Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder

Review of a book by Ken Greenberg, Random House Canada, 2011, 394 pp., $29.95 hardcover

Jane Jacobs quit New York for Toronto in 1968, partly because she opposed the Vietnam war and was worried for her two draft-age sons. Another loss to New York during the tumult of ‘68 was Ken Greenberg, who exited first to Amsterdam and then to Toronto— motivated, like Jacobs, by opposition to the war.

Before leaving at age 24, Greenberg had already been part of a group of Columbia University students who insisted that architecture and urban planning must pay more attention to human beings and stop being so wrapped up in corporate ambitions and signature buildings. Greenberg and most of his classmates had taken over Avery Hall, Columbia’s architecture building, during protests against the university’s encroachment on a Harlem park used by blacks. Greenberg believed cities and institutions must treat people better.

Eventually the Brooklyn native would earn a reputation as one of the best urban planners in all of North America. But first, in Toronto, he would get to know Jacobs, who became a friend and mentor. In 1970 she gave him a “crit” of his ideas about how density could humanely be added to one of that city’s downtown neighborhoods. Greenberg devised a concept that revolved around organic “infill” development, Alleys (“laneways”), he suggested, should be converted into small streets or mews; property owners could construct additional housing along them. Parks and playgrounds should be added. Walkways should be inserted across the long blocks, giving pedestrians convenient shortcuts.

Greenberg’s ideas, even at that early date, were in sync with many of the concepts later associated with New Urbanism. In Walking Home, Greenberg takes readers on a chronological journey through his experiences as a planner and urban designer (usually on a consulting basis) in many cities — among them, Toronto; Prince Albert, Saskatchewan; St. Paul, Minnesota; Boston; Montreal; New York; and Detroit.

Principal of Toronto-based Greenberg Consultants since 2000, he sees North American cities as having arrived at a tipping point. “After six stressful decades of sustained assault,” he writes, older neighborhoods have come to be valued “for their convenience, history and quality of building and also as the means to a more satisfying way of life.” The preference for spreading out and driving has lost much of its momentum. “There is a moment,” he says, “when a successful reaction becomes the new mainstream.”

“Today’s big, city-shaping forces are again consolidating ones,” causing us to “walk home” toward centers and intermingled activities, he says. Rising energy costs are a factor. “Convenience,” he observes, “is trumping size.” The ”creative economy” has reinforced this shift toward denser places that “house more people in less space, with more mixed results.” Businesses are adjusting. Supermarkets, he notes, “are now striving once again to imitate the looser formats of their predecessors, breaking themselves down into semiautonomous sections with fare customized to meet the changing tastes and needs of their local clienteles.”

Greenberg has long been a proponent of “incremental growth” as opposed to “big bang” development, and he thinks most urban centers now reject the idea of enormous projects aimed at transforming an area overnight. The “evolutionary approach results in authentic diversity based on the efforts of multiple actors over time — and this produces real city character,” he says. “Slow but steady wins the race.”

From his experience in the late 1970s forming the Toronto government’s Urban Design Group, Greenberg has learned the importance of having a mix of people — planners, architects, landscape architects, economists, transportation experts, and others — all work together. He also has learned that it’s best to use an “iterative” method — back-and-forth discussion that “allows participants to examine issues from many points of view to see how and where plans and revisions fall short. Then they can regroup and reformulate the problem and try again. This process of kicking the tires repeatedly by pitching ideas and getting all voices in the room to react at once expands the collective ‘brain’ of the team and, in a sense, simulates the complexity of real-world conditions.”

He credits the New Urbanism movement with promoting walkable, mixed-use development, sustainable communities, and healthier living conditions, but expresses qualms about whether the focus of many of its practitioners on “traditional town planning and neotraditional architecture” is too rigid. He fears that over time, “it will leave little room for the ‘new’ and unpredicted.” His own emphasis, he explains, is not on “determinism through design” but on “creating ‘platforms’ — open-ended frameworks that people could build upon as they wished.”

Greenberg gives a good sense of what’s it’s like to work with a variety of city governments in North American and beyond. He tells why Toronto has lost its edge on urban planning: In 1998 the Province of Ontario forced amalgamation onto many of the region’s municipalities. The amalgamation overrode one of Greenberg’s hard-won principles: that “matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.” Since then, Vancouver, British Columbia, has surpassed Toronto in planning and design.

He urges cities to find ways to set up cross-disciplinary, interagency design centers like the ones he was involved in organizing in St. Paul and Toronto; “they create the forum for a crucial, unbounded and unprejudiced conversation about integrated solutions that use scarce public resources as an investment in the future.”

This book’s style is direct, though Greenberg frequently relies on words that have lost freshness through repetition,. (Every author should be issued a quota on “sustainable” and “sustainability.”) The latter half of Walking Home gallops through too many projects too quickly; it would have been better to zero in on those that matter the most. Also, I wanted to hear how the US government — having turned the young, morally engaged war resister into an exile — treated him when he later reentered the US. That story remains untold. Nonetheless, there’s plenty here to draw a reader in. Greenberg is renowned for his thoughtfulness and balance; the result is an instructive look at where cities are heading and how they’re getting good things accomplished.