A Walkable City

Here is a great excerpt from a book I recently read by Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. I highly recommend the book to anyone, it's very well-written and engaging, and not half as boring as it sounds! I liked this passage about San Francisco and thought to share it.

<<... A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination. San Francisco has long been called the most European of American cities, a comment more often made than explained. What I think its speakers mean is that San Francisco, in its scale and its street life, keeps alive the idea of a city as a place of unmediated encounters, while most American cities are becoming more like enlarged suburbs, scrupulously controlled and segregated, designed for the noninteractions of motorists shuttling between private places rather than the interactions of pedestrians in public ones. San Francisco has water on three sides and a ridge on the fourth to keep it from sprawling, and several neighborhoods of lively streets. Truly urban density, beautiful buildings, views of the bay and the ocean from the crests of its hills, cafés and bars everywhere, suggest different priorities for space and time than in most American cities, as does the (gentrification-threatened) tradition of artists, poets, and social and political radicals making lives about other things than getting and spending.
...I sauntered over to nearby Golden Gate Park, which lacks the splendor of a wilderness but has given me many compensatory pleasures: musicians practicing in the reverberant pedestrian underpasses, old Chinese women doing martial arts in formation, strolling Russian émigrés murmuring to each other in the velvet slurp of their mother tongue, dog walkers being yanked into the primeval world of canine joys, and access by foot to the shores of the Pacific. That morning, at the park's bandshell, the local radio variety show had joined forces with the 'Watershed Poetry Festival', and I watched for a while. Former poet laureate of the United States Robert Hass was coaching children to read their poetry into the microphone onstage, and some poets I knew were standing in the wings. I went up to say hello to them, and they showed me their brand-new wedding rings and introduced me to more poets, and then I ran into the great California historian Malcolm Margolin, who told me stories that made me laugh. This was the daytime marvel of cities for me: coincidences, the mingling of many kinds of people, poetry given away to strangers under the open sky.>>


Taken alone, this passage sounds a lot like bragging, and one could argue that these things are found in other cities as well (like Central Park in New York). I think the real draw of walking in San Francisco is that you can actually *get* somewhere by walking a reasonable distance, and that during the walk you're greeted by surprising vistas, delightful architecture, amazing plants, trees and birds, inviting cafés and shops, and other walkers. Part of my enthusiasm for the city is its contrast to Chicago and my newness to it -- but I've talked to people who grew up here, and they aren't tired of this place. Each time I go for a walk, I see at least one new thing in the plant world.. a new plant altogether, or a familiar plant doing something I've never seen before (like a geranium large enough to be classified as a vine, rosemary and lavender bushes, and blooming jade). There are different birds here, and you can actually hear them everywhere.. trees are very precious in SF, and you can call a city hotline to have the "tree police" sent out to investigate or stop tree abuse! People overwhelmingly take care of their homes and landscape their tiny yards and even the footprint of tree plantings in the sidewalk. Even though it's the end of December, a lot of plants and trees are still quite lush, and many of the succulents that do so well here are in their blooming season. There's always something to see, hear, smell (it's nice when you can smell the plants and aromatic trees and not the trash) and just plain marvel at. And the important thing about that is not just that it exists, but that this environment is stewarded by people who realize its value and necessity for quality of life.