The Importance of Inter-Urban Walkability

Writing in The Huffington Post, Wolfe notes how walking between cities and towns can be as important as walkabilty downtown:

Strolls through such “places between” not only highlight the virtues of walking itself, but also invoke the universal transitions between distinct locales and the amorphous rural countryside.

Why? Wolfe recalls part of the reasoning behind the borrowed biological principle of the "transect" that stands behind new urbanist codes, and explains how understanding the blend between built and natural, including how balances change closer to clustered settlement, is key to defining sustainable cities going forward.

He blends discussions and examples from Italy, France and the United States to illustrate the "microcosm of similar characteristics defining the edge of urbanity", and further explains how modern regulatory approaches mimic classical development patterns apparent on the landscape.

Wolfe concludes with walk-based learning:

Last year, in the Palouse, I underscored how the elements of older, rural America have reappeared in today’s cities, noting how “small markets, the local bar, the library and the school — no longer needed in one context, they rise again in reinvented urban settings…”.

And last week on Corsica, walking to and from the place between places, I read human fundamentals, as illustrated in the images presented here, in a way that even more firmly decodes and illustrates the elements of urban settlement.