The case for the walkable city

The world is going to keep building cities whether we plan them well or not. The UN expects around 2.5 billion more people to be living in urban areas by 2050, taking the urban share of the global population from roughly 55% to about 68%, with close to 90% of that growth in Asia and Africa. The question isn't whether we build. It's what kind of places we choose to make.

Our answer is the compact, human-scaled, walkable city: streets designed for people first, density rather than sprawl, and movement built into daily life instead of designed out of it.

Norman Foster making the case for walkable, compact, sustainable cities. RISE Design Studio.

It isn't only an environmental argument

Walkable cities are easy to file under "green", but the case is broader than carbon. People consistently prefer them. The most walkable places tend to be the most visited, the most expensive to live in, and the most liveable by most measures. Compact, dense centres produce far lower transport emissions per person than car-dependent suburbs, for the simple reason that people drive less. And health tends to improve when daily life involves walking rather than sitting in traffic.

Norman Foster has long made the same case: back the compact, high-density, walkable city, and resist the sprawl and new roads that eat into countryside and biodiversity. On most of the measures that matter, sustainability, cost, health and day-to-day quality of life, the walkable city comes out ahead.

Reclaiming space for people

The urban projects that change a place most are rarely the tallest towers. They're the ones that take space back from cars and give it to people. Pull the asphalt back at a junction and it can become somewhere to sit. Close a street and it can become a market or a place children play. These aren't grand gestures. They're small changes to who a piece of ground is for, and they're often what people end up remembering about a neighbourhood.

It has to be done with people, not to them

This is where walkable-city thinking goes wrong about as often as it goes right. Imposed from the top, it produces schemes that look good in a render and empty out in use. Done well, it starts with how people actually move through a place, what they need and what they'd miss, and it's tested against real data rather than fashion. A pedestrianised street that nobody asked for and nobody uses is no improvement on the traffic it replaced.

Building that lasts

We judge a project less by how it photographs on opening day and more by how it works a decade or two later. The compact, walkable city isn't nostalgia for some pre-car age. It's a practical response to the numbers at the top of this piece: more people, finite space, and a need to cut emissions and run cities affordably. Design densely, design for walking, and keep people at the centre of the plan, and most of the other problems get easier to solve.

Whether it's a new neighbourhood, a tired high street, or simply making it more pleasant to walk from one place to another, the move is the same: design for people on foot first. If you're working on something along those lines, we'd be glad to talk it through.

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