Walkability "The extent to which the built environment is friendly to the presence of people living, shopping, visiting, enjoying or spending time in an area".
Walkability is a yardstick of distance or environment to walk. Usually, walkable distance is within 1.3 mile (2 km). But, walkability is measured by not only distance, but also many factors such as the quality of road, gradient of pathway, other pedestrians, safety, environment, level of closeness with buildings, and so on. In contemporary urban planning and design field, walkability is big issue to consider, because of benefits of walkability. Walkability is related with physical and mental health of local people. According to the research by Russel Lopez, walkability in a community brings personal and community benefits such as increasing the number of friends, pride of community, and reducing the number of obesity, crime because of more and more people walk on roads, carbon footprints by automobiles. In this circumstance that more than one third people suffer from obesity in U.S.A, planning and designing walkable city is the most important task for urban planner.
Urban planners used to design the cities for automobiles and neglect the needs of human being. For example, Brasilia, which is the capital of Brazil, was planed and developed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. Massive buildings and roads that ignored human scale changed the city bad place to live. The long distance between buildings forced people to use a car, and beautiful street destroyed and abandoned.
Urban planners should try to build more walkable city to avoid to plan another destroyed city.
By Chaerin Jin
I think Pittsburgh is a walkable city. Though the city seems very large, it's not hard to walk across it. When walking around, we don't feel boring or unsafe due to the beautiful and peaceful environment. However in Beijing, each time I go out, I feel threatened and uncomfortable, especially when crossing a street or walking near a road. There are too many motormobiles and pollution. Plus, Beijing is so big that it's unimaginable to walk to your detisnation. As to Brasilia, I also dislike its design. It's too monotonous and spread.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your opinion that Pittsburg is a walkable city. During our trip, I used to walk in the city to go to restaurants, bars and visit companies, even though I should walk at least 20 mins. I've never been Beijing,, I think the city is quite similar with Seoul. Every lunch time, my coworkers and I tried to walk near my company to help digesting lunch =), I was almost impossible to take a walk in the center of Seoul. =( If I walked 30 mins, I could feel that I breath dirty air....
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