What is the Sound of No Horn Honking?

It was Halloween morning on the warmest October 31 this New Yorker could remember, and he was pedaling his bike on the path past the block-sized supermarket within the Brooklyn Navy Yard when a gleaming white minivan turned from the road into the parking lot, not pausing to let him go as drivers normally did.

Habits dig and scratch, so the New Yorker yelled “Yo!” while seizing the brakes and pausing. Inside the car was invisible, coated in sunlight. Some force crawled up from the New Yorker’s shins to his shoulders. He pointed the back of his right hand toward the car and folded four fingers toward himself, a gesture that means “go ahead.” The driver had stopped and now had to back up, but then the gleaming white minivan sailed into the parking lot.

A woman stood nearby and seemed to smile moments earlier. The New Yorker made a summary comment about the moment, free of rancor, and looked again at the woman. She had earbuds in and, if she had been smiling, was now just squinting and not looking at the spot where no collision had happened.

Communication failed: it was instinctive reaction that saved drivers and the guy on the CitiBike from a crash.

A few blocks east at the entrance to Steiner Studios, nearly the same dance occurred - and nearly the same confusion clouded our New Yorker, as he thought people would smile or wrinkle their noses or comment. They always had before.

Now they all had buds in their ears. A few couples further along the path spoke quietly as they walked in workout clothes. But for most of the ride, two miles and some change to go, one heard no noise and saw no shared glimpses.

You can rightly fret that people don’t talk to people with whom they disagree. But nest that fret in a sob that it often just seems like people don’t talk.

The City Trade: Trading What You Know for What Others Ask

Why put up with the inequality, the noise, the lumbering traffic and the stink? The answer depends on what you consider valuable. In my curriculum, I guide kids to the premise that collaboration across skills, interests and attitudes creates the strongest odds for sustaining  human society peacefully as climate and employment churn. 

In this essay just published on the Atlantic's redesigned CityLab, I dig into what I hope my wife and I are teaching our kids each December when we send them on a scavenger hunt that obliges them to talk to strangers. The essay runs to the sentimental, but the ideas it stirs should get you uncomfortably close to questions about fairness, access, and bias. 

It should also work as a fun read. If it clicks for you, and/or if it prompts hunts of your own with partners of any age, I hope you'll let me know. 

Streetcars and Streetlamps

New York's Mayor has decided to find money for  a streetcar to run through the resurgent (ie, gentrifying) neighborhoods along the east side of the East River waterfront. I'm all for more mass transit and for more waterfront living, but it got me thinking about why streetcars feel so romantic to many folks who think about urban design. 

I think they strike the same note that streetlamps and neon signs do: they prove you're not alone, someone new is there, you can find your way. 

In a book proposal I'm working on, I’m going to argue here that urban design shows, in physical form, human efforts to shrink loneliness. When fossil fuel was cheap and we couldn't know its true cost, we flowed between that resistance to loneliness and a desire to settle. We got big cars, big tracts and big urban entertainment zones. 

Now, I'm going to show, the onset of climate change means that we have to couch our anti-loneliness surgery in a campaign to provide support to each other in disasters and in chronic shortages. 

It will get too hot, too chaotic, too crowded. That means our urban forms should guide patience, attention to the quiet, consideration for the old and young. 

And it means those forms should trace new lines - along the water and upland- now that we live in a century of weather we can’t predict and fuel we can’t treat as cheap. 

Uphill Learning

We city-dwellers have made a lot of progress since the horse-and-buggy days, but we have yet to budget for designing cities that can handle snow. We also haven't figured out how to train most people in cities to become fluent in urban design.

This plays out in slush piles and squandered school days. It also shadows the urban celebration of snow, as I realized after leaving a whoop-filled afternoon in Central Park with friends and family and realized how closely the population there mirrored what you'd find in SoHo House. But weigh no heavy matters on a sled run. Snow comes rarely, feels transporting and builds on itself before it goes away. We needn't rig public space to absorb it. 

We do need to rig public space to absorb differences and aggression, and turn these emotions reliably into productive energy. That means we need to teach kids -and voters- how different design and material choices predict different patterns of play, temper and commerce. 

Models for this kind of training come from big cities and small. In this week's New York Observer, you can find my opinion piece about New York's project to smooth barriers between sidewalks and public spaces. It's a climb to change how we assume cities disperse the kinds of goods we can't price. But it's a thrill to imagine the changes we can carve once we learn the techniques for making that change.