Four Lenses for Better Understanding Your City
(Source: Unsplash/Matt Jones, with edits.)
When I first got “bit” by the city bug about eight years ago, I would spend many precious hours up late at night after work scouring the web for anything I could find that would help me understand cities. Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities had infused me with much curiosity about cities, but without a clear roadmap for how to think about place, I found myself stumbling around for a while, slowly piecing together a framework but also frustrated at the lack of coherence.
Maybe you feel the same? If you’re like me, you like having frameworks through which to interpret complex systems. Cities are complex systems, but they don’t come with neat handbooks for properly understanding and interpreting them. This is probably a good thing, because it teaches us to respect the complexity of cities and to stay curious rather than thinking we’ve found “silver bullet” solutions and explanations. But it can also make it hard to know where to start when it comes to thinking about better understanding your town.
After almost a decade of staring at this metaphorical puzzle, I have settled on a few frameworks, or “lenses,” through which I can look at my city and attain some level of coherent understanding.
Framework #1: Patterns, Place, and Belonging
For most of us, the city’s physical construction is our first realm of engagement. We first encounter the city as a collection of material components: roads, buildings, infrastructure, etc. We can’t think about cities without thinking about a specific city, about a specific place built with specific materials according to specific patterns. It’s possible to approach cities first as political and/or economic realms, but thinking of them first as material, built environments is a much simpler and more profound place to start.
I say simple because it’s intuitive. No one has to explain how to experience a city as a built environment. This is simply a matter of taking a walk or a bike ride, of studying a map, of learning to stop and really see the city: it’s buildings, roads, intersections, and spaces. But I also say profound because these exercises invite us to think more deeply about the non-physical relationships facilitated by the physical construction of place. As we move about our city, we can think not only of the patterns of design and construction we encounter, but also about how these decisions about the physical world affect our metaphysical experiences of belonging and connection. How do different patterns and different design choices facilitate connection or…not?
Exploring the built aspect of the city also gives us a chance to more deeply engage with the story of the city. Every building, every road contains part of the city’s history, identity, and values. A road is not just a road; a building is not just a building, they are all the results of relationships, conversations, and maybe even contested visions of what the city ought to be and who it should serve.
So, start here. Start with the walk around various neighborhoods, noticing buildings, researching building styles, looking into the stories behind why certain roads and parks were placed where they are. Wrestle with the connection between the physical and the metaphysical: Why do some places feel more like places than others? Which places inspire you with a sense of belonging and connection? Which ones don’t? What kinds of patterns do you notice? How do these patterns of design affect the pattern of your life?
Framework #2: Social Connection
Another way of “seeing the city” could be to begin with the social component. After all, there’s no city without people who can peacefully live together! If starting with architecture and design feels less interesting or too intimidating to you, then start with people. To see your city through this framework or “lens” is to look at it in terms of who the city serves and how well it facilitates social connection. Here are some questions to guide you as you move through your city, with an eye to the social fabric.
Who does your city serve? By this, I mean: How does the design of your city facilitate participation for various groups of people? Who do you see when you’re out and about? Do you see children, elderly people, teenagers? What are their conditions of engagement? Are they inhabiting spaces conducive to them? Are your city’s neighborhoods and streets designed with them in mind?
Where do strangers mingle outside of a business? It’s easy to find crowded cafés and pubs, but what’s not so easy is to find third spaces not governed by transactions, such as parks, plazas, and public squares. Where in your city can strangers peacefully coinhabit space? Where do you go to people-watch?
How visible are people in your city? Do you see people on the sidewalks? How populated is your downtown? What is the ratio to seeing people in cars versus seeing people outside of cars (i.e., walking or on bikes)? How does the visibility of other people affect your experience of the city? (P.S. It's best to think about this while outside of a car.)
A city can’t be a city without people, but a city can’t be a community unless those people can live together in peace and conviviality, with opportunities to build loose ties. Where do you see these traits at work in your city? Where do you see them breaking down and why does that matter? How easy is it to get to know people who live near you? How easy is it to build loose ties? Why do you think this is the case? Which parts of the city feel friendlier than others?
Framework #3: Resilience/Sustainability
With these last two frameworks, we’re moving to more intellectual topics of policy, but they are incredibly important, especially when combined with the first two. Thinking about these topics can add a level of depth to your observations because they answer the “so what?” and the “how?” questions.
Let’s look at resilience first. This is a core idea at Strong Towns; it’s the idea of being able to bounce back quickly from systemic disruptions. To think about resilience means to consider if public decisions about land use, transit, the environment, and finance (just to name a few) infuse it with the ability to withstand possible future shocks.
For instance, if your city’s model of economic development relies heavily on outside investors and chain stores, then what happens if it suddenly becomes more attractive to do business elsewhere and they close shop? Does your city have a strong fabric of local businesses that can continue sustaining the economy? If your city relies heavily on tourism and allows much of its housing stock to be posted for short-term rentals, what happens if tourism dries up but the housing market is forever distorted? Or if your city indebts its future to supplying infrastructure in pursuit of “growth”?
Thinking about resilience provides a much-needed gravitas to our contemplation about cities, and can give us as local advocates a framework through which to discern the issues that really matter.
Framework #4: Policies and Practices
Moving up the ladder of abstraction here, the last framework I’ll propose is that of policies and practices. This “lens” can be the most murky and confusing of all, yet it’s extremely important. In fact, policies and practices undergird the other three frameworks. The design of our cities, the strength of our social fabric, and our city’s long-term sustainability are all governed in one way or another by policy. You could say that the study of cities really is the study of policies and their outcomes, both intended and unintended.
For me, this is perhaps the most slow-going aspect to city-study, simply because there’s not always a clear guide as to which policies and practices exist or how they are applied in the context of a specific city. But even if you can’t discover and decode every single policy and ordinance at play in your town, it’s extremely powerful to know to even look for them.
In the long run, you’ll likely have to combine a study of policy with immersion in local politics: policies themselves are only part of the picture. It also matters how the people in power interpret and apply them. In other words, you’ll want to study not just formal policies, but the entire system of how change happens in your specific town.
In the short run, though, here are some basic policy-oriented questions you can ask to get started. Honestly, you probably couldn’t go wrong assuming there’s some kind of policy component to whatever topic you’re interested in:
What does our zoning code imply about the design of our neighborhoods, with an eye to small businesses and multifamily housing?
What kinds of regulations exist around starting a small business? How might these policies encourage or discourage entrepreneurs?
What policies govern the design and layout of our streets?
Ultimately, to care about policies is to care about the “rules of the game,” because these are what determine what’s possible in your city. Implementing more sustainable practices, fostering greater social connection, and implementing designs that foster connection… They all require some kind of conversation about policy, codes, and ordinances.
So no, understanding your city isn’t easy but, yes, it is worth it. Few things have the power to add to our sense of agency, purpose, and security in the world than understanding the built context where our life unfolds. In an age of increasing transience and digitization, it’s easy to forget that place matters. Rediscovering that truth and rediscovering our places might be the most rewarding adventure of our time.
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