard found that commuting time has a larger impact on social mobility than crime, elementary school test scores, or even the percentage of two-parent families in a community. The longer the commute, the worse the chances of a low-income family moving up the ladder. Long commute times are the result of building patterns that prioritize low-density housing and car-oriented development. Good cities help families rise out of poverty.
We also know that more “eyes on the street” translates to less crime; and the number of eyes on the street is determined by architectural design and city codes. And we know that the more social connections people have, the happier they are with their life and that the physical characteristics of one’s neighborhood help determine the number of friends makes. And we know that urban environments contribute far less CO2 to the atmosphere than suburban ones, and that thousands of towns across the country would be financially healthier if they adopted certain policies regarding growth.
This blog is about how the decisions we make about the places we build change the trajectory of human lives. It’s about choosing to build beautiful places that honor culture and history; it’s about building affordable, inclusive, and empowering systems; its about using the built environment to be better stewards of the natural environment. Join us as we discover how we can build good cities.
-Trey Cason
