Why Cities Work: Surprise

A few months ago, when I was still taking the bus to work - and walking from San Francisco's Transbay Terminal to my office - my favorite shortcut got strange. And I'm glad it did, because it helped me crystallize one of the necessary qualities for a great city: surprise.



I'd taken to shaving a few minutes off the march by cutting down a narrow walkway between two skyscrapers. Tall brick on one side, tall concrete on the other. And at the end: pop. The backend of a simple plaza, bits of crummy retail and a Starbucks guarding the front.



Then, one morning, my shortcut had art in it. Multicolored, ten-foot-tall sculptures lined the brick wall. Same deal in the plaza, only with stone, a piece that looked like an I-beam twisted into a park bench, even a brushed-steel kinetic thing. The unoccupied bit of street-level retail space had turned into an art gallery specializing in sculpture, and the gallery had populated the plaza with big, public-scale work.



I've been lucky enough to live in most of the great American cities, and in each I've had occasion to take near-daily walks along the same route. I tend to walk the same way every time not because I'm habitual (though I guess I am about some stuff) but because the walk gives me a chance to see more and more details about the route. Every pass lets me increase the magnification on my observations, in a way.



But what was great about the art in my shortcut was that it surprised me - it was like seeing a whale swim past my microscope's field of view (to torture that magnification metaphor from the last paragraph). It forced me to touch the changing fabric of the city on my harmless way to work, instead of minding my own business. I realized: this is why I love cities, or some cities. You never know what's going to happen when you turn a corner. Yes, sure, sometimes surprise equals inconvenience when it involves the inaccessibility or unavailability of something you were counting on…or worse, when it actually translates into danger.



Not everyone likes facing the requirement of constant adaptation. Those people do not live in cities, or do not like cities, or live in cities that are bad at generating surprise.



So the question is, how can a city foster the qualities of being new and strange?



First of all, it has to happen at the street level. Anything that you have to drive to and find parking for is not going to be surprising (though it might be a lot of fun). I'm pretty sure that surprises happen in the spaces between our scheduled experiences.



So that means, secondly, the street level of the city has to be flexible. It needs spaces in buildings where people sell things, certainly, but also spaces in front of those buildings for things to happen - political demonstrations, chance meetings, farmer's markets.



And thirdly, the city has to create circumstances where surprising things can happen. Annual events are good. Concerts in parks. Festivals. If you add scheduled experiences, more people pass between them, and more surprises happen in the intersticial spaces.



I don't take the bus to work much anymore. For personal reasons I've started driving, which means the most surprising thing that happens to me on the way to work is a variation in traffic over the Bay Bridge, or a song I've forgotten about turning up in my iPod's shuffle.



It kind of sucks.