Creative Class

The Talking Heads rank of one of my all-time favorite bands. In this Wall Street Journal essay on what makes for a ”perfect city,” David Byrne shows he’s a pretty fine urbanist.

Size – A city can’t be too small. Size guarantees anonymity …The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable—it’s how things get created …

Density – If a city doesn’t have sufficient density … then strange things happen. It’s human nature for us to look at one another— we’re social animals after all. But when the urban situation causes the distance between us to increase and our interactions to be less frequent we have to use novel means to attract attention: big hair, skimpy clothes and plastic surgery. We become walking billboards.

Chaos and danger – To some, security means rigid order and strict rules. I do believe we do need some laws and rules to guide and reign us in a bit, and I don’t just mean traffic lights and pooper scooper mandates. … A little touch of chaos and danger makes a city sexy.

Human scale – Scale is important. … Some sort of compromise might be more ideal—the tall towers mixed in with the modest-sized shops and restaurants.

Parking – To be honest, available parking doesn’t matter to me. Parking lots and structures are dead real estate—they bring no life into a city … parking structures are simply dead zones, which hurt the businesses around them.

Mixed use – A perfect city is where different things are going on, relatively close to each other, at different times of the day. A city isn’t a strip of hotels and restaurants on a glorious beach; it’s a place where there are restaurants and hotels, but also little stores, fashion boutiques, schools, houses, offices, temples and banks. The healthy neighborhood doesn’t empty out at 6 p.m … In my perfect city there would always be something going on nearby.

Public spaces – In my perfect city there are ample public spaces—parks (not just vacant land, but common areas that people pass through and use), plazas (not just slabs in front of corporate towers) and, if possible, public access to the waterfront (if there is one). We don’t necessarily need massive acreage in our parks. Bigger is not always better, but we do need periodic breaks from buildings. … In some seaside towns there is no public access to the sea, which to me seems a self-injuring situation. In my perfect city there would be public access to all these areas.

The perfect city isn’t static. It’s evolving and ever changing, and its laws and structure allow that to happen. Neighborhoods change, clubs close and others open, yuppies move in and move out—as long as there is a mix of some sort, then business districts and neighborhoods stay healthy even if they’re not what they once were. My perfect city isn’t fixed, it doesn’t actually exist, and I like it that way.

The Department of Transportation is making way for thousands of new bike racks around the city. Mr. Byrne’s will be the most visible, a fact that may position him as the symbol of the civic virtues of cycling. But soft-spoken, curious and culturally omnivorous, he’s never quite been the celebrity spokes-model type. Besides, he said, “I don’t think people are going to switch over to bikes because it’s good for them or because it’s politically correct. They’re going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster.”

He has a similarly plain-spoken explanation for his own riding. “It’s a little faster than walking,” he said. “It feels good if the weather’s O.K., and if you see something that interests you, you just stop.”

Mr. Byrne isn’t anticipating a revolution, but he does sense a shift in the wind. Riding a bicycle, “used to be completely uncool,” he said. “Now it’s cool in different ways: for some people it’s cool if you have an old junker. For other people it’s cool if you have a racing bike.

Anyway, it doesn’t immediately relegate you to nerd status anymore.”