Homestead bar, San Francisco (photo courtesy of Craig Howell)
If we can take the measure of a person by the company he or she keeps, perhaps we can take the measure of a neighborhood by whether there are good “third places” to keep company. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a good bar is all it takes to make a neighborhood great, but it’s a relevant indicator. And there are many good reasons for that bar to be in walking distance of its clientele.
My friend Eliot Allen first introduced me to the concept of neighborhood completeness: that the quality of a place is defined in part by how many different basic functions it has in close proximity to homes and to each other. Eliot was closely involved in the creation of the LEED for Neighborhood Development green rating system, and the concept made it into the system. LEED-ND gives credit toward certification for a development that contains, or locates near, certain categories of “diverse uses”: supermarket, pharmacy, restaurant, child care facility, library, and so on.
I was part of the LEED-ND team as well, and I note that we did not list “bar” or “pub” as a creditworthy neighborhood asset. But Michael Hickey, a community development consultant, makes a good case for their inclusion as “third spaces,” or community hangouts. In an article titled “In Praise of (Loud, Stinky) Bars” and posted in the National Housing Institute’s Rooflines blog, Hickey writes:
“The vaunted ‘third space’ isn’t home, and isn’t work—it’s more like the living room of society at large. It’s a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect. It’s a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection. It’s a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle.
“And nine times out of ten, it’s a bar.”
I have never seen a better description of why good drinking establishments can hold such appeal, can even play a significant role in knitting together this elusive concept we call “community.”
Author Ray Oldenburg first coined the phrase “third places” in his 1991 book, The Great, Good Place. His arguments for creating and sustaining such neighborhood places were good ones then and, in these current times of electronic communication and chain retail, may be even more compelling today.
Later in the Rooflines article, Hickey posits that bars support community life in a valuable way that other establishments do not:
“We shouldn’t romanticize third spaces as only being about brightly lit cafes, pedestrianized streets, and the local public library. Bars work in their scruffy way by offering a place to get away from an overcrowded apartment or a squalid loft or a grimy job. They are a place where someone with little to spare can go for a change of pace…
“The goal of a bar patron is to enjoy the primary benefit of any decent third space: a place to linger. I’m still looking for someone to generate a ‘lingering index’ so that we can measure the impact of just plain old hanging out—but that’s really at the heart of place-making, and we shouldn’t forget it.”
I love the idea of a “lingering index.”
What does this have to do with sustainability? Well, quite a bit, in my opinion. The more complete our neighborhoods, the less we have to travel to seek out goods, services, and amenities. The less we have to travel, the more we can reduce pollution from transportation. People enjoy hanging out in bars and, especially if they are within walking distance of homes, we can also reduce the very serious risks of drinking and driving.
On that subject, Scott Doyon of the planning and development advisory firm PlaceMakers has gone so far as to map “pub sheds,” or five-minute walking zones from pubs in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur. Writing in his firm’s excellent blog PlaceShakers and NewsMakers, Scott concludes that his community is fairly well covered. He further suggests that, if one extends the walkability zones to ten-minute distances, it would be well-covered indeed.
Like Hickey, Scott salutes the contributions that neighborhood bars can make to community cohesion:
“My town of Decatur, Georgia—already pretty walkable, especially by Sun Belt standards—has, for the past 15 years or so, been developing a thriving pub scene. In addition to some long-time institutions already in place, we now have a growing number of neighborhood-friendly taverns spread around town.
A pub in Decatur (photo courtesy of Chloe Fan/chloester)
“These are where neighbors go, hang out, and get to know each other, and they’ve contributed to the fact that, here in Decatur, craft beer has pretty much become a de facto component of the city’s economic development strategy.”
Later in the article, Scott adds that, “If ever there was a business you should be walking to (and from) rather than driving, it’s your bar.” Agreed.
I lived in Decatur for a bit when I was completing my undergrad studies at Atlanta’s Emory University, a few minutes away by car in those days. My girlfriend was a student at Agnes Scott College, a pretty campus in the heart of Decatur. There were some classic bars a few miles away from Agnes Scott that fit Hickey’s description of a “scruffy” place where we could go to hang out. But they were in Atlanta, not Decatur, and not within walking distance of where either of us lived. It’s good indeed to see the fine concepts of drinking, lingering, and walking merge in my old territory.
I might add that, in the download age—which has already killed all but specialty music stores, weakened movie theaters, put print newspapers on life support, and finished off all but a few bookstores—the remaining places where there is a sort of shared community commons are becoming ever more important. Bars qualify: you can’t download a pint of Guinness.
More about Reasons to Walk
How Far Are We Willing to Walk Somewhere?
There are a number of good informal tests to determine a community’s walkability. In the blog I write for NRDC, I’ve described the popsicle test (can a child comfortably walk to buy a popsicle and walk back home?), the Halloween test (does the neighborhood attract kids walking door-to-door on Halloween?), and the 20-minute neighborhood test (can you meet most of your daily needs within a 20-minute walk or transit ride?). My friend Steve Mouzon, whose common-sense thinking about our built environment makes several appearances in this book, adds the tourist test (is a place good enough that people will want to vacation there?); Scott Doyon, as described above, likes the “pub shed” (how many drinking establishments are within walking distance?).
In evaluating reasonable walking distance, LEED-ND adopted the conventional wisdom that transit-inclined people will walk as far as a quarter-mile to a bus stop or a half-mile to a rail station. For those who like comparative numbers, the increasingly sophisticated online service Walk Score calculates the number and types of typical destinations within comfortable walking distance of any given location and assigns a rating based on the outcome.
But Steve has now added another, very interesting idea to the mix: he posits that, in fact, “comfortable walking distance” is not a constant but a variable, and that the distances we are willing to travel on foot depend on the quality of the environment along the way. Steve calls his concept “Walk Appeal.” Streets and neighborhoods that entice us to walk farther have greater Walk Appeal.
This street in Santa Monica has high Walk Appeal (photo by F. Kaid Benfield)
In Steve’s provocative blog Original Green, he illustrates the idea by comparing two different environments that produce very different outcomes. First, he describes a chain retail shopping experience:
“Walk Appeal…explains several things that were heretofore either contradictory or mysterious. It begins with the assertion that the quarter-mile radius (or 5-minute walk), which has been held up for a century as the distance Americans will walk before driving, is actually a myth.
“As we all know, if you’re at Best Buy and need to pick something up at [a nearby] Old Navy, there’s no way you’re walking from one store to another. Instead, you get in your car and drive as close as possible to the Old Navy front door. You’ll even wait for a parking space to open up instead of driving to an open space just a few spaces away…not because you’re lazy, but because it’s such a terrible walking experience.”
For a captivating city such as Rome, however, Steve notes that people happily walk much, much farther “and then keep on walking without ever thinking of driving.”
Continuing, Steve suggests that one will walk two miles or farther in a world-class city such as London or Paris, but “put a Parisian accustomed to walking five miles or more per day on a suburban American cul-de-sac, and they wouldn’t walk much.” He further posits that people will walk about three-quarters of a mile on a good American Main Street, where building entrances tend to be along the sidewalk, with narrow storefronts to provide variety in the walker’s view. For residential areas, Steve says that, if a neighborhood is or mimics a traditional (pre-1950) one, we typically will walk about a quarter of a mile. But in sprawling suburbs, the distance drops to about 250 feet, and in a power center of big-box stores the distance drops to 100 feet.
In his post, he elaborates:
“People won’t walk across a sea of parking to get to another store because the walking experience is simply too dreadful. This is exacerbated by the fact that a sea of parking is a heat island, capturing and storing the sun’s heat in all that dark asphalt, raising the temperature of the air above it by dozens of degrees in summertime. A sea of parking is also a huge stormwater runoff problem, and is most often solved by building really ugly stormwater retention pits nearby. If you don’t know what they are, a retention pit is a depression several feet deep in the ground, usually surrounded by an ugly chain-link fence, where all the styrofoam cups, packing peanuts, and plastic wrapping collects after a rain.”
So, one could say that a street in the heart of a world-class city has much more Walk Appeal than a typical suburban American street, and that a traditional Main Street has more Walk Appeal than big-box stores separated by a large parking lot. That, in a nutshell, is the concept of Walk Appeal.
This parking lot in Hillsboro, Oregon, not so much. (photo courtesy of CMH-90/Chris)
Intuitively, I think Steve is on to something here. His theory is supported by a body of thought about the characteristics that make an appealing walking environment—sidewalks, traffic safety, shade trees, visual variety, and so forth. But there are all sorts of variables and additional factors to consider:
- Purpose. To an extent, I think Steve’s examples compare apples, oranges, pears, and grapes. We travel in different places for different reasons, which affect our willingness to walk. In particular, to make Steve’s American-retail-versus-Rome comparison a fair one, a hypothetical traveler would have to be on the same sort of journey in both scenarios. Best Buy is an electronics store. Shoppers purchasing, say, televisions are unlikely to walk two miles to another shopping destination, even if they have the option of walking down Rome’s finest street to get there.
- Personal safety. A long walk that is visually appealing but in a sketchy area is unlikely to have much Walk Appeal, even if its urbanism suggests that it should. Also, does Walk Appeal vary by time of day? I suspect it does; I’ll walk farther in daylight than in the dark, unless it’s oppressively hot in the daytime.
- Convenience and time. I will indeed walk two miles in parts of New York or Paris or Washington if I can spare the time, but depending on terrain, climate, crosswalk interruptions, and other factors it will probably take me somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes. If I’m in a rush, I’ll take a cab.
- Nature. I will walk farther if I can traverse or at least walk alongside an appropriately sized (not too big) and well-designed park on the way to my destination. In fact, I will deliberately lengthen my journey in order to go through a great park such as the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, mentioned in an earlier chapter.
- Alternatives. Just as there are places where walking is a terrible experience, there are places where driving is a terrible experience. Heck, there are places where public transportation is a terrible experience, too. We weigh the costs and benefits of our choices and may walk farther if the other options are poor.
- Environmental intensity. In one of Steve’s blog posts, a commenter suggested that “people density,” creating a sense of liveliness, is helpful. I would agree, but to a point. Crowds can be oppressive and can slow one’s walk. Sound matters, too: music can be helpful, but construction noise is a killer for walking.
So, is Walk Appeal more art than science? It feels a little in-between to me. We can describe some of its elements, but not all of them are easy to measure.
What I like best about the concept is the suggestion that a comfortable or pleasant walking distance is highly variable, and that part of the reason we choose to drive even short distances is that sometimes the experience of walking to them is so horrible. Steve has provided some useful new vocabulary and an interesting frame through which we can evaluate streets and neighborhoods.
I’m all in on those ideas, and think Steve came upon a “Eureka!” moment when he found a way to articulate it. But my hunch is that, for me at least, it is the idea of Walk Appeal that has power, and I would caution against a quantitative or definitive application.