When conditions are right I walk at about 4 miles per hour. By “conditions” I mean all the usual
pedestrian variables: what I’m carrying, what’s falling on me, what I’m walking
on, and what my feet are in. I slow down when things aren’t ideal, when it’s
icy and I’m carrying lunch, my computer, and a change of shoes, or if I didn’t
want to carry that change of shoes and I’m just doing my usual 2+ miles daily commute
in heels. Sometimes I’m faster, when I’m
late, cold, or in speedy flats. But the
variation is pretty minor; no matter whether it’s 3 or 4 miles per hour I would
argue that I experience an entirely different place than a driver or even a
cyclist. The place that we see and feel
at a walking pace is not at all the same place as seen through a windshield and
mediated by shock absorbers. Although this
might make Einstein cringe, I think there is a general theory of relativity that
describes the urban environment and it can be stated thus: Speed + Space = Scale.
I touched on this in my previous
post (a very long 5 months ago, mea
culpa) but that was a rant on how ill-matched our precise measurings are to
our sense of distance. Tell someone to
walk two and a half blocks and they can figure it out; tell someone to walk 800’
and they’ll just look at you. Or, more likely, they’ll ask their portable
digital navigation assistant to figure it out for them. But talking as if space is purely measurable,
whether in blocks or feet, only addresses the speed/scale relationship; it says
very little about scale.
 |
| roses at a portal to another dimension |
Scale is material. Wandering the richly detailed streets of
Old Town Alexandria one can completely lose all sense of time. Often when I’m leaving the King Street Metro
stop visitors will ask me “how far is it to the waterfront?” I used to tell them the metric truth: “it’s a little over a mile, maybe a mile and
a quarter.” Then I would watch them
settle in to wait for the free trolley.
Now I just smile and tell them the experienced truth: “just take that
street and keep walking. It’ll take you about 20 minutes; you can’t miss it.” And off they go. What they discover of course is the haptic vividness
of a 3-4 mile per hour environment. Every
step and railing, doorway and flower pot, offers something to enjoy and the brick
sidewalks guarantee thoughtful walking. Time stretches and bends; you walk
slowly but you don’t notice how far you’ve gone. When they, our typical visitor,
return home to 35-mile-per-hour-land they’ll think that what made this place different
was the “history”, the narrative of founding fathers, rebellions, and
preservation. They probably won’t think
of speed and its relationship to space.
Outer Asphaltia has its own speed/space relationship. I had always puzzled over the part of Einstein’s
theory that states that an exceptionally massive object can distort the adjacent
fabric of space-time. Then I went to a
Walmart. Although I will gladly walk
miles through the streets of Alexandria or Washington, put me behind the wheel
of a rental car and I’ll clench the steering wheel while I search for the
closest possible parking spot so I can enter the gates of hell for a load of
cheap crap. And would anyone voluntarily
walk from a Walmart to a neighboring Home Despot? No, because you’d be walking
through void and distorted space-time, with no sign of human care or
intelligence against which you could measure your progress.
 |
| cobbles and asphalt: how fast is this place? |
It’s a problematic word, progress. It’s spatial and temporal, and also heavily
value-laden. It’s progress that we can
move so much more quickly than we did a century ago. It is progress that our information can move
even faster, liberated from attachment to us.
But it’s a fact of progress that speed disrespects the slow. The very elements that make a walkable place—incremental
materials, generous sidewalks, short blocks, tight turning radii, street trees,
on-street parking, narrow driving lanes, and stop signs—send drivers into fits.
At 35 miles per hour a world of beauty
is flying by, not only unseen but unvalued.
We’ve spent far too much time in the last 60years designing fast environments. Maybe instead of focusing so obsessively on
the style of new buildings and neighborhoods we should focus more on their speed: how fast is this place?
“Today we experience an ease of motion unknown to any prior urban
civilization, and yet motion has become the most anxiety-laden of daily
activities. The anxiety comes from the fact that we take unrestricted motion of
the individual to be an absolute right. The private motorcar is the
logical instrument for exercising that right, and the effect on public space,
especially the space of the urban street, is that the space becomes meaningless
or even maddening unless it can be subordinated to free movement
... The technology of modern motion replaces being in the street with a desire
to erase the constraints of geography.”
Richard Sennett, The Fall
of Public Man
