In this weeks edition of FFWD Magazine Calgary Life and Style, Professor Noel Keough explores livability on the East Coast.
"In the National Film Board documentary Rain, Drizzle and Fog, Rosemary House profiles a series of St. John’s artists including Mary Walsh (This Hour Has 22 Minutes), exploring the attachment to place that St. John’s exerts, despite the oppressive dominance of rain, drizzle and fog. Here in the first week of August, in spite of a particularly nasty bout of this meteorological affliction, St. John’s remains one of the most walkable cities in North America.
Many characteristics make this Newfoundland city walkable, but one prominent feature is the fact that it is old enough —— some claim it to be the oldest city in North America —— to have been built long before the invention of the automobile, and as a result it is designed with humans in mind, not the machines that transport them. Though St. John’s and most other city districts of pre-auto vintage —— Boston, New York, Montreal, Quebec City —— have adapted to the automobile, the basic geometry remains human scale. These cities provide comfortable human habitat.
Google Maps provides a clear image of what is different about these pre-car cities —— whether it is St. John’s or Boston, or the pre-car centres of London, Paris and Rome, or for that matter informal settlements in the exploding cities of developing countries where a car is still out of reach for the majority of people. These places developed organically, prior to or without the guiding hand of city planners, in a fashion that has its own pedestrian logic."
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