The Symbols in the City
(Source: Unsplash/Alexander Grey.)
Feeling restless a few weekends ago, I snapped my four-month-old into his car seat and pointed the car toward our downtown. I popped into a coffee shop for an iced matcha and ambled through the farmer’s market before setting out on foot for the Magnolia home goods store. I don’t usually shop at Magnolia, but my mom wanted one of their candles and, seeing that my Christmas package is now absurdly late, obliging her request was the least I could do.
It was a lovely day and our Graco stroller made the walk pleasantly smooth. There were, however, some literal bumps in the road…bumps I hadn’t noticed when walking child-free around town. Several sidewalks lacked curb ramps, so getting the stroller up and down took creativity. At one point, the sidewalk ended entirely and I had to inch around a light pole and negotiate with drivers to get across the street. After Magnolia, I hopped into another store out of curiosity, the entry to which consisted of gravel with a few “lily pad” style flat stones. Fortunately, this episode of bumpy offroading didn’t wake my son Levi from his nap; kid’s a champ.
Normally, this kind of walk would leave me building a list in my head of all the infrastructure improvements we could make in our downtown. A better sidewalk there, more traffic calming here, three more curb ramps, etcetera, etcetera… The list goes on. Infrastructure is important. It’s also important to be able to name what we see in our cities, to articulate what’s working and what’s not. It’s important to have a language for the city. But we also need to be able to interpret the city and this requires seeing everything in the city, everything in the built environment as a symbol, as something that communicates a message about who we are, who belongs here, and what we value.
Consider, for example, the extremely wide lanes we have in many neighborhoods here in Waco. At first glance, this might just be a straightforward design issue: such wide lanes are extremely likely to induce speeding, making what should be a public space too dangerous for other people, especially children, and turning it into a domain for cars and their drivers. This straightforward analysis is important and valuable, but what happens if we think about it symbolically? Then the overly wide residential street becomes a symbol of our culture’s unexamined commitment to cars and a conversation starter about the cost of this commitment, specifically the way they are turning our neighborhoods into traffic corridors, not communities.
Or, let’s take sidewalks. So many of ours here in Waco are extremely skinny, overgrown with grass, often existing only in disconnected segments or, in some parts of town, entirely non-existent. It’s one matter to consider what this means from a technical or design perspective; it’s another entirely to think about what this situation represents. What do these sidewalks in their various states and conditions communicate to us about our values and priorities? What do they communicate about who belongs here?
I think of this especially when walking neighborhoods. Because of the lack of sidewalks, I must walk in the street and do my best to make eye contact with the few cars that do pass us, hoping they can see the stroller. The lack of sidewalks might seem at first an economic choice. Sidewalks are, after all, quite expensive. But historically, there’s been an association with sidewalks as urban infrastructure that doesn’t fit in the quiet suburbs and as a potential magnet to people who don’t “belong” in the neighborhood.
Or consider the fact that there’s no coffee shop I can walk to and meet up with friends. Technically, this is a zoning issue; nothing more to it. But what do those zoning rules symbolize? What do they tell us about the patterns of life we believe belong in a neighborhood? What does they communicate about what we value?
Learning to see the city as a collection of symbols is a powerful way to shift the conversation out of the typical linguistic and paradigmatic boxes we’re so accustomed to. It allows us to see the city as a collection of value signals and to ask if we are signaling what we really value as a community through our design and investment choices. It allows us to ask the kinds of “first questions” that need to be asked and that aren’t asked enough: Who are we? What do we value? Who do we serve?
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.