I have always loved Kansas City and this list of walkable neighborhoods sheds some light on why. Kansas City has 4 of the top 138 walkable neighborhoods in the country, Old Westport ranks number 10. This puts KC in the company of NYC, Seattle, Portland and San Fran. Note that there is not one neighborhood from my home of Arizona on this list.
Ellen Dunham Jones speaks of major retrofitting to improve the financial and social sustainability of suburbia. This is an inspiring video however I tend to believe in small suburban retrofits like connecting streets, allowing business and multifamily in single family residential buildings, using our unused landscape and providing walkways off of arterials. If we do these small things first we set the foundation for the more exciting suburban-urban environments Jones speaks of.
This article helps illustrate my notion of the need for suburban “Destination Streets”. It is interesting to note that Jane Jacobs pointed to this theory over 40 years ago in her analysis of New York City. The Upper East Side has more pedestrian activity than the Upper West Side. She points out that UES has shorter block lengths than UWS which correlates with the the “Intersection Density” theory of the attached article.
