Street trees, benches, slower speeds, and beautiful proportions are often treated as extras, added only after the “real” engineering work is done. Victor Dover argues that this gets the whole assignment wrong. In this episode, he talks about the second edition of Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns and why great streets have to be designed as places, not just routes. Dover makes the case that beauty belongs in the brief from the beginning, because when a street is designed only for traffic flow, that is all it can ever really become: a place for traffic.
Hey everybody, this is Chuck. Before we get started, I want to confess something to all of you. I am terrible at email. More specifically, I feel overwhelmed by email. We've done all kinds of things to help me keep up, and it's gotten better, but I get so many messages from so many people. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. But at least five or six times a week, I get an email where someone will say, "Hey, Chuck, I just found Strong Towns. Love what you're doing. Let me tell you my story." Eight paragraphs later, there is a series of complex questions, and I would love to respond to all these. It's just really, really hard.
I am also overwhelmed with messages, whether it's LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack Messenger. I just found out I've got messages sitting on Twitter and Blue Sky. I don't even try anymore. I get Instagram messages, messages on YouTube, and comments. There's so much inbound traffic, and it's really hard to keep up.
I want to tell you what I am doing to prioritize right now. I love the Strong Towns Commons, and I tend to spend most of my online social time there. The Strong Towns Commons is something we set up for members. Again, remember, membership is whatever you can afford to pay, so there's no barrier here. We just ask you to come on board. commons.strongtowns.org is the site.
You can direct message me, and you can post your message there. It will show up in a social type format. The great thing about it is, if you've got that long question, that "Hey, Chuck, let me tell you my story," guess what? There are hundreds of other people on that site that are into this same kind of thing. If I can't get to it, someone else is going to get to it, and they're pretty smart. They're going to give you some good ideas, too.
If you are a Strong Towns member, head over to the Commons, commons.strongtowns.org. You should be able to log right in. We've emailed you a password in the past, and we'd love to have you there. If you're trying to get ahold of me and you're thinking, "Chuck, I've emailed you. I've messaged you. You're not getting back to me," I'm sorry. You're part of my waking, guilt-laden dreams in the middle of the night. But if it's something you want to talk about soon, go to the Commons, because that's where I start my day.
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. Victor Dover is co-founder of Dover, Kohl & Partners Town Planning. They're based in Coral Gables, Florida. It's a design practice focusing on restoring healthy neighborhoods as the basis for sound communities and regions. Victor is a former national chair of the Congress for New Urbanism and lead designer of more than 150 neighborhoods, urban revitalization programs, and regional plans across the United States.
Victor is one of the authors of Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns, which now is in its second edition, published by Wiley Publishing. I think we like them. I know that I do. Victor, welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast.
Glad to be here.
I got a note from my publisher saying, "Hey, would you be interested in interviewing for your podcast this guy named Victor Dover?" I was like, "Yeah." I don't know if including a publisher, that's right. We have a lot in common in colonial poetry.
Here's the first edition, which is an impressive book, and Wiley sent me the second edition. I think you were going for a volume record. This is really impressive, man. It's quite an accomplishment. Congratulations.
Heavy reading material, as I say. It's heavy.
It does weigh a lot. You are walking people through how you think about streets, and in that sense, it's genius. This couldn't have been done without color, without the graphics that you put in, and without the lessons. As someone who's gone through this book process, I know it is a marathon.
Why a second edition? We talked with the first edition. What is it about? Why are we back at the table again here? Why are you asking Wiley for another one?
Well, actually, they asked us. To our complete surprise, it sort of became the go-to book as the leading textbook on the subject, and I think they realized that it would be good to have a new edition.
We thought, okay, we'll just go through, update a few things, add a couple of case studies, trim out some things that had seen a lot of day, whatever. We thought it would be really fast. But the more we got into it and started thinking about it, the more motivated we got to do a real rewrite. It really is a rework. There's a lot of material that was in the first edition that still is in the second, but it's not just a thicker, bigger, more colorful book. It really is a new book. We rewrote virtually every page.
I think what provoked it was thinking about what had happened in the race toward better streets during the years since we started writing the first edition: 2009, 2010, 2011. It was eventually published in late 2013. In those years, there were all kinds of bold experiments going on all around the United States, including the impressive work under Janette Sadik-Khan in New York, where they were doing pilot projects and demonstration projects to see how it might work out if we took back some of our space in our streets for pedestrians, people on bikes, trees, and people sitting at cafes. They took back some of the space from cars.
In parallel with that, all sorts of important breakthroughs and experimentation were going on in our peer cities in Western Europe. Of course, the Dutch and the Danes have been at it for a long time. It felt like the French and the Brits were a little behind them, but they were also beginning to do things, and everybody was moving in the same direction. Our safety record was improving, like theirs had been. The struggle or fight for space in the street for walking and biking and trees was trending in the same direction on both continents.
Fast forward to 2022, coming out of the COVID lockdown. The experiments with open streets, that is, streets closed to traffic so you can do things you used to do inside buildings out in the middle of the road, were all happening. We compared the two and said, wait a minute, we have stalled in the United States. They're making incremental progress, but the vast pace, the acceleration of street improvement and reform that we saw in the late 2010s, had tapered off. Meanwhile, in Europe, they were going great guns. The Parisians and then the French as a whole, and the Londoners and the Brits as a whole, were getting in on it now and catching up with Holland and with Copenhagen in ways that we haven't.
That stoked our enthusiasm to work on the book and make it more of a challenge. I hope when people flip through it, they see the gap between the street experience they're having day to day and the ones they could have, and it motivates them to get back on project.
One of the strange things about getting older, I'm just in my early 50s now, so I don't feel like I'm that old, but around here I have people now who ask me about the way things used to be in my city. It's funny because I have historical reference. I think a lot of people listening to this podcast won't have the historical reference that you and I have about what life in the '80s and the '90s was like in terms of street design, as you're talking about this stagnation.
If you graduated from college in 2008 or 2010, you've had a very different experience of streets than you and I had in the decades prior to that. Can we fill that in a little bit? I do see the stagnation. I also see the change, and I want to give people maybe a starting point that is a little bit further back in time than the last 15 years.
Great question. Now that we're both qualified for AARP membership, I'm only 63. I'm not that much older than you. But I think we both were growing up during the last years of the golden age of the automobile. It was still what the traffic engineers call the free-flowing condition on a lot of our streets and a lot of the time. But it was beginning to wear out. It was becoming more and more clear that organized motordom had won, and sprawl was the order of the day.
I remember being an architecture student in the early 1980s and hearing it often discussed how, theoretically, just theoretically, it might be possible to bring some of the historic main streets back to life. After all, a little bit of nostalgia, French Village, and a little bit of SoHo were doing pretty well. There was a tiny little piece of Old Town Alexandria that was looking really good. Maybe that meant that just maybe you could turn the lights back on in historic districts.
In the meantime, the default setting in the shopping mall, the strip shopping center, the apartment complex, the suburban hellscape of subdivisions and office parks, that was what development was. That's what real estate was in the minds of the vast majority of practitioners in all the fields, including the people who influenced the design of streets. In that period, it was still widely held that wider and faster roads were better roads.
It just took a little bit of time. In the '90s, people started questioning that pretty hard. By the time we got well into the 2000s, first of all, it wasn't theoretical anymore. You could turn the lights back on in historic districts. By the early 2000s, half the downtowns in America were undergoing some kind of revitalization, and the old neighborhoods were getting buffed up, polished up, brought back to life, and made economically strong again. The other half were beginning to do that by then. So I think there was no longer a theory that walkable places could be attractive to customers and that people would actually choose them. That's the difference.
My story, as an engineer early in my career, I remember having this conversation: streets are for cars. It didn't even occur to me that there was another setting. I've described how I came to this conversation by asking a different question. I wasn't asking about beauty, and I wasn't asking about street design. I was asking, why is this city going broke? Is this something you just had? Is this how you entered the profession, with this awareness of streets, or is this something that grew in you? What was your process? What was your Damascus road that got you to, "I really want to focus on streets"?
It definitely was a process of growing in me over a long period of time. I grew up in the suburbs, right at the edge of the last of the inner-ring suburbs around Charlotte. Of course, that edge has moved a long way since then, but ours was the last house, and then there were the woods. I was accustomed to an environment where there wasn't that much traffic, but there also weren't that many people around either. Riding my bike on those streets, delivering papers on my paper route, it never occurred to me to question why there weren't any sidewalks.
I went off to college in Blacksburg, Virginia, which started with nine tiny square blocks and a beautiful little main street college town, almost a monastic environment in the mountains in southwest Virginia. It was the first time I got to live in Old Town, the old part of town, with campus and town so close together. College students, whether they were raised in pedestrian-friendly environments or not, quickly adapt to being part of the last great pedestrian population when they're on a college campus. I did that.
Then I went off to Alexandria to complete my study. It was Old Town Alexandria, and at that point just a few blocks of King Street had been revitalized. Much of the old town laid out by George Washington was considered blighted, and certainly had been the subject of disinvestment, urban renewal, highway building projects around it, and all that sort of thing. At that time, I could almost in real time see the revitalized part of Old Town Alexandria expanding right before us.
In those times, the mid-80s, I called my father up and said, "I live in an old town, and it's amazing here. You can walk a block in any direction from my apartment, which is in the garret of an old row house, and you can buy The New York Times." There wasn't a New York Times on your tablet or your phone. There was a physical need to go buy a paper. My dad responded, "But why would anybody want to do that?"
I thought it was amazing to live in this environment with a tight grid of streets, beautiful tree-lined streets, and all those great built-into-street relationships in Old Town. I got a lot out of it. I thought it was a terrific place to live and work.
Then, when I moved to Miami, it suddenly became clear to me what Old Town Alexandria had been teaching us. Miami was built more recently, or greater Miami, Coral Gables, where we are, had been built after the car became king. Outside the older inner-ring suburbs, like Coconut Grove and Coral Gables, in the suburbia out of Miami, you had to drive everywhere for everything. It's the exact opposite of Old Town.
I was asked a couple of years after that, "How do you grow more new urbanists, Victor? How do we get more people to join the new urbanism?" I said, "Well, you steep them in Old Town Alexandria for a couple of years, then you parachute them into the asphalt in the suburbs in a place like Miami or Atlanta, you water them, and they'll grow into new urbanists. Almost automatic."
A similar question is, why is Miami such a cradle for new urbanism? Part of it is this is where Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, founders of the movement, live and were teaching. Clearly, that was it. I learned so much from them in those years. I think the other reason is because of that old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. We need it really badly here. That's why it focused so many brains around the school of architecture at the University of Miami around the idea of retrofitting suburbia, building new towns that are worthy of the human species, and turning the lights back on in the integrated old towns and inner-ring suburbs.
You talked about us hitting this stagnation point. Early in your career, now you're building this practice, one of the most successful urban design firms in the country. You had to have felt like me in the early days of the COVID pandemic. Obviously, there was a lot of tension going around. We were in a pandemic. This was not a time to celebrate.
But I remember writing at the time, I'm seeing some amazing things happen. Especially as we got through the initial, how many people are going to die, what is going to happen here, and things got a little calmer, you started to see streets being closed. People were turning outdoor space into human space. You started to see all these adaptations that people like you have been pushing on for years, and all of a sudden this was a mainstream embrace of this stuff as an economic necessity. In my mind, we're never going back. As soon as people get a tiny taste of this, we're never going back. Was that a feeling that you had? What happened?
It came in a couple of phases for me. The first phase was when everybody was locked down. I could foresee a time when the pandemic was behind us, when people would be able to go back out into public space and sit at a sidewalk cafe, something you want to do a lot in the weather in Miami, and be with other people. I felt like there would be this great sigh of relief across society in which we could finally go outside and be with each other again.
That was the first stage of it. Then the second one was as exactly that started to happen, and they started moving the restaurants out onto the sidewalks and into the streets all over the country, less so in Miami. Our number of experiments with that were limited compared to many other cities. But as that started happening, I felt the same as you: once people get a taste of this, they're going to want to keep this the way it is.
But it was a real test for the stranglehold of the transpocracy over the public rights of way. It's very interesting. The trend toward pedestrianization just accelerated post-COVID in cities like Paris, and was rolled back in many cities in the United States, even in New York, where they had already had so much success with open streets. That's a little mysterious, but I think it has to do partly with generations of adult Americans, older and younger, who were all raised around the idea that priority one is flowing. We just need to flow. That's what your car feels like it's designed to do. You get inside. It's all sound insulated. It's got all sorts of safety devices associated with it. Not that they all work well enough, but they do a lot, because that's why the safety record was improving for a while. Inside your car, it feels like flow is an actual thing to do.
But actually, flow is not the most important thing. The most important thing is the economic vitality and social vitality of the spaces that all of us, in our vehicles, on our two feet, or on our two wheels, are moving through. The most important thing is that those are addresses where people want to be. Secondary to that is flow. Way above, on the top of the list of the things that make it a place where people want to be, is safety. How could safety be less important than flow? But it is in typical practice, as you and Wes Marshall and others have pointed out in your writings.
I thought, okay, people are going to see slow down a little bit here. They're going to see how great it is, and then they're going to feel better about prioritizing safety over flow. That isn't what happened. The next round of it was where everything opened back up again, but not as many people were traveling yet, not as many people were going back to the offices. For those who were on the street, all of a sudden they could go as fast as they wanted all the time, even in the peak hour. There weren't nearly as many cars, so you could floor it. Flooring it is what seems natural in a lot of modern cars and in a lot of modern car television advertisements. That's what they did, and immediately the safety problem got worse instead of better.
I heard Beth Osborne, our mutual friend, say once that as we were coming out of lockdown, that is when it became apparent or proven what we always suspected, which was that congestion was in fact a safety tool. Having a bit of friction was slowing us down but keeping us within the speed ranges where a whole lot less mayhem happens. Of course, as we started driving again, first in smaller numbers at higher speeds, the safety record started getting worse and worse because of speed.
Then everything returned to normal, and a lot of people returned to driving much more often, and now they're all speeding. It's interesting. There was a mental shift that happened after the lockdown, where for a few months there was free-flowing condition. You could drive as fast as you want. Free-flowing condition is gone again. We're back to congestion at peak hour in most places, but people still expect to go fast, and they're dying in large numbers as a result.
This is the disappointment that I have. For me, I feel like your book is part of my personal disappointment, because I tell people, go read this book. I'm trying to build a great place, and I feel like your book is, in a sense, saying, hey, here is an example of a place that can do it, and here's another that can do it. This is not hard, in the way I would say it.
Yet I look at New York City, and I think in New York City you have every ingredient that would make this revolution in streets happen. You have a culture that is less car dependent than any place else, generally walks, and has streets that are wealthy enough and thick enough to not have all these gaps and empty spaces. You're utilizing the space. You've got good framing in the places where they've done it. It's not an experiment that they did somewhere else. It's literally up the street. You did this awesome thing. Why don't you do it here, too?
I want you to describe what they've done in Paris, because I think a lot of people listening to this podcast have probably heard that story, but we've never talked about it here. I think it would be interesting for people to get that. But in New York, it's not like I go explain to someone and they're like, "Oh, you're crazy. You're talking about New York." No. It's in New York. You're literally right up the street. We did it. Look. It's awesome.
There is still progress being made, and there are wins among the losses. Even though I talk about a kind of stagnating of the progress, there is still incremental progress being made, and there are big exceptions. There's a wonderful redesign of the main street in Banff, in Alberta, for example. You can't believe it. You look at that place, and they were obviously motivated as a tourist-driven place to get the visitor experience right. That was more important than flow, and that was all the permission they needed to make their main street highly walkable.
You can drive, by the way, but your car is a guest, and they just slowed it way on down. There's actually a fire pit in the middle of the street, which is kind of a funny thing for our Canadian friends. If they can do it in places like that, we can do it in all kinds of places.
Let me ask you this. Is your phone ringing off the hook for street designs?
Yeah, we're pretty busy, although I don't think there are a lot of people doing exactly what we're doing. That may be an outlier, just the same.
Let me ask this, because new urbanism has had the blessing and the burden of Seaside, right? The blessing being this is such an amazing place. When I go, I fall in love with it every time. It's this evolving, amazing design. But the burden of it is that it's a resort community. So when people learn about it, it's, yeah, that's what you do in Banff. That's what you do in these weird one-off places, or Ocean Drive in Miami Beach.
Exactly. I actually live in a metropolis that is where other people go on vacation, so we're really lucky here to have all kinds of environments around that you would choose to visit. That way, we are a little spoiled.
Here's the question. I feel like success to me is when Dover, Kohl can't possibly finish all the work you're being asked to do, and it's not from the Banffs and the Seasides and the South Beaches of the world. It's from some normal place where normal people live, and they're like, "Hey, we want a lot of this work." Give me my optimism back.
Come through the book. You're going to find some things that are reassuring. For example, Lake Wales is in the center of Florida, in an economically struggling former citrus-growing region where the orange juice business has collapsed. They're in a decline, and yet in their place, they're building walkable streets, planting street trees, and restoring the vision they had for their city 100 years ago as a city in a garden. That's a little town of 17,000 people. It's not Chicago. It's not Gotham. They're doing it.
The little town of Port Royal, South Carolina, which is basically a military town adjacent to Parris Island, they're doing it. It isn't just for fancy places or resorts. This idea of walkability, for example, was absolutely normal everywhere for literally hundreds of years on our continent and thousands of years worldwide.
The burden of Seaside is that it just makes an easy target for somebody who wants a one-liner or a bumper sticker to say, "That doesn't count. That's a resort. That's a holiday." Okay, you go to a holiday town and you learn things, and you think, we should do this in our town. That's a good thing. That's a really good thing. Had it not been for Seaside, there would be no new urbanist movement, and there would have been far fewer brilliant infill development projects in big cities around train stations and high-rises. Its influence wasn't just of other holiday towns. It's had an influence in all kinds of places.
I also think that context matters a lot. Where you are should be as important as what you're doing. One definition of design is that you're thinking in situations. You're giving form to things. You're using geometry. But basically what you're doing is responding to the conditions on the map, or on the ground, or in the context. There are few absolutes. Very few absolutes. Everything is a little bit adjusted for the nuances of its own place.
Even if you tried to replicate some example you saw on vacation, you would still modify it. It would be a new thing in your new place. They have a Parthenon in Nashville. Actually, it doesn't read or feel or operate in the city scene at all like the Parthenon in Athens, although it is a one-to-one scale replica of it out of cheaper materials. What I'm getting at is an idea you pick up while you're traveling is going to change on its way to being redeployed in your town just by the changing context.
Can we drill into that?
Yeah. We are busy, by the way, so I hope you're not telling everybody to knock our doors down, because my studio team would revolt if I added any new projects this week.
I'm telling people that they should. I'm also trying to encourage other people to copy your business model, because I do feel like, to me, the premium thing people should be doing is designing great streets.
You just said street-oriented urbanism. Really, in traditional neighborhoods, there's a thought about how to make the neighborhood that starts with streets, that street spaces are as important as any other spaces, maybe more. The spaces between buildings are more important than spaces inside them. If you start with that, then you're going to end up with street-oriented urbanism. In a way, the book is more about that than it is about transportation planning.
This is what I want people to get from you today, because I want them to go get your book, learn this, and discover the way you think. You said something just now about context matters. There's nuance.
I feel like, as an engineer, what they teach you in engineering school is that there's a standard template. You may have three different types of streets. There's a rural section, an urban section, an urban arterial, and an urban collector. Here they are. It's your standard section, and go. Literally, the world ends at the edge of the right-of-way. You're just worried about what happens in there, and everything outside of that is a pain in the ass to be ignored. If they make you go to a public meeting and talk to someone, they're going to complain about something. Let's just keep it within the right-of-way, people.
You approach the world in the complete opposite way. If someone calls you up and says, "Hey, Victor, I would love you to come help us with this street, or this neighborhood, or this place," and you go there for the first time, what are the things that you're trying to take in, understand, and grasp as part of doing that job?
There's a lot there. First, you observe. The first obligation is to observe closely. We sometimes will do documentation. We'll measure things. We'll make maps, which Ray Gindroz said are like X-rays for urban designers. I think that's exactly right. Like X-rays are for doctors, maps are for urbanists and planners. You do your homework, and you get to know the place in some detail.
Observing closely will bring you to strengths and weaknesses. You'll pick up on how this street over here looks really good, and the property values are buoyant, and everybody loves it, and that's the one they take pictures of and put on their postcards. Then this other part of town that they built more recently, in all likelihood, they hope you don't notice, because they're a little bit embarrassed by it. You find that contradiction everywhere.
One of the first things we do is try to understand the history of the place so we can figure out how that part that is doing so well now, and has been doing well for decades and decades, if not longer, came to be. Usually it was because some person drew lines on a map and said, "We're going to put the main street on this alignment." It might have been a railroad supervisor. It might have been a grand town founder developer. It doesn't really matter. They made decisions. They said the main street goes like this, not like that. They drew that on a map, and they basically put some order on the chaos of all the activity that was to come in that place.
The streets are the most important armature there is, because they don't move very much once you put them down. Someone said that streets are the slowest of human institutions to change. Think about that a second. The Appian Way is sitting right where the Appian Way used to sit in Roman times. You draw the street map, and the street tends to stay right where it is. Maybe every once in a while, one will be closed or relocated or expanded. Every generation or two, they might tear up everything you can see and dig up everything below the ground, all the pipes and wires and things, and reinstall the latest design. But the alignment of the street in the master plan is likely going to be right where it was from the first day, and it'll be there for hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of years. That adds a little pressure. We should be getting that right.
Chances are the fundamental bone structure of the old part of town is healthier, and the new part not so healthy. Once you make those observations, you can explain these things with pictures to people of their own place. I often will use history pictures to get a public design process started, because then I can show them what their great-grandfathers were building when they were poor as a community, or maybe when the street itself was still mud, still dirt. They hadn't quite gotten to the point where they could afford a fancy pavement on top, much less cars going back and forth on it. But the buildings on that street scene, take a look, chances are they were of competent proportions. Maybe there was even a little flourish or ornament over the door or over the parapet. It stood upright, had a front porch or a storefront, presented itself to the street, and said, that's the public face of the town. They sent a message and said, "Here we are. We're a town, just like those towns back east, or the old town back in Europe, or whatever. We're here." That was the message that those original founders' buildings were sending.
You realize that the backdrop for that was that they didn't have much technology. They were probably doing it with steam shovels or with horse-drawn equipment. They didn't have any of our advantages, any of our cool tools that we have: computers, machines, aerial photographs, satellite imagery, rapid communications. There's no excuse at all why we shouldn't, in the coming era, build the best towns yet. We should be even better at it than those folks.
When you compare the work that the founders, the great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers and mothers were building to something built more recently, everybody looks at it and says, wait, how did that happen? There's a kind of learning process that goes on. Typically, that's very much how we would always start projects.
Over the process of looking at pictures, especially postcards, people will fall back in love with streets. They'll realize, oh, the street is a thing, and it doesn't end at the edge of the right-of-way. It's a thing that goes from building face to building face, or the whole of the environment. Urban designers walk around like this. You'll see this a lot of times at the University of Miami. It's all about the U, right? That's not what that means. It means building height-to-street width ratio. This is a big deal for us.
We'll walk around, and people think we're filmmakers that are sizing up the next shot, lining up where we're going to put the camera. But what we're looking at is the building height-to-street width ratio. What you typically find is that the more that spreads out, the less a sense of place emerges. Once we show that to people, they can never unsee it. They'll see it for the rest of their lives.
The subversive motivation behind a big, fat book full of pictures is that once somebody has that idea in their head, they'll go find a page, take it to their meeting, point to it, and say, "Exactly right. How come we can't have a street like that in our town?" Now the engineer, the public works director, or the DOT, or the mayor, or the developer have a bigger question to answer.
You probably have danced around the idea, and I'm going to give it a word: beauty. You've danced around it a bit, but you haven't used that word. I wonder if you would argue that there's an argument that beauty is subjective and in the eye of the beholder. I've run into people, including a former council member, who said, "I like really wide streets with no cars on them. That, I think, is beautiful." I'm not going to argue with you.
I wonder if there is a pattern, if there is a non-subjective definition of beauty in a street. Are there things that...
Now you make me want to search and see how many times we use the word beauty or beautiful in the book. I bet it's one of the most common words.
I think it is one of the more common words, but you haven't mentioned it in this podcast yet. That's why I wanted to bring it up. I feel like beauty is a thing that we reflexively discount as a society. We say, oh, you can't have a standard of beauty. Yet when it comes to places, I feel like there's something there, and I don't think it's all that mysterious. Elaborate.
You're absolutely right. Actually, one of the lines you'll hear me and John Massengale say quite often is that if it's not yet a beautiful street, it's not a complete street. I've heard you say some of the Complete Streets projects that have earned that bumper sticker from complete streets policies are a complete disaster. Well said, by the way. Not all of them.
Really, beauty is not extra. I've used the word design. I think beauty and design kind of go together, because elegance is only going to come about as a result of somebody getting in control of the geometry of things, the order of things, and the proportions. Beauty is not extra, and design is not extra. It's not something we can add on to the end after all the big decisions have been made by lawyers, accountants, traffic engineers, garbage haulers, or fire marshals. Beauty has to be in the design brief from the beginning as part of the assignment.
Why? Because if it's not beloved, it won't remain valuable. If it doesn't remain valuable, it won't be economically strong. We have to make people love it, not just more or less merely tolerate it. We've got to make places that people feel devoted to, and that comes from making them beautiful. I'll add memorable to the list.
One of the things we have in the new book that we didn't have much of in the first one is a real attack on this idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. John Massengale did a ton of scholarly research to dig into this, and he pulled out lots of evidence from neuroscience. Some really new emerging neuroscience research in the last 10 years keeps telling us that people respond consistently to certain things in a positive way. They're going to have a dopamine rush, not just from being able to get where they want to go at the time they want to go there, but having the experience be good. That burns its way into their brains and makes them say, I go that way next time. I'm going to use that route next time. I'm going to stop at that place when I come through here again. Or, I'm coming back to here. Those all burn into their brains.
This idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is a highly questionable thing, and we attacked it three or four ways, especially in the final chapter of the book. I'm curious, once you get there, because I know you're working your way from the front to the back and you're not there yet, 702 pages, I'm curious to hear your take on it. We make the case that there are some things that human beings consistently go for every time. Shade is one of those things. There are building-to-street proportions that consistently produce beauty more regularly. Even street trees. People love street trees.
Trees are really useful. They provide shade, so they lower the air conditioning cost in your building. If they're deciduous trees, they lose their leaves in the winter and let the sun melt the ice on your sidewalk. They are very functional things. They hold stormwater, hold the soil, and even slow traffic down to safer speeds. My favorite is they make oxygen. We breathe that stuff. So street trees have all these utilitarian, functional purposes, but they also give you a feeling that you belong in that space. We're drawn to greenness. Nature in the city, in all its forms, in parks and greenways, but also in tree-lined green streets, is one of the ways we get that dopamine rush.
What's more beautiful than aligned street trees that have been planted with deliberateness and nurtured and allowed to grow to the point where they provide shade and their canopies intersect overhead? You cannot get a bad experience with those features.
This is where I'm going through your book, and it's written by brilliant urban designers talking about streets in terms of proportion and beauty. I feel like if your standard traffic engineer just wrote a book about streets, it would say, here's the traffic count, here's the standard plate, and it would be a two-page booklet. Then I would ask the question to the people who are making decisions in a community, which book do you want? Which book do you want to open? What book is going to reflect your place?
Whose streets are they? That's the question we ask in the title of the final chapter. Traffic engineer streets? Walter Kulash, the great, brilliant transportation engineer, used to repeat this traffic engineer wisecrack. It goes like this: "We traffic engineers don't mind if you use our roads. We just wish you wouldn't turn on and off of them all the time."
The joke is that the engineers think the roads belong to them, and that the only thing that matters is whatever assignment they've been given. If they've only been given the problem of getting flow to happen, how to make it possible for an ever-increasing number of people to drive even farther every year, even faster than before, without delay, and that's the only problem you give them, then the engineers are going to come back with a solution that has only that in the book, in the manual.
That's not, by the way, what the AASHTO Green Book, much maligned, even says at the front of the book. It says determine the function of the street. We can determine that we want a great place to have a Fourth of July parade, and we want a great place to fall in love, and we want a great place to run our business, or to sit on the front porch and wave at our neighbors as they walk by. We can determine that the function is more than just what kind of driving function or motoring is going to take place there. If we give the engineers the right assignment, they stand a much better chance of coming back with the right stuff.
One last anecdote. All those years ago, when we wrote the first edition, we were trying to figure out what title to put on it. Of course, the conclusion was, let's just call it Street Design, because that way, when they introduce us, they'll say, this is Victor and John. They wrote the book on street design. We left it at that and added a little subtitle.
Just prior to that, I made the argument that the book should be called The Art of Street Design, because artlessness is all around us in the sort of utilitarian, engineering-only infrastructure that people are getting. What we needed to bring back was artfulness. Bring back the beauty. Bring back the wonder and magic of it. Instead of the street being something that maybe works, by one definition, at least part of the day for some number of years before it doesn't anymore, but is so ugly and repellent that you want to turn your building around, recoil from it, focus on the interior of the block, and try to put the street behind you and out of your mind. If that's the kind of street you have, you're missing out on some of the potential return on investment for going and building that darn thing.
That's why I thought we should call it The Art of Street Design. I even imagined there would be a second book, which we might get you or Rick Hall or somebody to write, that could be called The Science of Street Design. There was a brief moment when we thought maybe that's the way to do it. Our book is bigger on art than it is on science, but in the end, we also try to build rational, evidence-based arguments for the things that we're prescribing in the book.
Let me ask you one of those, because I said earlier, I've come to this conversation because I was trying to answer the question: Why are cities going broke? Why are these projects making no financial sense to me? When I have engaged with the standard engineering approach to building streets, oftentimes we will get to a point in the conversation where we're talking about beauty and the art of street design, and then it will be, well, we've met the function of the street, which is to move cars. Now we can add in, at extra expense and extra cost, the pretty things. We'll put in some nice benches, and we'll put in some planters, and maybe some trees. Enhancements. We're both doing air quotes here for those that are listening.
Street trees are not a core function. We'll do enhancements. What I always find is that that reinforces the idea that those enhancements are just extra superficial things that really probably don't have a return on investment.
But when I watch you work, and when I see your work and other people who do great street designs, my analysis is that you're actually, in most places, spending less money on the physical stuff that engineers say are required, and you're getting a better return on that investment. You're getting more private wealth, more land value, a better return. I'm not trying to make the argument for you, but I am asking you.
This is what's puzzling to me. If I'm building a street, why in the world would I ever turn it over to an engineer to destroy the wealth when I could turn it over to a really good designer? I would like you to make the case in your terms, because I feel like you would approach this a little bit differently than I would.
Let me first toss out a challenge for all Strong Towns listeners, many of whom are engineers by training. Remember that engineers used to be the producers of some astonishingly beautiful works of art that happened to also be bridges, or happened to also be Eiffel Towers, or also happened to be skyscrapers.
We've kind of given engineers in modern times a free pass from the obligation to deliver something that not just stands up, meets the budget, or satisfies some structural engineering requirement not to fall down. The Roebling generation of engineers saw their job as being much more overlapped with the job of architects, urban designers, and City Beautiful planners. You'll find that in landscape architects. There was a ton of overlap in these professions before they all got pushed off into their own silos. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., for example, was a city planner and a landscape architect. He was also a brilliant engineering mind who was thinking about stormwater while he was thinking about the beauty of the lake that would all be so.
Roebling was designing bridges across the river in Louisville, in Cleveland, and in Brooklyn, and saying, this is going to be the symbol on the skyline of the city, so it has to be graceful. It can't just be strong and sturdy. Architecture, similarly, some of the architects have also been given a kind of free pass, as if they don't have to think about how to keep the rain, and the stains that come with the rain, from wrecking their sculpture. In the old days, when these professions were still defining themselves, landscape architecture and city planning had a huge overlap. Engineering and architecture had a huge overlap. We asked everybody to be in on making it beautiful, fitting, and sturdy. It wasn't like anybody could get out of a part of that assignment.
There's my challenge for the engineers who listen to your podcast: why isn't beauty part of the brief, and why aren't you studying up about that kind of stuff? You can do it. You don't have to go to art school. You don't have to go to the Harvard Graduate School of Design for an architecture degree to be thinking about what would make it look good. I hope everybody will think about that.
City planning, I call myself a planner. You and I have debated before whether we keep paying these dues to these professional organizations ourselves. I'm actually an FAICP. I called my mom up and said, "They made me a fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. They gave me an F." She said, "Oh, I'm sorry," like that sounded like a penalty.
Anyway, I'm a city planner, but I'm trained as an architect. I'm thinking three-dimensionally about the city, and I'm trying to practice design-minded planning and be an urban designer and a city planner at the same time. I think we can ask others to do the same. Why wouldn't we?
In terms of return on investment, when you only have so many dollars to go around, you need to make each dollar do three things. Why wouldn't you do something like plant a street tree, which has 25 benefits, instead of just widen the road, which has one ostensible benefit, free-flowing traffic, and tons of downsides, and costs a lot more? That obligation to be frugal should come with it.
City planning started before the silos, in an overlap of public health and the parks movement. They were addressing some really utilitarian, social, technical need, which was to take the toxic industrial city and make it livable and healthy for the occupants who were coming into the cities in big numbers. There was no difference between parks planning and city planning, land use planning, let's call it urban design, and transportation planning in their time. It was all one thing, or all parts of the same activity.
Now that puts us today in a situation where on a daily basis I kind of trample on the first 15% of what a lot of other people call their job. We start drawing the landscape architecture before the landscape architect has shown up, and we start drawing placeholders for future buildings before the architects will ever be hired, maybe decades before the architects will be hired. We get into the room and start arguing with traffic engineers.
A noble task. Let me ask you this as a final question, kind of a quick-hitting one. Every place that I go and give a talk, the number one question I get is, "Point me to the place that's doing this right." I'm always like, okay, this is all so messy. Every place is doing good things and things that would make you cringe. But I feel like streets is actually a narrower question.
If people are out across North America, or if you want to go further than that, fine, and want to experience a great street, what are some of your favorites?
That's a long list. That's why we wrote about 200 of them in the book. I want people to get the book, right? We don't have many case studies of terrible things, things that are just garbage and we hate them. We have a few pictures here and there to illustrate the point of a bad practice. But most of the case studies in the book are places where some people got it right. They're in big cities and small towns, rural places, retrofitting suburbs, holiday towns and not-holiday towns, places you've never heard of. I think there's an example in there for virtually everybody. There's something in there for every condition.
Okay, but you have a favorite child. I want to know which one it is.
I like different streets for different reasons, but I'm going to pick one that I know you'll be drawn to in reading the book, because that's an interesting design history. That's a street that is simultaneously a park, a high-intensity, high-density development address, a rail system, a highway, and a waterfront. That's Riverside Drive in New York City.
Riverside Drive started by Olmsted Senior and evolved by others, including even Robert Moses during the better times of his career arc. John Massengale wrote a definitive history of the design of Riverside Drive in the book. It's the longest case study in the book now, and worth every bit of it, because it's a unique street. Yet there are features there, greenness, the utilitarian needs, artfulness, and the dense residential address that nevertheless feels beloved and valuable. I think all those are transferable lessons that other places can take.
Main Streets are a different animal. We designed one in West Palm Beach, which I'm super proud of, which is also a case study in the book, called Clematis Street. It kind of reset the bar for slow and safe and that kind of thing. I'd be curious to see what you think of that one.
There's a case study from Toulouse, just to give you one from the other side of the pond. Toulouse is just a nice French city, but it's not Paris. It's not the biggest or most famous place in France, and it probably doesn't even show up on global lists of urban innovation or street design. Yet wait until you see the pictures that Nicholas Boys Smith from Create Streets took of the streets in Toulouse. They're marvelous, and simultaneously understated and elegant. They're not screaming at you that they have a bunch of expensive doodads that don't do much. They're very subtle and beautiful and just right. I think you'll get a kick out of that case study. So you can look for a fancy European one, or you can look for an ordinary American one. There's one for every situation.
I want people to get the book. It's called Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns. It is a fantastic book. You're right, I have not read every page, but I've certainly gone through it and seen a lot of places that I've heard you talk about in the past, places that I've visited, and places that I have yet to visit.
I do think there is a beautiful art of street design that everybody can access. This is not something that you have to be a world-renowned architect or engineer or anything to be able to do. We all have a palette in our places that we can build on. So, Victor, thanks for doing it.
For thousands of years, Chuck. We can do it next year. I think that once you stop suppressing it, it just comes out, doesn't it?
Yes. Thank you for the book, and thank you for taking the time. It's so nice to chat with you again. I don't want to overwhelm your team, but if people do want to get ahold of you, where would be the best place to go?
You can look at a lot of examples of our work and contact us at doverkohl.com. That's D-O-V-E-R-K-O-H-L dot com. The Street Design book has its own special website, which is easy to remember: street.design. It's kind of a digital extension of the print book. There are animations, for example, of the built and unbuilt examples that are in our catalog of essential street types. You can click on that street.design website, and you can see video of it. We're adding bonus images there. A lot of information is at street.design.
Victor Dover, thanks for being with us. Thanks everybody for listening. Go get the book, and keep doing what you can to build strong towns. Take care.
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