Walking a City That Was Drawn

I have a habit, arriving somewhere new, of walking until I am lost and then walking until I am not, and I have come to think of it as the only reliable way to read a city. Maps lie by omission. They show you where the streets go and nothing about whether you will want to go there.

This morning it is the old quarter, seven o'clock, and the city is doing the thing that cities do at that hour — waking in sequence rather than all at once. A shutter goes up. Then another, further along, as though the first had given permission. Bread arrives in a van that has parked where no van should park, and nobody minds, because the arrangement is older than the traffic rules and everyone understands the exemption.

The street is four metres wide and the buildings are five storeys. That ratio is doing a great deal of work. Wide enough not to oppress; narrow enough that I can see the faces opposite and read the lettering on the far windows. The upper floors lean in slightly, which may be subsidence or may be deliberate, and either way the effect is of a room with the ceiling missing. I am indoors and outdoors simultaneously. Some part of the animal in me is satisfied by this and it takes an effort of will to notice why: I can see a long way down the street, and nothing can approach me from behind without being visible to somebody in a window.

There is a phrase for this, coined sixty years ago by a woman with no professional training in planning who understood cities better than the men demolishing them. Eyes on the street. Safety in an urban neighbourhood, she argued, is not produced by policing or by surveillance but by the ordinary, continuous, uninterested attention of people going about their business — the shopkeeper who glances up, the woman watering plants on a second-floor balcony, the regulars outside the café who would notice an absence before they noticed an event. It requires only that buildings face the street, that there be people in them at different hours, and that doors open directly onto the pavement rather than into a lobby behind a gate.

I turn a corner and the city changes completely, in the space of one junction, the way cities do.

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Here the blocks are long — two hundred metres, perhaps more — and the buildings are set back behind planting, and there is grass, and there is nobody on it. It is not ugly. It is, in an austere way, rather beautiful: towers in a park, generous light, each apartment with an aspect. Somebody drew this, and drew it with conviction, in the middle of the last century, and they believed they were correcting the street I have just left — its noise, its crowding, its want of sunlight.

What they removed, without meaning to, was friction.

A long block gives you no choices. You cannot turn; you must commit to the whole of it, and so you walk it briskly or you drive it. A shopfront cannot survive on it, because footfall at any point is a fraction of what a junction generates, and so there are no shops, and without shops there is no reason to be here unless you live here, and so nobody is. The grass is real grass and it is mown, and it is what planners call a leftover: space that resulted from the arrangement of buildings rather than space that anyone designed to be used. You can tell the difference instantly and it is very hard to say how.

I walk it in nine minutes and meet one person, who is walking a dog and looks at me with the mild suspicion reserved for pedestrians in places where pedestrians are anomalous.

The critique of this way of building is now so widely accepted that it has become a little glib, and I want to resist that, because the intention was humane. The slums being replaced were genuinely dark, genuinely overcrowded and genuinely unhealthy, and the reformers were not fools. Their error was specific and worth naming precisely: they optimised for the qualities of a dwelling — air, light, aspect, hygiene — and treated the space between dwellings as residue. A city, it turns out, is mostly the space between the dwellings, and the space between is where everything except sleep occurs.

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By nine I am in the nineteenth-century grid, and it is a relief to be somewhere that was planned and works, since it disproves the lazy conclusion that planning is the problem.

The grid was laid out by an engineer who surveyed mortality street by street and discovered that people died in inverse proportion to how much air and light their housing received. His response was not to abandon density but to regulate it: a rigid grid of blocks with their corners cut away at forty-five degrees, so that every junction opens into a small octagonal plaza. It is such a slight modification. The consequence is that every crossing in the district has room for a tree, a kiosk, four tables and the loitering that cities require and never plan for. A hundred and fifty years later the city is closing some of these junctions to traffic altogether and finding, unsurprisingly, that the space absorbs the change easily, because the shape was always there waiting.

I sit at one of the four tables and have a coffee I do not need, purely to be somewhere for a while, which is the test a public space either passes or fails.

Across the plaza a boy of about nine is riding a bicycle in slow circles while his grandmother talks to somebody at the kiosk, and he is at the precise distance from her — twenty metres, in sight, out of earshot — that the geometry makes possible and that nobody drew. The corner-cut, designed for ventilation and for carriages to turn, is now holding a child at exactly the radius at which a grandmother relaxes.

This is what I think I have learned from walking: that a city is a very slow argument between the people who drew it and the people who live in it, and that the drawings which survive are not the ones that were most complete but the ones that were most forgiving — that left room for uses their authors never imagined and could not have justified in advance.

The shutters are all up now. The bread van has gone. Somebody upstairs is having an argument I cannot follow in a language I do not speak, and it echoes off the opposite wall, four metres away, exactly as it was always going to.