urban FAIL

One of the biggest problems I have with Phoenix is how much it fails as a city from an urbanistic standpoint. Phoenix was laid out a rational grid. This is not itself a problem- it’s a bit boring, but Manhattan was also laid out on a grid. The problem is that the scale of the grid is way too big and the squares that are formed by the grid are mostly empty. It’s as though the city was designed to be a massive warehouse- easy to find your way around, and everything is clearly organized and labeled for maximum visibility.

Phoenix is that sense is a very convenient city- every good you need to purchase is available at a particular Cartesian coordinate, 18th and Bell, 36th and Goldwater, Thomas and Central. There is very little “tucked away” in Phoenix, and fewer “hole in the wall” places.

However, Phoenix is only convenient if you have a car and don’t mind spending a large percentage of your day in it. Phoenix appears to have been designed around the idea that the ideal city was the one that let a person in a car drive from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Driving around the city, its amazing how relative the sense of distance and time are compared to other cities. For example, in St. Louis, anything farther away than 5 miles was “kind of far”. The part of town I considered to be my general area had a circumference of about two miles. St.Louis has really short blocks and contorted and distorted streets, so people drive more slowly, and the density of the city makes it feel like there’s more distance traveled. A gym five miles away would take about twenty minutes to get to and would feel far from home.

In comparison, Phoenix, a place of incredibly low density and designed for maximum car accessibility skews my sense of space to be much larger. “My” part of town had a circumference closer to 5 miles, you don’t bat an eye to travel 15 miles, and it will take you twenty minutes to get there. The grocery store five miles from home is your “local” store.

I guess fundamentally the problem I have with this is that if your city is a warehouse, you end up thinking of your home as another container and yourself as a container custodian moving from one point on the grid to another, shuttling around stuff from A to B in a highly efficient manner. There’s no engagement with the city, there’s no chance for collisions, encounters, discovery. People really like ‘lifestyle centers’ or outdoor pedestrian shopping malls. Why? because its interesting and fun and vibrant. Why couldn’t the city be like this?

Blah blah blah.