Philosophy Community Endeavors

What these showy bits of street-corner architecture have in common is that each is a focus for
walkable sightlines. Each marks (celebrates) a fixed point of connection — and thereby
continuity — of walkable space. They’re punctuation marks (not so much exclamation points
as commas) serving the overall legibility of our walkway network.

As such, they work from a distance; but they also work up close. It’s not just the shape of the
spaces we walk through, and the visual play of their connections (all that obliquity) that invite
navigation on foot; it’s also what immediately defines those spaces — the stuff close enough to
touch as we walk past.

The character of this immediate stuff is a big part of what can be called “pedestrian scale”.
I’ll say a bit more about scale in my next notes.

I compare it with another half-mile, from the north end of the 400 Block to Carroll College and
Centennial Park — same distance, easy to walk, but much less sense of sustained connectivity. I
think it has a bit to do with the walk being mostly straight lines and 90-degree turns. I miss the
doglegs.

Those two half-miles, compared, seem to show that urban walkability — and, by extension, urban
“place” — has at least as much to do with the shapes of the outdoor spaces we walk through as with
what’s underfoot. Those Main Street doglegs are ours by luck, a gift of topography, but can we do
as well by deliberate design? It’s fun to think about.

For my next notes I’ll return to that second half-mile, to look at a bit of deliberate design which
addresses a modern urban problem quite well.

Walking is good because it’s carbon-neutral and doesn’t demand the vast landscape-gobbling
infrastructure that cars do. Cars aren’t going away though. Our challenge is to understand the
appeal of a walk in terms enabling us to reintegrate walking as an option — the preferred option
where possible — despite the cars. I think of it as habitat restoration.

That makes sense because of a deep connection between the appeal of walking around outdoors
and the appeal of something else old and low-tech (though hardly simple) — the idea of “place”,
as in “sense of place”. From a practical point of view (I’m an old urban planner) thinking about
urban place and thinking about urban walkability are much the same thing. Place is pulled
together by walkable sightlines.

There are some instructive examples out there — ours less by planning than by luck. Luck’s
trying to help us in Helena. My next notes will point out a few cases. In the meantime, put
yourself at the mercy of the urban outdoors. Try thinking of it as our habitat — as “place.”

In that first case, sightlines confirm the immediate proximity of our open lands. We get two
kinds of landscape at once, in-town and out, with a standing invitation to walk between them.
In the second case, we get a zigzag half-mile of downtown vitality, another invitation to walk.

So, for walkable sightlines, it’s as good to have crooked streets doglegging through downtown
as to have straight streets dead-ending unceremoniously at the edge of town. We’d have
neither without the luck of topography. We wouldn’t have Reeder’s Alley either.

Louis Reeder struck a rare deal with topography. Knowing that it doesn’t take much
cut-and-fill to suit natural pedestrian agility, and in exchange for building stone, he let his
gully keep its identity. Though now urban, it’s still rocky and raw and steep-sided, still
legible as a natural young landform in very old rock.

Can Reeder’s Alley and those doglegs and dead-ends — quirks of old Helena — show us how to
treat the modern problem of urban connectivity? Think about it. I will, for my next notes.