The Walkability Test
Walkability is the measure of ease in walking through an urban space. Sometimes a city is designed to be walkable but the people who use the space choose not to walk in it. Does that mean the design failed? Perhaps there is just something lacking.
SPACE
Richard Lasam
2/14/20263 min read
During the last Christmas holiday, I spent a few days with my family in Filinvest City, one of the more mature Planned Unit Developments (PUD) in and around Metro Manila. This type of urban space is a small scale commercial and residential zone, a “city in a city” that is a quite popular way in the Philippines of revitalizing an existing urban space or creating a new urban space in a new location.
I say mature because Filinvest as we know it today began in 1995. According to the website, it was planned to be a “fully integrated, self-contained, and future-ready urban development.” Thirty years later, it has transformed into… certainly a “live-work-play community” in the basic sense of the term, but not quite the walkability expected of such urban spaces.
What makes a city walkable?
I’ve written about walkability before, and it doesn’t take an expert to see if a city is walkable. You just need to observe the habits of people who use the space. When it comes to Filinvest City, the way it was designed invites the visitor to explore it by “island hopping” instead of “walking amidst the city sights and sounds.”
Don’t get me wrong; I do think the sidewalks within it are well designed for pedestrian travel. But, using them myself as I traveled on foot from hotel to church, I cannot help noticing how so few people walked around the place. There were plenty of people there, but they seemed to be concentrated in the two large commercial developments of Filinvest City: Alabang Town Center and Festival Mall.
What does this imply? Most people go to the malls via car because traveling to them on foot lacks interesting points for pedestrians to explore. Where are the street level shops? In the malls. Public parks? Attached to the malls. City landmarks and artworks that are only discoverable by walking? In the mall. That’s why outside the mall, the well-designed sidewalks are empty.
3 points of a walkable city
There are three points that make a city walkable—or at least invite people to consider traveling on foot instead of taking the car or public transport. It’s nice to look at real-world examples because we can see these elements better, and how their use (or non-use) dictates the habits of people who use the space.
1. Pedestrian design. Included in pedestrian design are elements that make a sidewalk safe: hedges and well-located zebra stripes to protect travelers from the traffic flow, ramps for accessibility, and ample shade from the sun and rain. Making it easy to travel on foot within the city is half the battle. The other half is convincing people to walk.
2. Points of interest (or what we look for to “live, work, play”). I don’t mean just the end points, which in this case are the malls, the hospital, office, church, and hotel. You can design good sidewalks to connect points of interest, but if there are no interesting areas to discover in the journey, there won’t anyone walking on them. (Hence, island hopping.) Lines of outdoor shops/ground floor shops or green spaces can fill these roles and make walking more appealing.
3. Open spaces. I’ve mentioned green spaces, which probably call to mind manicured parks, but open spaces can be anything that you don’t over-build on: water features, natural features that were there before, a grove of trees, a fountain, sculptures, amphitheaters… these elements make it more appealing (and easy!) to take a walk.
Designing cities is quite tricky actually! PUDs more so because they trick you into thinking that you start from zero and can impose anything on the given space—but that is not true. When I wrote about desire paths in an old post, I mentioned that considering them means taking to the drawing board what people are already doing in the space before creating any new design and master plan. When you do that, you can rest assured that the city (or any design) that you make is likelier to be used as intended.