CHAPTER TWO

Lace Up Your Sneakers

Once, for a magazine article I was writing, I interviewed a woman who had completely ditched her car for family bicycles. “What’s your favorite thing about getting around by bike?” I asked, assuming she’d say, “All the calories I burn” or “The way I’m saving the planet.” What she said instead was “Riding a bike is fun.” The litany of daily errands that are stultifying or stressful by car became exhilarating on a bike. Fetching the forgotten gallon of milk from the grocery store wasn’t a hassle. It was freeing.

In the kinds of circles where people talk about cities and towns and how to make them better, walking and biking are having a moment. That’s a huge turnabout for a nation where car culture has reigned for decades. In 1998, 83 percent of our trips were by car; only 10 percent happened on foot. The number of children who lived within a mile of their school and walked or biked there had, by 2009, fallen to only 35 percent.

So it was notable when in 2013, for the first time, the National Association of Realtors found that car-centric suburbs were out. In: mixed-use, quasi-urban developments where residents could stroll from apartment to dry cleaner to restaurant. Sixty percent of home buyers wanted walkable, bikeable neighborhoods.

To lure this 60 percent, cities and towns are cranking out urban redesign plans that emphasize greenways and bike lanes. In Indianapolis, for instance, luxury condo complexes are blooming near the city’s Cultural Trail, a $62.5 million walking and biking pathway modeled after ones in Copenhagen and Paris. New York City has doubled its number of bike lanes since 2006. In Minneapolis, demand for bikeable housing along the Midtown Greenway, a rails-to-trails path, is so high that one condominium building, VÉLO North Loop, named each of its floor plans for bicycle brands (the Schwinn, the Cannondale). The online brochure juxtaposes stock photographs of smiling twentysomethings with pictures of beach cruisers and racing cycles. One image shows two bikes tangled in the sheets of a queen-sized bed, as if to say, “Cyclists have more sex.”

On that particular point, I will refrain from comment. What is clear, though, is that one of walking and biking’s fundamental benefits applies to everyone, but particularly Movers like me: It helps us figure out where the heck we are, and we need to do that to stand any chance of becoming place attached.

Here’s a simple exercise: Think about the last time you were on vacation in an unfamiliar city. How did you get around? Google Maps? The soothing directional whispers of Siri? What if someone deposited you at a random street corner? How would you figure out how to get home?

In Blacksburg, I spent months slightly lost, either because I didn’t know where my destination was or because I couldn’t figure out how to get there from here. (And Blacksburg is no Austin, with its confounding frontage roads, and certainly no Los Angeles or New York.) Knowing where we are in the world and where everything else is in relation to us is the first, fundamental part of feeling like we belong in a place. Without it, we’re literally disoriented—without orientation—a deeply unsettling feeling.

In a new city, the most basic navigation requires front-of-mind brain space, the prime mental real estate you usually allocate to higher-level thinking, like solving a work problem or choosing which BBC series to watch on Netflix. Basically, you’re using a gigabyte of RAM on a job that should normally take ten megabytes. That’s a poor allocation of resources, and it means there’s less memory than normal to spare for other tasks, leaving Movers in a state of perpetual muddledom. My friend Vanessa told me it took six months in her new city before she could stop actively giving herself step-by-step directions (Okay, turn left here) every time she left the house.

Eventually, when we’ve come to know a place well, daily navigation descends, pleasingly, into the unconscious realm again. Muscle memory kicks in. One minute you’re on the freeway, the next you’re in your driveway, and you can barely remember how you got there. Home is the place where you know how to shortcut past a knot of traffic or speed to work entirely on back roads. (Or maybe home is the town where your body instinctively knows how to get to the nearest Starbucks.)

Scientists call the way we learn to navigate a place “mental mapping.” In the 1940s, a behavioral psychologist named Edward Tolman found that rats who first aimlessly explored a maze developed cognitive maps that helped them quickly scamper through it later. Chimpanzees have shown the same ability. In a 1978 experiment, psychologist Emil Menzel carried a chimp around a field, showing him where researchers had hidden food. When Menzel walked to the edge of the field and set the chimp down, the animal beelined straight to the hidden food, because on the walk-through he’d formed a mental map of where the prize was. He knew just how to get there. Meanwhile, five chimps who hadn’t been shown the hiding spot in advance wandered, lost.

Maybe if they’d given those five chimps a smartphone, they would have figured it out. GPS-enabled devices make a fabulous second brain; one in four Americans, myself included, use their phone to get directions almost daily. But over time our technology can rob us of our ability to figure out directions on our own. “Navigating, keeping track of one’s position and building up a mental map by experience is a very challenging process for our brains, involving memory (remembering landmarks, for instance) as well as complex cognitive processes (like calculating distances, rotating angles, approximating spatial relations),” says Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg. “Stop doing these things, and it’ll be harder to pick them back up later.”

Before I moved to Blacksburg, I spent months studying the town on Google Maps Street View. As maps go, Street View is a pretty serious step down in the poetry department. Nothing to unfurl, no romance. But thanks to a fleet of Google cars with their fancy, roof-mounted cameras, I could fake-stroll my future city, mouse-clicking through residential neighborhoods like a newfangled Peeping Tom. Over time I Street Viewed so much that I was pretty sure if you dropped me in a parking lot in the middle of Blacksburg I’d be able to find my way anywhere.

What I realized when I finally moved here was that Street View made Blacksburg familiar, but in a bizarro-world way. These were the same places I’d traveled online, but the dimensions were wonky. Buildings were taller, more upright—my new city as pop-up book. And there were so many hills! What had Street View done with all the hills? The mental map of my town that I’d spent months crafting in 2-D was rendered totally pointless by the 3-D, real-life version. My sense of geography withered. I was lost.

Like Tolman’s rats, humans most effectively acquire our cognitive maps of a town by exploring it. Google Street View doesn’t do the trick. We have to be there physically, trying out the back roads, learning where things are. You can do that in a car, of course, and most people do, but some research suggests that our mental maps are more accurate when we walk or bike places.

When Bruce Appleyard, a professor of city planning at San Diego State University, asked a group of nine- and ten-year-olds to draw maps of their neighborhoods, he discovered something interesting. Kids who lived in a suburb where they primarily traveled by car had no idea how the streets in their community connected or where their best friend’s house was in relation to their own. What Appleyard calls the “windshield perspective” prevented them from developing a sense of local geography.

Meanwhile, the children who walked or biked a lot drew much more detailed maps. They pointed out more places to play and added trees and homes. Their maps were also more correct. The kids understood how streets fit together, how this one led to the elementary school and that one led to the playground.

Yes, but kids don’t drive, you say; they only navigate when they walk or bike. But the results line up with another study in the Netherlands that found that college students who walked or biked around their campus and town had a better sense of its geography than students who rode public transit. In other words, if you really want to figure out where you live, the quickest way to do that is under your own steam.

Within a few days of moving to Blacksburg, I started walking in Grissom/Highland, the neighborhood in the hills behind my rental house. Mostly I was after exercise and thirty minutes of fresh air, but as it turned out, tramping up and down the streets of split-levels and neocolonials put me at the perfect pace to pay attention to where I was.

“One’s destination is never a place,” said Henry Miller, “but rather a new way of looking at things.” These walks were like a Zen practice in being present. I noticed the bacon-and-egg smells that wafted out of open windows and the plastic flamingos that populated a neighbor’s lawn. I breathed in the evergreen that reminded me of summer camp. By clarifying how each street jigsawed into the next, my daily walks allowed me to build my mental map of Blacksburg piece by piece.

Jeff Speck, a city planner and author of Walkable City—a key source for this chapter—told me that the way you get around determines your relationship to your environment by determining what you see. Driving a car, you’re so focused on not killing yourself or others that you only notice the big stuff, like road signs. Biking allows you to experience your place’s topography and weather (Hills! And it’s raining now!), but you’re still going too fast to notice minutiae. “Only walking,” says Speck, “is an invitation to socialize, as well as the slowest productive pace for observing the details of the buildings, landscape, humans, and other animals around you.”

The 3.5 miles per hour I manage on foot would make me tear my hair out in a car. But the slowness is the point. Walking is more than transportation; it’s experience. You admire a baby in a stroller on the bike trail. You have a conversation with the guy walking his husky. Even the simplest elements of a walk can take on the quality of poetry: The warblers sing. The grass sways.

All these things combined create a sense of where we are. As the novelist Alexander McCall Smith writes, “Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love.”

Each jolt of memory becomes a geolocation marker that we press into our mental map of where we live. Little by little, we pin ourselves into place.

Stop Commuting

One of the first people to tap this underground seam of interest in walking and biking was a tech entrepreneur named Matt Lerner. A Microsoft refugee, in 2007 he whipped up a beta version of a website called Walk Score with fellow entrepreneur Mike Mathieu. As a kid, Lerner says, “I just thought that cities were either cool or not and you didn’t have much control over it.” Later he realized that the cities he thought of as cool were all more or less walkable. Walkability was one of the things that made a place cool. But did everyone think so? He e-mailed the link to the beta Walk Score to fifteen friends for feedback. “The next day,” he says, “we had 150,000 unique visitors on the site.”

The idea behind Walk Score is pretty ingenious. Using Google Maps, Walk Score awards points to an address based on its distance from a range of businesses and amenities: schools, libraries, parks, grocery stores, restaurants, gyms, and so on. If your house is within a five-minute walk of at least one place in each of thirteen categories, it scores a perfect 100, making it “a Walker’s Paradise” where you don’t need a car to get around. The New York City neighborhoods of Little Italy and Chinatown pull down perfect 100s. Downtown San Francisco scores a 99. Topeka, Kansas, where Matt Lerner grew up, scores a 33 (“Car-Dependent City,” in Walk Score parlance).

Walk Scores have become such a real estate phenomenon that the site now churns out about 20 million Walk Scores a day, many by way of its Walk Score Professional version, which is available on over thirty thousand real estate sites, including the two largest, Zillow and Trulia. “For my buyers,” says Stephanie Somers, a Philadelphia real estate agent, “walkability is almost equal to price as the most important criterion.”

My rental house in Blacksburg earns a respectable Walk Score of 55: “Somewhat Walkable.” That means that I’m 0.2 miles from Cafe Mekong, 0.4 miles from First Citizens Bank, and 0.8 miles from Dunkin’ Donuts (the kind that’s in the back of a gas station mini-mart, though I’m not sure Walk Score knows that). In less than ten minutes, I can grab frozen pot stickers at the international food market, macarons at Our Daily Bread bakery, or a new pair of running shoes at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports. This convenience is no accident. Every time we move, I angle to land in a walkable neighborhood, comforted to know that if the world ended, I could still mosey my way around my city, gathering socks and soap for the apocalypse.

Everyone has their own reasons for wanting walkability. As a former Brooklynite, my friend Kate wanted to normalize fresh air and self-propelled transportation for her two kids, even after the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island. “We looked at many houses that weren’t really walkable to anything and nixed them,” she said. “It was one of our first criteria.”

Suzanne picked her neighborhood in Southern California because she wanted to be close enough to the action of downtown that she’d never need a designated driver. “My friends and I walk everywhere on the weekends—my nail place, the grocery store, restaurants, bars. The location was my number one requirement in renting my house.”

Then there was my friend Amy, who hunted for an apartment in a walkable neighborhood when her husband’s four-mile commute to work was regularly taking ninety minutes in rush-hour Seattle traffic. “He was exhausted and I saw no reason to have his time be spent like that. So we broke our lease early and moved closer.”

Walking seems like it makes people happier with the place they live, but does it? To figure that out, let’s look at the opposite of a walkable town: a town where you’re trapped behind the wheel of your car for hours every day. When two Swiss economists, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, asked people, “How satisfied are you with your life?” the answer among commuters was “Not very.” A one-hour drive each way to work diminished life satisfaction so drastically that commuters would have to make 40 percent more money at their jobs to be as happy as noncommuters. “For many people,” Frey and Stutzer write, “commuting seems to encompass stress that does not pay off.”

There’s more bad news. In one study, researchers attached electrodes to the heads of volunteers and found that battling rush-hour traffic or crowded trains sent commuters’ heart rates soaring and flooded their bodies with the stress hormone cortisol. Biologically, riot police facing angry mobs are less freaked out.

And the longer people spend behind the wheel every day, the more miserable they are. Measuring the results of an eighteen-year longitudinal study of British commuters, researchers found that each successive minute stuck in traffic steadily sucks the joy out of you. On the other hand, when a former car commuter switches to walking to work, his happiness levels go up as much as if he’d gotten a raise or fallen in love.

Why? I think it’s the walking itself. People who walk regularly are better at creative thinking. They’re more likely to volunteer and trust their neighbors. They have more energy. And it almost goes without saying that they’re healthier—less likely to be overweight or obese, to struggle with diabetes or high blood pressure. The effects are so profound that Vancouver, Canada, set an ambitious goal to earn a Walk Score of at least 70 in every last one of its neighborhoods by 2025.

More than a hundred other cities are courting a culture of biking and walking by launching Open Streets initiatives. For a day or an afternoon, cities like Parkersburg, West Virginia, and Edmond, Oklahoma, close a section of city streets to car traffic. The asphalt becomes a biking, walking, and Rollerblading free-for-all. San Francisco’s monthly Sunday Streets draw up to seventy-five thousand pedestrians. In other places, pop-up bike lanes, removable curb bump-outs, and other small-scale interventions aim to make biking and walking safer, at least temporarily.

People who walk a lot feel better about their lives, and one of the principles I was coming to understand about loving where you live is that feeling good in general often translates to feeling good about where you live. When you’re happy, for whatever reason, you also happen to be happy in the place you live. There is a subtle difference—happy people can feel meh about their town—but there’s a spillover effect, since it’s easier to have a pleasant attitude about your surroundings if you’re in a good mood in general.

If you’re a Mover, choosing a walkable city, or a walkable neighborhood in your city, can improve your happiness in your new place and thus your chances of becoming firmly place attached. Unfortunately, a lot of us can’t afford the price tag. Because three in four millennials want to live where they don’t need a car to get around, neighborhoods with higher Walk Scores tend to be more desirable, and thus more expensive.

After studying tens of thousands of real estate transactions in fifteen cities, economist Joe Cortright, in a project for the nonprofit CEOs for Cities, found that houses with above-average Walk Scores commanded up to $34,000 more than homes in less-walkable neighborhoods. In Tucson, Arizona, for instance, a house with a Walk Score of 66—in the seventy-fifth percentile for the area—fetches an average of $10,841 more than a house with a score of 51. Even a relatively moderate Walk Score of 55 jacks up real estate prices in most cities. “If we’re looking to shore up value in local housing markets,” says Cortright, “it appears that promoting more walkable neighborhoods is one way to do so.”

That’s bad news for home buyers. But if you want to love where you live, you’d be better served forgoing the granite countertops and spending your money to land in a neighborhood where you can walk or bike to most of the places you need to go. “When you look at Americans’ day-to-day activity,” says Dan Buettner, author of Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way, “the top two things we hate the most on a day-to-day basis [are], number one, housework, and number two, the daily commute in our cars. . . . [So] it’s an easy way for us to get happier: Move closer to your place of work.”

Even when we do live close enough to walk, however, we don’t always do it. Sometimes we need a little nudge.

Make Your Town Walkable

The historic Boylan Heights neighborhood of Raleigh, North Carolina, curls like a cat in the center of the city. Only a few railroad tracks separate its leafy streets of bungalows from a menacing warehouse district and the 752 felons of Raleigh’s Central Prison. Now Matt Tomasulo wanted me to cross those tracks.

We were heading from his coworking space, an old warehouse with Japanese lanterns fluttering from the ceiling and a sound system piping in the Avett Brothers (Walk Score: 79), to downtown Raleigh. The route should have taken us over the Boylan Street overpass bridge. But Matt asked, “How would you feel about taking a secret path?” and we left the roadway. Fording some tall grass, we eventually dead-ended in a thick bed of gravel. Two sets of train tracks floated there like noodles on broth. Matt forged ahead.

“Are these tracks still in use?” I asked nervously.

“Oh yeah,” Matt replied.

No worries, though. His shortcut had been rubber-stamped by no less than the former mayor of Raleigh himself, Charles Meeker, who lives in Boylan Heights. “One day I saw him walking down here in his suit,” Matt said. “He’s a lawyer downtown. He told me he’d been taking this path every day for years.” Besides, this route shaves six minutes off Matt’s daily walking commute. He’s not going to abandon it over a minor concern like safety.

I was walking with Matt, a thirty-two-year-old who wears Hawaiian shirts ironically, because he was an unexpected rising star in placemaking, known for creating a project that, simply and cheaply, helps cities get their residents to walk more. That is a bigger deal than you’d think. After all, telling you to move to a more walkable town is cold comfort if you’ve already parked your minivan in suburbia. Even urban environments aren’t always truly walkable. As Fred Kent, founder of the Project for Public Spaces, often says, “If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places.” Heavy-duty urban design is required to engineer the mixed-use streetscapes, sidewalks, crosswalks, tree cover, and public spaces that provide Walkable City author Jeff Speck’s four great pillars of walkability:

Walks must be useful.

Walks must be safe.

Walks must be comfortable.

Walks must be interesting.

Some of Walk Score’s heavy hitters, like New York, seem to have stumbled into the magic combination by happy accident (although even New York has made efforts in recent years to increase its walkability and bikeability). In cities that missed the boat, efforts to change things after the fact have often been misguided.

In 1977, Raleigh closed downtown Fayetteville Street to cars and converted it into a pedestrian mall, but instead of attracting the expected foot traffic, the retail businesses along Fayetteville slowly asphyxiated for lack of customers. Like 89 percent of pedestrian malls, it eventually failed. When the city reopened Fayetteville Street to automobiles in 2006, it did so with a multimillion-dollar plan to change the street in some of the ways Jeff Speck recommends, by making Fayetteville feel populated and lively at least eighteen hours a day.

When Matt Tomasulo moved to Raleigh in 2007 for graduate school in landscape architecture at North Carolina State University, what shocked him was how few people walked. Right away he loved the city, but his friends kept decamping for Brooklyn or San Francisco. What did those places have that Raleigh didn’t? The answer he kept returning to: feet on the street.

He had spent a semester abroad in Copenhagen and seen how walkers and cyclists enlivened the city. If Raleigh could convince people who worked downtown to live there, eat there, and hang out there, Matt figured, shops and restaurants would thrive and multiply. The domino effect might not make Raleigh the new Brooklyn, but it could help the city create its own southern version of the “ballet of the good city sidewalk” that urban activist Jane Jacobs wrote about in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In Matt’s mind, change hinged on getting people to walk.

At his downtown apartment building, Matt started asking his neighbors if they ever walked to the supermarket to pick up a gallon of milk or a jar of peanut butter. “No way,” they scoffed. “It’s too far.”

It wasn’t really. It was just a half mile. Matt had timed the walk himself and it took only twelve minutes. The problem, he guessed, was less the actual distance than the idea of the distance. In a city like New York, going ten blocks on foot from Grand Central to Rockefeller Center is a fact of life. In Raleigh, a ten-block walk was a nonstarter. “It was a perception thing,” Matt told me. “I was like, what if we try to shift that perception? You say to someone, ‘Would you walk a half mile?’ they say no. But if you say, ‘Would you walk for ten minutes?’ they say yes.”

But how to do that? Thinking about it, Matt remembered reading about a project called PARK(ing) Day. One afternoon in 2005, a few designers from the San Francisco design studio Rebar dropped their coins into a parking meter on Mission Street in the city’s South of Market district. They rolled sod into the six-by-twenty-foot streetside space, set out a bench and a potted tree, and called it a park. People lay on the grass. Some sat on the bench to read the San Francisco Chronicle. Two hours later, when the meter expired, they rolled it all up and left.

At the time, 70 percent of San Francisco’s outdoor space downtown was devoted to parking. In a slightly wacky way, PARK(ing) Day drew attention to the need for more spaces for humans. Within a few years, the City of San Francisco worked with Rebar to develop a permit process for permanently converting a parking space into a miniature public plaza. There are now more than thirty such parklets in San Francisco and dozens more around the world. PARK(ing) Day itself is re-created each year on the third Friday in September. In 2011, the last year the creators gathered participation data, 975 parking spaces in 162 cities across the world were turned into parks for a day—or until the meters expired.

Matt had never heard of “tactical urbanism,” a term coined for the kind of small-scale, fly-by-night projects that average citizens like the Rebar designers were implementing to make their cities more livable. But he was fascinated by “this idea of a temporary, DIY thing that was transitioning into policy.” Before long he had his own idea for an urban intervention that would, if all went well, make people realize how easy it was to walk around Raleigh.

After dark fell on a cold January night in 2012, Matt and a few friends approached the intersection of Wilmington and Hargett in downtown Raleigh, dressed in black like ninjas. Working fast, they pulled corrugated cardboard signs from the back of a buddy’s van and lashed them to streetlamps and traffic signal poles with plastic zip ties.

Matt’s tactical urbanism project was a set of twenty-seven way-finding signs with messages such as “It’s a 16 Minute Walk to Seaboard Station,” “It’s a 9 Minute Walk to the NC Belltower,” or “It’s 17 Minutes by Foot to Oakwood Cemetery.” Each featured an arrow pointing the correct way and a QR code that a passerby could scan for step-by-step directions. Matt called the project “Walk Raleigh.”

He’d designed the signs on his laptop over Christmas break, then paid $300 to have them printed professionally. However, he’d gone through precisely zero official channels. Without permits, this was, technically speaking, illegal. So when a police officer approached as Matt hung a sign, he froze.

“What’s that?” the cop asked.

Heart thumping, Matt mustered a breezy reply. “Oh, they’re just directional signs for people.”

The cop leaned in for a long, slow look. “Okay,” he said at last and wandered off.

For weeks after that, no one seemed to even notice Walk Raleigh. Then, in February, a local pointed the project out to the Atlantic Cities blog. Soon the BBC, Scientific American, Sierra magazine, and the Huffington Post all ran enthusiastic stories that had the unintended consequence of tipping the City of Raleigh off to the signs’ presence. In the grand tradition of responsive local governments, city employees took the signs down. Matt collected 1,255 signatures on a digital petition. The signs went back up. Ultimately, the city council voted to turn Walk Raleigh into “an educational pilot program for the city.” The signs stayed.

On the Thursday evening Matt and I took our shortcut through the Warehouse District, downtown Raleigh thrummed with the noise and energy of people blowing off steam after work. Because not many people scanned the QR codes, it was hard to get a sense of how many pedestrians actually read the signs, let alone responded to them. (Matt’s experimenting with sensors and other ways to measure traffic.) The Walk Raleigh signs themselves were long gone, dissolved by weather and the high-fives of drunks, who, according to Matt, are inexplicably drawn to hitting them. But their echoes seemed to remain. “This area used to be a ghost town,” Matt said.

Now, we passed a popular Laotian restaurant and an Irish bar with outdoor seating. Across the street, kids ran the mandala paths of Moore Park while their parents waited out the heat under the trees. We’d walked a mile but the streets were so full of things to see—our walk so useful, comfortable, interesting, and, apart from the train tracks, safe—that I’d barely noticed.

Waiting to cross the intersection by the Morning Times, a coffee house whose café tables were spread with mugs and laptops, I asked Matt my million-dollar question: “Does walking make people feel more attached to their towns?”

He replied without hesitation. “Absolutely. I think that it helps people discover the character of where they live and why they like it. Otherwise it’s a faceless kind of experience. You don’t come into contact with anybody. Even having the comfort of being social and being around other people is so healthy. It’s fun to walk down the street and say hi to people.” As if to demonstrate, Matt greeted several friends on the sidewalk as we headed back to Boylan Heights.

Not every place can be downtown Raleigh, let alone downtown Brooklyn. What if you live in a place where walking is weird or where there aren’t well-marked sidewalks? Matt was bullish. Walk anyway, he said. “It might not be enjoyable yet, but when people see you walking, they say, ‘Hey, I can walk here. That’s a thing.’”

Arrange an Urban Intervention

When Walk Raleigh took off, Matt launched a Kickstarter campaign for a project that would let anyone, anywhere, create customized wayfinding signs for where they live. On WalkYourCity.org, all you had to do was type in what you wanted the signs to say and pay $25 each to have them printed and sent to you. Three thousand Walk [Your City] signs have now been hung on every continent but Antarctica, each speaking of a rich local culture ripe for exploration. In Hyderabad, India: “It is a 17 minute walk to Moazam Jahi.” In Buenos Aires: “Son 10 minutos caminando al jardín botánico.”

Raleigh’s official way-finding signs, which were only three years old when Matt debuted Walk Raleigh, cost $1.3 million. A set of forty Walk Raleigh signs costs around $1,000, so downtown development corporations and arts organizations use the signs as a cheap way to drum up foot traffic. When Mount Hope, West Virginia (population 1,500), hired Matt to tack up seventy customized way-finding signs, it was like the circus had come to town. They had never seen so many people out walking.

Walking was the best way I knew to ease into a city. Wasn’t encouraging other people to walk the next step? Because Blacksburg was a college town, people walked here more than most. Virginia Tech students drummed a constant rhythm of home–campus, campus–home. On fall weekends when the football team played, the downtown sidewalks flooded with foot traffic. Some of the neighborhoods close to campus, like Miller Southside, earned hefty Walk Scores (80: “Very walkable!”).

So deciding that Matt Tomasulo’s Walk [Your City] signs were tailor-made for my first Love Where You Live experiment wasn’t a matter of admonishing Blacksburgians (though the tussle for on-street parking spots proved that most of us didn’t walk as much as we could). Mostly I wanted to try out placemaking, and Matt’s online sign templates made transforming my town for the better idiotproof. Then Matt started throwing around phrases like “mapping city assets” and “creating campaign nodes,” and I started to wonder.

Before you can make signs at WalkYourCity.org, you have to identify where people are likely to start walking—an origin—and where you want them to go, a destination like a museum or a park. Origins and destinations have to be matched up. Sign locations must be plotted onto a map of city streets. You have to figure out which way the arrows on the signs will point. It seemed . . . complicated.

Worse, Matt told me I should collaborate with other people. Official people. For his original Walk Raleigh experiment, he’d gone renegade (and escaped police interference by the skin of his teeth). Now, he said, “I really recommend that you work with the city government and get some buy-in.”

What? No! I knew exactly zero city officials who could run Walk [Your City] up the flagpole for me. A public meeting would mire the whole idea in bureaucracy. Anyway, what about the “guerrilla” aspect of Matt’s system of “guerrilla way-finding”? Forget what other people want, I thought. I’m going to do this myself.

Filled with righteous resistance, I logged onto WalkYourCity.org and clicked “Make a Sign.” An hour later, I’d charged $125 to my credit card. My five signs were slated for delivery within a week.

When the cardboard box came, however, I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I mean, it was easy to be all “I’m fighting the man” when I was just staring at my computer in my house. But what if a cop came by when I was putting them up and my explanations didn’t seem as legit as Matt’s did? To help me move past my mounting sense of dread, I recruited help from Laura, a fellow mom and writer I’d met working the cash registers at the elementary school book fair. She wrote restaurant reviews. Logical conclusion: She was not averse to pissing people off.

We started early on a Thursday morning at the northern terminus of the Huckleberry Trail, a six-mile rails-to-trails pathway through Blacksburg. I held an “It Is a 6 Minute Walk to Farm-Fresh Fruits and Veggies” sign whose QR code map directed pedestrians to the farmers’ market at Market Square Park. Laura strained to zip-tie it to a post. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man in neon yellow gliding toward us on his bike. Bike cop! I thought. We’re busted! As fear adrenaline started spiking through my body, the cyclist slow-mo tumbled to the side. “Man, I can’t get the hang of these clips,” he groused. A few seconds later, his buddies joined him, and they sped off for a morning bike ride.

My nervous giggling took on a hysterical edge.

Laura and I walked the neat grid system of downtown streets and furtively attached the four remaining signs at the proper street corners. Only a handful of college students were on the sidewalks, too absorbed in their smartphones to notice us, let alone inquire after the state of our city permits. Near the crosswalk by Souvlaki, the Greek greasy spoon, we lashed the “It Is a 15 Minute Walk to a Nice Bench by the Duck Pond” sign. “It Is a 9 Minute Walk to a Great Public Library” went by the streetlamp near College and Main. The other two signs pointed to the nonprofit SEEDS Nature Center and a Civil War–era cemetery, tourist attractions that are enough off the beaten path that I sometimes forget they exist.

As we finished putting up the last one, I said, “Well, we didn’t get arrested,” in what I hoped was a voice of triumph. Yet all afternoon I braced myself—for what, I wasn’t sure. An official city reprimand? I heard nothing at all until Ella came home from walking to the frozen yogurt shop with some friends after school. “Mom, we totally saw your sign,” she exclaimed, “the one by the Huckleberry Trail! I was like, ‘Hey, my mom put that sign up,’ but no one believed me.” I realized, with relief, that even if people wanted to complain, it would be tough to trace the Walk [Your City] signs to me. I was used to being anonymous in my town. Placemaking called a bit too much attention for comfort.

Still, every few days I skulked, stalkerlike, to check on them. The signs were my $125 investment in Blacksburg. I was worried that they’d be noticed and torn down, and equally worried that they wouldn’t be noticed at all. After a week, the latter seemed more likely. Over lunch with Quinn at Souvlaki, I pointed at the duck pond sign and said, “I have no idea if anyone’s even looked at it.”

“Well, you should take pictures of all of your signs,” he suggested, “before they come down.”

Coming down would be, I knew, the inevitable conclusion to all this. Even under the best of circumstances, Walk [Your City] signs are meant to be a temporary urban intervention, not a permanent addition to the landscape. Since it was a warm day, maybe one of the last of the season, after lunch I began walking through downtown, snapping photos of the signs on my iPhone until I reached the one that said “It’s a 10 Minute Walk to a Civil War–Era Cemetery.”

Including Westview Cemetery in the mix of walking destinations was mostly about assuaging my vague sense of guilt that we had a Civil War–era anything in town—a miracle for a California girl!—and that I had never once stopped to see it. Confession: I still hadn’t stopped, even after Laura and I had zip-tied the sign for it on a lamppost across from a fancy nail salon. I liked the idea of a historic cemetery. It just wasn’t someplace I would normally visit. For fun. You know.

Looking at the sign now, it hit me: If I couldn’t be bothered to follow my own Walk [Your City] directions, how could I expect that anyone else would?

Right that minute I rerouted myself up Roanoke Street. On foot, it took me nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds to reach Westview Cemetery, where I was the only visitor other than the man mowing the grass. The air smelled loamy; the oak trees burned in brilliant autumn colors. Inside the gates, everything felt hushed and reverent.

Cemeteries can tell you a considerable amount about the city where you live. Here, a marble obelisk dedicated “To the memory of the Confederate Dead of Blacksburg and Vicinity, 1861–1865” reminded me that my town, founded in 1798, was solidly gray during the Civil War. Maybe parts of it still were. The hump of earth under the memorial had been worn bald by pilgrimages.

Among the gravestones eroded by wetness and weather, I made out birthplaces in West Virginia and England. Like every town in America, Blacksburg’s origin story includes a motley cast of outsiders—primarily immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, England, and Germany, intent on pushing the boundaries of civilization steadily south and west. In 1850, when the town had 330 residents, was anyone worried about liking where they lived? Or was sleeping under a warm roof and not starving enough?

Even in circumstances where survival is the best that can be hoped for, the idea of home exerts a pull. One of the area’s most famous historical figures is Mary Draper Ingles, a settler who was taken captive in 1755 by Shawnee warriors. Two and a half months later she escaped. The eight hundred miles of wilderness that separated her from her home couldn’t keep her from making the journey, alone and on foot. Walking was her only option.

Not long after that day at the cemetery, my Love Where You Live experiment began to unravel. Matt Tomasulo had warned me that the Walk [Your City] signs had a naturally limited life span—they were printed on cardboard, after all—but mine appeared to be mostly accident victims. The sign by Souvlaki was karate-chopped in half, presumably by a drunken college student. A couple more mysteriously disappeared. The director of the nature center tracked my e-mail address down through Matt to let me know that my sign had pointed someone in exactly the wrong direction. I explained that the zip ties must have come loose, allowing the sign to twist on the pole, but he seemed unconvinced. “I’m just curious,” he responded. “Did you have town permission to put up those signs? I don’t think anyone has complained, but I would think that some kind of permission would be needed.”

I’ll never know for certain if my Walk Blacksburg signs inspired anyone to walk more or to discover the sites I flagged. But in the days and weeks that followed, my perspective on Blacksburg was changed. I kept thinking about the day I walked up Roanoke Street toward the cemetery. On foot, going slow, I saw its details. Attic windows made of old-fashioned wavy glass. Gold stone lions keeping vigil outside the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house. I entered a narrow alleyway I’d never seen before, which revealed, Secret Garden style, a tiny church across from a minuscule park.

As many times as I’d driven on Roanoke Street, I’d never noticed the alley, the church, or the park, let alone the wavy glass or the gold stone lions. Had I stayed in my car, I probably never would have.

There’s something about being on foot or on a bike that makes us explorers of where we live. Walking and biking in Blacksburg, I developed an intimacy with the town that made me find the hidden gems and appreciate where I was. I suspect that anyone, in any town, could have the same experience. Like Lewis and Clark, we plunge into the undiscovered country, and in so doing, we master it. One bike shop owner told me that, for him, cycling through an area effectively made it his. Sure, he could drive through a town, figure out how to get around. But once he’d ridden the streets on his bicycle, he owned the place.

Love Your City Checklist

Follow the “1-Mile Solution”: On a map, draw a circle with a one-mile radius around your home. Figure out which tasks you can complete inside the circle (the grocery run? school pickup?), and try to replace one car trip per week by biking or walking instead. Eventually you can work up to walking or biking all your errands under a mile.

Explore unfamiliar parts of your town without a GPS. Wandering, then finding your way back to where you started helps you establish and maintain strong mental maps.

Draw a map of your part of town. How many details can you fill in? Houses? Trees? Store names? Dogs? Flower beds? If your map isn’t very detailed, take a nice, slow walk with your eyes wide open, then try again.

Sign up for a local walking tour—of a historic district or a neighborhood, a park, or restaurant row. (Google “walking tour” and the name of your town to find one.) If it goes well, consider leading a walk yourself as a stellar way to get attached to your town. Jane’s Walk offers free, citizen-led walking tours in cities across the country; see JanesWalk.org.

If possible, switch to a walking or biking commute. Virtually nothing else you do will make you happier, and the effects will trickle down to how you feel about where you live.

If you’re moving soon, aim for a neighborhood with a high Walk Score.

Make your own Walk [Your City] signs at WalkYourCity.org. Maybe ask for permission first.