How (Bad) Urban Design Affects the Way We Feel
Hanging outside of a bar with a group of friends in Turin, Italy, I’m amazed at how the city feels so alive. The night is black, the piazza lights cast a dim yellow, and the streets are filled with countless people out and about. They’re enjoying a stroll, having a drink; many are watching the river. “In my city,” I tell a friend, “you’d never see this.”
Turin was built for people. With urban planning that long predates the automobile, the city has a tight grid with narrow streets, public squares, multi-use developments, and an extensive public transit system. Somehow Turin, a mid-sized post-industrial city like St. Louis, feels more like a home to me than my own, five thousand miles away.
As walkers swell the streets, an Italian next to me chuckles. “In America,” she laughs, “all they do for fun is drive.” I snicker, then admit quietly, sheepishly, that I spent the night before I went abroad driving around the county with my two best friends. I confess that often on summer evenings, either when nothing is open or everything is far away, sometimes all we do is drive the empty highways. And while it’s fun (and I love the friends in the passenger seats), at the end of those nights I think how trivial it is to rely on a chassis for joy, to drive but travel absolutely nowhere.
As I’ve begun to travel to other cities, I’ve learned that returning to St. Louis means saddling up in the car. What I love about places like Turin is the liveliness: the feeling that the city around me is full of people and that I’m a part of their vibrant community. I once thought that driving would grant me a newfound freedom to get around St. Louis’ suburbs, but I’ve since realized that driving (and financing) a metal and glass box is a confining necessity, one that takes away from urban life. When I drive down stretches of Olive, Manchester, and Lindbergh, I feel empty and out of place. My car feels like a coffin, and I become hyper-aware of the fossil fuels I’m burning to travel across an expanse of nothingness. I also feel paralyzed—foot stuck on the gas—because there’s little I can do to change the way my city was physically built or the intangible emotions it evokes.
Historical and political forces have shaped the built environment of St. Louis and the emotions which arise from it. Urban renewal efforts in the mid-20th century stripped the city of life to grow its suburbs. As University of Missouri-St. Louis professor emeritus Lana Stein notes in her book St. Louis Politics, “ideas regarding the obsolescence of the downtown” and “the city streetscape” gained ground in City Hall and among local business elites in the 1950’s. These ideas, propelled by racist policies and government funding, led St. Louis and many other American cities to forgo their urban cores and sprawl out into suburbs. Neighborhoods were bulldozed, the city was gutted, and communities were cut through to make room for highways. The car was the driving factor. This history is sad, and so is the decline of what was once one of America’s most prominent cities. Since St. Louis reached its peak population in 1950, the city has lost over half a million residents. Today, the city is dwarfed in population by the county, a vast landscape of suburban sprawl.
Patty Heyda, an author and professor of urban design at Washington University in St. Louis, often finds herself driving down streets that feel “generic.” There’s very little that is special about suburbia—its wide streets, large parking lots, and utter dearth of shade and sidewalks. Suburbia wasn’t built for humans; it was made for cars, and, according to Heyda, “driven by economics.” The professor describes a certain staleness that extends to other structures of American life. The growth of the suburbs has coincided with a retreat from the public realm into the safety of private products. In the bored background of suburbia lies a “political economy” Heyda says, “that just wants efficiency out of everything and that privatizes and individualizes.” While the car may be convenient and excursions can often be joyrides, there is something simply devoid of life and meaning in our need to drive everywhere. We end up with a sort of “minimum environment,” says Heyda—“this formulaic kind of thing.”
To describe much of St. Louis’ sad suburban design, the professor uses the words isolating, limiting, frustrating, and even violent (in the ways that cars actively harm us, divide us, and warm our planet). Another accurate descriptor is unsustainable—which conjures all the anxiety one can feel around climate change.
In what USA Today curiously calls the tenth-most walkable city in America, driving is a necessity to get around and burning fossil fuels is required to run daily errands. According to the most recent Census data, over three-fourths of St. Louisans drive to work alone. “Sustainability is a context,” writes columnist David Owen in his book Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. “Dense cities,” writes Owen, set a “critical example,” but suburbs stretch us thin, forcing us to drive more and commute longer. St. Louis isn’t quite the right setting for sustainability, which makes me feel incredibly guilty for having grown up here. As penance for driving too much, I wait with the masses in the gas line at Costco and Sam’s, filling the tank up with petroleum in the midst of a climate crisis.
Historian George Lipsitz, in his book The Sidewalks of St. Louis, recounts “serious social problems” that arise with suburban development. He also praises St. Louis, acknowledging all of the people, places, and stories that make up the city we call home. Despite the sadness found in how this city is built, there is also joy in how we chose to live in it.
I must confess that I like the smell of gas, the feel of the wind, and the sound of Chappel Roan’s newest album with the car’s volume all the way up. Sometimes I enjoy the silence of the suburbs, the independence that the car affords me, the way the sun sets beautifully on hills only visible from the highways. As I give a little push on the gas pedal just as Chappel Roan sings about the “seasons in Missouri,” I peer out at all the strip malls, big box stores, and empty parking lots that flank the sides of the car. Sadly, joyfully, when she sings about her “dying town,” I feel I know exactly what she means.
“When we write about cities,” reflects Lipsitz, “only incidentally do we confront their geographies, built environments, and political institutions. Ultimately we write about cities because we need to rewrite and rethink and revise our relationships with other people.”
In the conversation around urban design, we need to start talking about how the built environment makes us feel. It’s our reality, and, as Heyda says, “we all operate in it.” It can’t just be torn down and rebuilt like it was a century ago. Instead, the road ahead is, according to Heyda, “moving forward with a different set of ideals and priorities.” One ideal should be to build cities to make people happy: to bring them together and out of their cars. Another is to acknowledge our feelings, and all the emotional ways we collectively call this city ours.
