Liberal Landscape

Like Japan’s other coastal urban areas, the Tokyo region is crossed by several large rivers, among which the most important are the Ara (Arakawa 荒川), the Edo (Edogawa 江戸川), and the Tone (Tonegawa 利根川) east of the city and the Tama (Tamagawa 多摩川) to the south. These rivers have been the source of Tokyo’s water since the city’s founding. They have also been responsible for numerous floods, some of which have caused tens of thousands of deaths and an enormous amount of property damage. Attempts to control the rivers go back many centuries. The Tone, the largest and once the most destructive of the rivers, flowed to the sea mostly through what is now the Edo River as late as the 17th century, when it was largely diverted to pass through less populated areas to the east. The Ara reached Tokyo Bay through what is now known as the Sumida River (Sumidagawa 隅田川) in central Tokyo until the early 20th century when it too was mostly diverted to a parallel riverbed in what is now eastern Tokyo. Since the late 19th century, all of the rivers have been dammed at numerous points upstream and acquired substantial levees or (in their most urban portions) concrete walls over much of their length. Parts of the lower Ara, Edo, and Tone now flow through mostly artificial channels created by bulldozers. Recent work has centered on making these channels at least look natural.¹

The rivers’ levees began to be used as informal footpaths long ago. Since the early 1980s, these paths have been transformed into formal recreational trails, as bicycling, running, and more or less serious walking have become as important in Japan as in the rest of the modern world.

A large swath of the Tokyo region highlighting pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines. “Pedestrian facilities” segments shorter than 30 m have been eliminated for space reasons; this mostly takes out short alleys and bridges over major streets. The classification of rail lines needs a bit of explanation. The distinction between subways and regular passenger rail lines in Tokyo is mostly a question of who runs the line. Many subway lines in Tokyo extend for some distance along suburban railroad tracks, and most rail lines operate at rapid-transit frequencies in central Tokyo. Note that the fully grade-separated Yurikamome and Rinkai lines, as well as the monorails in Tokyo, Tama, and Chiba, have been classed as subways even though they are not managed by either of Tokyo’s two subway companies. The map also shows northern routes on the Yokohama subway. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, all heavily edited. Edits include the excision of railroad yards, freight-only lines, and all but a single track on lines in the central city. It’s possible that some freight-only lines have been left near the map’s edges.

I have not been very successful in documenting this transformation process, perhaps because it’s always played second fiddle to the work of flood control. What’s clear is that building and improving the trails has been going on for forty and more years and that in many cases it’s been local jurisdictions that have been responsible for it. Because of the timeline and because the rivers all pass through numerous jurisdictions, the trails have not been constructed in a very consistent way. Some are wide, some narrow. Some are paved, some are not. Sometimes there are trails both on the levee and down on the floodplain, sometimes in just one of these places. In certain stretches, there are trails on both banks, elsewhere just on one. In many cases, carefully graded paths take users under bridges; in other cases, users have to cross roads or take stairs. Where there are wide floodplains, parks have often been established, and various amenities—baseball fields, tennis courts, benches, and bathrooms—have been added; sometimes, however, the trails are just about the only improved parts of the rivers’ rights-of-way.

View across the Edo River near Ichikawa, one of the places where the entire floodplain has been repurposed for recreational uses. Photo was made from a trail along one levee; a levee trail can be seen on the opposite bank, in the distance. Down below is a trail on the floodplain, as well as athletic fields. The trail on the floodplain continues under the bridges. It’s connected to the levee trail by graded pathways.

Narrow sections on the trails along the Tama River in Ota. The buildings in the background are in Kawasaki. The road on the right is at a lower level than the levee.

The trails also differ in the extent to which they’ve been “branded.” The trail along the Tama, for example, has much more consistent kilometer markings than the trails along the Edo and Tone. It’s also more likely than the other trails to have signs offering friendly warnings about certain obvious dangers, such as bicycle/pedestrian collisions (all these trails allow cyclists).

Sign along the Tama River trail.

Despite these differences, the trails have become usable over enormously long distances. The trail along the Ara is 68 km long, that along the Edo goes on for 60 km, and the one along the Tama is at least 50 km in length. (The much less urban Tone trail has stops and starts and would be harder to follow for a substantial length.) Of course, it’s not surprising that the world’s largest urban area should have some the world’s longest urban recreational paths, but Tokyo is not generally known for its recreational facilities, and the trails, which have become one of Tokyo’s most distinctive features, have not been widely publicized.

All of these trails get a fair amount of use, at least where they aren’t too far from settled areas. It was pouring the day I visited the Ara River trail, and there were still numerous runners and cyclists using it; there were even baseball players on the athletic fields.

Along the Ara River trail on a wet and windy day. Most users were staying on the path down on the floodplain. The levee path (right) was uncomfortably windy.

The river trails are chiefly recreational trails. The rivers the trails parallel are rarely natural routes for commuting or shopping. Tokyo is definitely a multi-nodal urban area, but most of its nodes are relatively close to the traditional city center. The most heavily traveled transport links in the Tokyo area tend to be focused on the center, and are usually perpendicular to the trails. Also, because of the flooding problem, the older towns that often became the commercial centers of what is now suburban Tokyo tended not to be close to the rivers, and the river paths naturally don’t take you to these places.² The fact that some of the “rivers” now flow in courses that are at some distance from their original bed often brings them even further from traditional settlements. No doubt a few commuters and shoppers do use the trails, but I suspect they’re not numerous. I didn’t see anyone carrying a shopping bag in the many kilometers I walked these trails in July. There does not seem to be any serious movement in Tokyo urging the building of a more complete network of trails that would include routes between the suburbs and central Tokyo. The recreational trails along rivers constitute a large proportion of Tokyo’s off-road pedestrian facilities.

The recreational corridors that include the trails are clearly quite different in character from most of Tokyo, where smallish houses and other structures typically occupy a very large proportion of available land. The corridors, in contrast, seem extraordinarily open, especially those along the man-made river channels, which can be a kilometer wide. It’s quite startling to see them from train windows, where the contrast between densely built-up city and brief episodes of openness seems particularly vivid. Because these areas are distinctive and attractive, numerous moderately expensive high-rise apartment buildings have been built along some of the corridors even though the neighborhoods in which they are located are not on the whole particularly fashionable places. Although Tokyo, like other Japanese cities, is generally less segregated by class than most Western cities, much of eastern Tokyo in particular is perceived as being rather blue-collar in character. Thanks to the recreational trails, many areas have undergone a modest amount of gentrification.

Apartment buildings along the Tama River trail, Ota.

The Sumida River which adjoins central Tokyo has also acquired a recreational path, but the path has a somewhat different history and character than those along the Ara, Edo, Tone, and Tama.

Pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines in central and part of eastern Tokyo. See notes on map above for information on data. In this map, even the shortest “pedestrian facilities” have been included.

Unlike most of the longer rivers, the Sumida (or anyway its lower half) is essentially a tidal inlet off Tokyo Bay. There is no floodplain for athletic fields along the lower Sumida, and there are no levees. There are concrete walls that serve the same purpose as levees, but of course these could not be transformed into paths in the way that the levees were. Also, because the lower Sumida runs through central Tokyo, its banks were much more likely to be lined with industries than the banks of the longer rivers, especially where the river flowed into the Bay, past more or less man-made islands. (The upper Sumida River—roughly, north of Shirahige Bridge—has levees, and the path along the Sumida here seems to have roots very much like those of the longer rivers; it’s in part a byproduct of flood control measures.)

Unlike the paths along the longer rivers, the path along the lower Sumida had to be designed as a pedestrian path, and it only came into being in the early 21st century. Building it wasn’t particularly easy, since, in most cases, substantial landfill along the river was required, and also, because some of the bridges across the river were not very high, tunnels below the high tide mark had to be dug. Also, a decision was made to do some serious landscaping along much of the Sumida Terrace; this must have complicated its construction. This construction in fact is still underway, and some gaps in the path remain, but alternate routes are pretty clearly marked.

The path along the Sumida also differs from the longer trails in that it’s been given a formal name: it’s the Sumida River Terrace (Sumidagawa terasu 隅田川テラス). In addition, it’s acquired much more consistent signage than the longer trails as well as a carefully designed series of maps that are posted every hundred meters or so.

One of the many maps along the Sumida River Terrace.

The Sumida River Terrace (or at least its southern portion) differs from the longer trails in one more way: It does not permit cyclists. It also has many more benches. You certainly see runners there, but the Sumida River Terrace wasn’t really set up to be an athletic facility; it was designed to be a place for relaxing and for enjoying the urban landscape.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect that urban rivalry was a factor in the Sumida River Terrace’s construction. The people who govern Tokyo are well aware that it’s in competition with places like New York, London, and perhaps Shanghai for “world-city” status and most certainly became familiar with thriving urban features like Hudson River Park, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, and the pedestrian paths along the Thames and the Huangpu Rivers, which made Tokyo’s once run-down and hard-to-access waterfront seem something of an embarrassment. The Sumida River Terrace is intended to be “globalized” Tokyo’s elegant inner-city waterfront walkway.

The Sumida River Terrace appears to be a success, at least on weekends and late afternoons, when there are numerous users (including many more foreigners than on the longer, further-out trails). It’s certainly contributed to the slow gentrification of the neighborhoods along its banks, which, traditionally, were rather working-class.

The Sumida River Terrace on a busy weekend.

The place can be rather empty at other times, however, when the homeless people who live on some parts of the Terrace become a major proportion of its users, especially on the East Bank, where there are some permanent-looking encampments. Another issue is that much of the East Bank and a small part of the West Bank of the Sumida are shadowed by a noisy expressway. The expressway does provide some shelter from sun and rain, but this makes it all the more attractive to the homeless.

The Sumida River Terrace, and the longer paths along the Ara, Edo, Tone, and Tama Rivers (and several shorter paths along waterways elsewhere in the urban area) nonetheless do constitute a relatively new and generally appreciated feature of Tokyo’s urban landscape. Like their counterparts in North American, European, and a small number of Asian cities, these paths are intended to be a kind of haven from the automobile- and transit-dominated city surrounding them, a place where long-distance movement on foot and (in most cases) by bicycle is convenient and pleasant. Of course, like other recreational paths in cities all over the modern world, these paths are so completely separated from roads for automobiles and so oriented to recreational use that they do not really challenge automobile hegemony either.

Anyone who likes cities to be lively and full of people at all hours would appreciate cities in Japan.¹ There are large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists not only in the central business districts but also in many of the residential zones of most big Japanese cities. It’s not hard to explain this. The large role of public transit in urban mobility guarantees that there will be numerous pedestrians and cyclists moving to and from transit stops.² In addition, the absence of free parking in Japanese cities encourages even car owners to do everyday tasks on foot or by bicycle. Radically mixed land uses in dense outer-city nodes also demand movement on foot. And it’s pretty clear that recreational walking is common in Japan.

I wouldn’t say though that conditions for pedestrians and cyclists are perfect in Japan. Narrow streets often have at most a white stripe to separate pedestrians from traffic. There are sidewalks along major streets, but, thanks to the near absence of curbside parking, one is often in close proximity to fast traffic. Even more important, sidewalks are often crowded, and there are frequently cyclists to contend with, who have a choice nearly everywhere of using streets or sidewalks. Some streets have sharrows or blue arrows for cyclists, but most don’t. And, while some sidewalks have bicycle lanes, the majority lack them, and many cyclists and pedestrians pay absolutely no attention even to the most clearly marked lane separation. Motor vehicle drivers, on the other hand, defer to pedestrians and cyclists as much as any drivers in the world. The expectation in return, however, is that pedestrians and cyclists will obey traffic lights, which, as elsewhere in Asia, can take a long time to change.

Walking and cycling in Japanese cities, in other words, are pretty safe and always interesting but also at times inefficient and a little annoying.

More or less ordinary landscape in central Kyoto.

Japanese cities do have plenty of pedestrianized streets. They tend to be either crowded commercial streets

Teramachi Street, one of several covered commercial streets in Kyoto. Bicycles are forbidden here.

or else streets that are so narrow a car wouldn’t fit. They will never take you very far.

Pedestrian path along canal, Inari, Kyoto, Japan.

In other words, most walking and cycling in Japanese cities must take place along regular urban streets.

One factor here is that Japanese cities have relatively few of the kinds of long-distance urban pedestrian facilities that many North American cities have developed over the last few decades, and those that exist rarely pass close to big-city central business districts. The same thing is true in European cities of course, where, just as in Japan, existing dense urbanization makes the creation of such facilities extremely difficult.

There are exceptions to this generalization, however.

One of them is in Kyoto, where, as in many Japanese cities, the city is bisected by rivers, in this case the Kamo River (Kamogawa 鴨川) on the east and the Katsura River (Katsuragawa 桂川) on the west. In their natural state, both rivers sometimes flooded after heavy rains or periods of substantial snow melt, and so both rivers have been subjected to elaborate flood-prevention controls. There are dams upstream and retaining walls or levees in the city, where parts of their floodplains have been parkland for a long time. These parks acquired paths many decades ago, and, in recent years, there have been systematic improvements, which are scheduled to continue.³

The Kamo River paths struck me as being especially impressive and pleasant. There are now paths on both banks for most (but not all) the length of the river, between northern Kyoto and the junction of the Kamo and Katsura, a distance of a little more than 17 km.

Map of Kyoto and vicinity showing pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines. The lines along the rather narrow Kamo River in central Kyoto may be confusing. There are walking/running/bicycle paths on both banks. Just to the east, the private Keihan Railway has an underground line. GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

The route of the Kamo River path takes you through quite a variety of neighborhoods. Roughly in the path’s middle, it passes next to Kyoto’s CBD on the west bank and several somewhat traditional neighborhoods (like Gion) on the east bank.

Kamo River path, just north of the Japan Rail tracks, and just south of Kyoto’s central business district. At this point the Kamo River flows in a man-made trench, with substantial retaining walls on both sides.

In the north. it takes users through relatively low-density sections of the city, and there are parks that have room for soccer fields and tennis courts—and benches for sitting.

Kamo River path, north of central Kyoto.

In the south. it runs through working-class districts under freeway and railroad bridges that seem a long way from tourist Kyoto.

Maintenance work along the Kamo River path, south of central Kyoto, in a spot where there are two paths, one down by the river and one on a levee. Note the highway bridges. The path is maintained both by prefecture employees and by volunteers.

Over the last few years, government entities have provided the Kamo River path with the kinds of amenities that can be found in urban recreational trails all over the world. There are numerous entrances and exits; occasional bathrooms; distance markers; and a few small art exhibits. Approximately half the path is paved; the rest is hard dirt.

Marker showing distance to Katsura River junction.

The Kamo River path is used by fairly large numbers of walkers, runners, and cyclists in all seasons, although it rarely seems really crowded. While there are definitely commuters on this path, it seems busiest on pleasant afternoons and on weekends. In other words, while it serves as both a commuting route and a recreational trail, the latter use appears primary.

The Katsura River path in western Kyoto is rougher and requires some bank switches and generally runs through less dense parts of the city. As a result, it attracts fewer users. But it’s much longer than the Kamo River path and extends outside the city in both directions. In fact, it will take you via the Yodo and Kizu Rivers as far as Nara, 35 km away, or else to Osaka, approximately 50 km away. These longer-distance trails tend to run along levees and were probably created originally to facilitate levee-construction. Because the areas along the trails were historically subject to flooding, they are often the location of industries and tend to have low population densities. There are few of the urban features (or amenities) that one finds on the Kamo River path. As a result, while the longer-distance trails are wonderful facilities for people who want to go for 100-km (or longer) bicycle rides, they are perhaps somewhat less useful for commuting or for casual walking.

Nonetheless, in Kansai area (which includes Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe), there is at least the beginning of the kind of off-road pedestrian/cycling network that can be found in a few North American cities. In Kyoto itself, the Kamo River section of the regional network runs right next to the central business district and provides a genuinely useful alternative to busy city streets and a recreational facility that appears to be widely appreciated.

In the 1980s I wrote a paper on the then-mostly-new recreational trails that had come into being in many North American cities. In most places, these trails were quite fragmentary. They were built where it was easy to build them, mostly along watercourses or (less often) in railroad or power-line rights-of-way or (even less often) along new highways or rail transit lines, and, in most cases, the different trails didn’t connect nicely with each other. Only in a very few places did these recreational trails form enough of a network to permit traversing the whole urban area on them, notably in Washington, Ottawa, Denver, and Calgary. In the case of Washington and Ottawa, federal ownership of a huge amount of streambank land–as well as two convenient canals with disused towpaths—helped account for the abundant trails. In Denver and Calgary, land along streams coming off the Rockies with highly irregular flow had been set aside as parkland early in the history of urban development, and this parkland could be utilized for linear trails fairly easily. In the original manuscript, I argued that the recreational trails constituted a distinctively new kind of urban infrastructure (although there were certainly precedents for them—Robert Moses, for example, built bicycle trails along some parkways in the 1930s and 1940s, and there was certainly plenty of infrastructure built for bicycles during the late-19th-century bicycle boom).

No one wanted to publish the paper, and, of course, there was no internet to send it to. I’d still stand by the basic thesis. The recreational trails (often labeled bicycle trails) that were being built in many places from the 1970s on really were in many ways a new and distinctive kind of infrastructure, and they’ve remained so as they’ve grown not just in North America but in urban areas all over the world.

It’s still true that recreational trails make up coherent networks only in a few urban areas, in North America generally the same urban areas where this was the case in the 1980s. Elsewhere, there are usually major gaps. This doesn’t matter in the way that it would, for example, for rail lines. There are usually ways for pedestrians, runners, and cyclists to move around even without formal recreational paths. But the alternate routes are often slow and inconvenient and can even be somewhat dangerous.

I was in Boston last September for the first time in nearly three decades. I’d lived in Cambridge in academic year 1966-1967 and had found myself in Boston frequently between 1976 and 1978. I had last been in Boston in (I think) 1989. I have tried to keep up with urban developments there, but that’s not the same thing as seeing for oneself. As always, I was particularly anxious to look for changes in non-automotive transportation.

Map of Boston and vicinity showing pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines. GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

Boston is perhaps best-known among urbanists for the “Big Dig,” the replacement of an elevated portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike by a fantastically expensive tunnel, but starting in the 1960s several completely unrelated steps were taken to improve the area’s non-automotive transportation system, mostly under the aegis of the MBTA, a state agency. For example, the MBTA revived a complex system of suburban railroad lines that were on the verge of disappearing when I lived in Boston in 1966-1967. It took several decades of development, but these lines now attract approximately as many passengers every day as Philadelphia’s “commuter” rail system; in North America, only New York, Chicago, and Toronto have more riders on their suburban train systems. The MBTA also extended the Red Line subway in two directions between 1971 and 1985; it placed the Green Line near North Station underground in 2005; and it replaced the Orange Line’s elevated portions with tracks along the Boston and Main Railroad (in the north) and the main Amtrak line (in the south) between 1975 and 1987.¹ It also built the Silver Line BRT lines, whose only really fast portion is an impressive tunnel from South Station south through the transformed South Boston Seaport area. Boston has certainly improved its “rapid transit” lines more between the 1970s and recent years than its East Coast competitors, New York and Philadelphia.

Boston’s recreational-trail network has seen much more modest improvements. Boston has a real problem. Its main central-city recreational trails run along the Charles River. This means that they do come close to the central business district as well as to Harvard University and MIT (although the route from Harvard is circuitous). The catch is that major highways run along the Charles too, Storrow Drive and its continuation, Soldiers Field Road, on the southern (Boston) side of the Charles and Memorial Drive on the northern (Cambridge) side. These roads, which go back to the years before the automobile came along, all started as modest parkways. They were designed for slow pleasure travel. But, because they served downtown and other important destinations, they became filled with cars as early as the 1920s. The city and state governments did a considerable amount of work to improve these roads in the 1950s. Storrow Drive acquired formal exits and entrances and became a freeway in all but name, although trucks stayed banned. (Lake Shore Drive in Chicago has a similar history.) Storrow and Memorial Drive and Soldier Field Road carry truly massive amounts of traffic in rush hour, and this affects the environmental quality of the recreational paths, which are generally right next to the roads. Only along the Esplanade (which abuts Back Bay) is there an alternate trail that’s somewhat removed from the highway. Although the recreational paths along the Charles attract numerous users, many people find them painful to be on and avoid them. I was doing a fair amount of running during the period in the 1970s when I was visiting Boston frequently and ended up deciding it was more pleasant and satisfying to run 3.6 km loops around Fresh Pond (in western Cambridge) than spend time running along busy Memorial Drive. I wasn’t alone.

The recreational path along Storrow Drive runs right next to an often very busy traffic lane.

Over the last couple of decades, Boston has definitely become one of the winners of the digital age. Gentrification in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville is widespread, and, of course, there have been tens of thousands of college students in the area for a century. The students and many of the people who have moved to Boston over, say, the last twenty years are likely to use recreational paths on a large scale, and governments in the Boston area have taken some modest steps to improve these facilities. They’ve repaved and widened the paths along the Charles and extended the Memorial Drive path into Charlestown. Memorial Drive is now closed to cars on Sundays, but, despite considerable pressure to extend closing hours, that’s the only step that’s been taken to reduce traffic. Boston’s prosperity may actually be helping to make traffic worse. The trails along the Charles are still Boston’s main recreational trails, and they haven’t changed substantially since the 1970s. They can still be plausibly seen as little more than sidewalks along very busy highways.

Boston has built some new trails, although, all things considered, they’re fairly modest.

The Southwest Corridor (late 1980s) is perhaps the most distinctive. This corridor, extending several kilometers southwest from downtown, was originally supposed to be used for a freeway. But, after the land was cleared, it became obvious that there was so much opposition to building a highway that the corridor was used instead for an improved Amtrak line, the new Orange Line, and a linear park. The neighborhoods through which the Southwest Corridor runs were (and to some extent still are) generally poor and needed the parkland desperately. The Corridor is usable as a recreational trail, but the fact that most cross streets have been left in place makes it a bit frustrating for runners and cyclists. Still, it is a new recreational path in a part of the city that didn’t have one.

The Southwest Corridor, Back Bay/South End. Further southwest, this corridor runs through much more modest neighborhoods.

More recently, in conjunction with the transformation of Boston’s old close-to-downtown port into an upscale residential space, there has come into being a kind of de facto recreational trail along the edge of Boston Harbor, from North Station (where it connects with the recreational trail along Storrow Drive), along the edge of the North End, down through “South Boston Seaport,” and (with some gaps) around South Boston and by the Kennedy Library. Much of this trail just follows sidewalks (and so it’s barely indicated on the accompanying map), but it’s marked with “Harborwalk” signs, and, in the North End, there’s an impressive protected bicycle path (which was being used by more runners than cyclists when I was there).

The protected bicycle path that runs around the edge of Boston’s North End. It appears to be used by runners and even walking pedestrians as much as by cyclists.

The Harborwalk in the South Boston Seaport. This area has arguably changed more over the last fifty years than any other part of Boston. The path can be so crowded that fast walking or running become impossible.

There are also several additional mostly suburban trails, for example, the 16-km-long Minuteman Bikeway in Lexington, Arlington, and Cambridge (1992 or so); the 5-km East Boston Greenway (2007); several bits and pieces of trail along the Mystic River; and a few other short segments as well.

Despite the existence of these new trails, it can’t really be said that Boston has acquired what anyone would call a network of recreational trails. It’s not very clear that it easily could. The area’s geography just doesn’t provide the kinds of lengthy, connected corridors that could be used for such trails, except along the Charles, where the existing trails are imperfect.

Boston is, of course, like most North American cities in this regard. Although it’s possible to fantasize about elevated bicycle and pedestrian routes, such facilities would be expensive to build, cast shadows, and perhaps be all too easy to throw things from. As a result, just about all recreational trails are built in pre-existing corridors. When such corridors are scarce or short or scattered, recreational trails along them are going to be fragmentary, and, where those corridors are used for major highways, trails that follow them are going to be marred by highway noise and pollution. This is true even in an urban area like Boston whose inhabitants would appear to be particularly inclined to support such facilities.

One of the “Marseille change” signs that can be seen all over the city, this one at the Cinq Avenues tram stop. “Marseille change” is best translated “Marseille is changing.” These signs all have the same text but include different images. All the images focus on some aspect of urban life that does not involve automobiles.

Many—and probably most—French cities have engaged in large-scale urban renewal projects over the last thirty years or so.¹ Obsolete industrial and port facilities have been replaced by offices and housing. Research centers, museums, and concert halls have been squeezed into underused spaces. Housing projects (HLMs) have either been torn down or else altered substantially with a view to creating neighborhoods characterized by mixité—the mixing of people of all social classes, which has become the holy grail of much French comment on urbanism. There has also been at least a modest pushback against the hegemony of the automobile. Numerous streets in city centers have been pedestrianized. Bicycle lanes or paths have been constructed. Tram lines have been built in just about all cities above a certain size class, and rail rapid-transit lines have been extended in the cities that have them.

Marseille has done as much urban renewal work as any city in France, and I spent a week there at the end of April, making a special point of looking closely at Marseille’s renewal efforts. I’d been in the city numerous times over the years but had never stayed there for more than a couple of days.

It’s important to say that Marseille for many years has been something of an outlier among major French cities. None of Marseille’s peer cities has had as many poor, ethnically non-French people living in such strikingly dilapidated housing close to the city center. There has been some gentrification but on a relatively small scale. A factor here was that the city consistently lost population—and jobs—between the 1970s and 2000, as its industries and port declined.² One result of this is that there hasn’t been the same demand among well-off people for inner-city housing that there has been elsewhere. Marseille had acquired a fearsome reputation by the early 21st century, comparable in some ways to the reputation of some rust-belt cities in the United States. It was seen by many as a dangerous place. Tourists avoided it.

Marseille’s massive redevelopment efforts over the last two or three decades have been heavily colored by a desire to improve its image.

Much of Marseille’s urban renewal work has been similar to that in other French cities. It’s focused in part on transportation. Marseille’s built tram lines, for example, and extended its subway. It’s also set up both bike-share and dockless-scooter systems.

Map of much of Marseille, showing rail transit lines and pedestrian facilities. “U/C” = “under construction.” GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

Tram lines 2 and 3 along the Cours Belsunce. Automobiles are not allowed on this major street.

Marseille has also done a great deal of work to improve the pedestrian environment of the central city. It’s built a substantial walkway that circles the old port. Inland, many small streets have been completely closed to motor vehicles. There are also some weekend street closings. Parts of the Canebière, perhaps Marseille’s most famous street, become an open-air market on Sundays.

The Canebière on Sunday afternoon.

There has also been some transportation-related urban renewal work outside the central city, but it’s generally been smaller in scale. One new subway extension is under construction; a couple of tram lines have been extended; and protected bus lanes have been built along the Prado and elsewhere.

There has only been a modest amount of pedestrianization work outside the central city, perhaps because less was needed. Marseille, like most older European cities, is for the most part a comfortable place for pedestrians. It has a pleasantly complicated urban environment; reasonable sidewalks; and drivers who are generally willing to cede to people on foot. The city has added some bicycle lanes in recent years, mostly however just defined by lines painted on sidewalks. The boundaries between space set aside for cyclists and space set aside for pedestrians do not seem to be respected very assiduously by anyone.

Painted bicycle lane on the sidewalk on an island between the main part of Boulevard Michelet and a separate side road. Note the protected bus lane. This is the part of the city that contains Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation, which has been joined by several other apartment towers designed to be surrounded by parks but now mostly surrounded by surface parking lots. 

The most impressively improved pedestrian facility in Marseille may be the set of paths along the Corniche Kennedy. Marseille’s Corniche (which acquired the name Kennedy in 1963) is a road winding along the cliffs above the Mediterranean between the old port and the Prado area approximately 5 km south. It’s been around since the 19th century. The wonderful views from this area caused many well-off people to move in even during an era when it must have been difficult to get there. When automobiles came along, the area filled in quickly, and the Corniche became a crowded two-lane highway. When cycling and running became popular in the 1980s, the sidewalk along the highway attracted numerous cyclists and runners. There are no major parks in central Marseille, and the Corniche is one of the few places where it’s possible to bicycle or run for several kilometers without encountering cross-traffic. The views are an added bonus. It took years of nagging, but Marseille’s government has finally responded to the demands of cyclists and pedestrians and begun widening parts of the Corniche sidewalk. In places, there are now three separate parallel paths along the highway: a protected bicycle lane right next to the road; a raised running path next to that; and a pedestrian right-of-way at the cliff edge which includes what is claimed to be the world’s longest bench.³ It’s a really impressive facility despite the proximity of road traffic, although when I was there part of it was closed for repair. Apparently, the supports that hold the paths to the cliff were beginning to fail.

The three parallel paths along the Corniche Kennedy, at the point where they are interrupted for construction work. The Mediterranean is just out of sight to the left, many dozens of meters lower.

In one important respect, Marseille has outdone other French cities in its renewal work. Much of its effort has been put into a new quarter, Euroméditerranée (or just Euromed in everyday French). Euroméditerranée is a substantial zone of 480 hectares that’s said to be the largest urban renewal project in southern Europe. It’s been replacing what is in part an older port and warehousing area lying along the Mediterranean coast just north of its CBD around the Vieux Port. Work on the southern half of the area started as long ago as 1995 but took some time to get going. In the last ten years, however, the extreme southwestern portions of Euroméditerranée have been almost completely rebuilt. (Marseille’s selection as one of the 2013 “capitals of European culture” was apparently a real impetus to move its urban-renewal work forward.) The zone incorporated in Euroméditerranée was extended north into partly residential areas in 2007, but the northern areas have not yet seen as much activity as Euroméditerranée’s southern half. It’s relevant that it’s in northern Marseille where a disproportionate number of its poor inhabitants live.

Map of the southern half of Euroméditerranée and vicinity. Sources of GIS data as in earlier map.

Overview of part of central Marseille looking north from the Marseille’s highest point, the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde, a point just below the bottom center of the map above. Euroméditerranée’s most altered area stretches from Fort Saint-Jean, in front of the Ferris wheel at the left center and now part of MUCEM, to the two skyscrapers at the photo’s right center, which were designed (left to right) by Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel.

Marseille’s choice of a name for this quarter and at least some of what it’s aimed to do with it have involved an attempt to capitalize on what it claims to be one of its special characteristics. Marseille’s a port city with long-term intimate contacts throughout the Mediterranean Basin, including the non-European parts of the Mediterranean area. It’s hardly the only city of which this can be said, but there is at least some basis for the argument that Marseille has particularly rich historical links to many parts of the Mediterranean. The city was founded by Phocaeans, Greeks from what is now Turkey, and much of its current population has roots in North Africa. Tens of thousands of the French who had to leave Algeria in 1963 (the so-called pieds noirs) settled in Marseille, and something like a quarter of the Marseille region’s population is ethnically North African, consisting either of relatively recent immigrants or of their descendants. (There are also large numbers of people with roots in sub-Saharan Africa, the Comoros Islands, and Italy.) Marseille’s North and sub-Saharan African connections are of course not always seen by people elsewhere in France as a good thing, so Marseille’s emphasis on its Mediterranean roots could be viewed as including an element of bravado, but the chief point is that there may be something genuine about this. In its branding efforts, Marseille (unlike some cities) is not pretending to be something that it definitely isn’t.

From a tourist point of view, Euroméditerranée’s key feature may be the new MUCEM (sometimes MuCEM), the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, which is located at the entrance to the harbor at the extreme south end of the Euroméditerranée site. MUCEM’s focus on Mediterranean civilization jibes perfectly with Marseille’s emphasis on its Mediterranean roots in its branding work. MUCEM does indeed have a permanent exhibit on Mediterranean rural culture, rooted in great measure in the work of Fernand Braudel. It’s a nice exhibit but reveals the fact that the museum does not have a very distinguished permanent collection. What it does have is an impressive building by Rudy Ricciotti, which is connected to and incorporates the partly medieval Fort Saint-Jean, which stands at the entrance to the harbor and from which there are remarkable views. MUCEM has been attracting substantial crowds despite the €9.50 admission price and has been a key factor in improving Marseille’s image.

Most of central Euroméditerranée is considerably less tourist-oriented and less connected to the district’s branding than the MUCEM area. Much of it was designed to deal with the fact that Marseille had a shortage of office space suitable for banks and insurance companies, whose decision-makers have perhaps felt a bit skittish about setting up shop in the ethnically complicated central business district around the Vieux Port. Much of central Euroméditerranée has been given over to new offices. There are two starchitect-designed skyscrapers, the CMA-CGM Tower by Zaha Hadid and La Marseillaise by Jean Nouvel. There are also quite a number of smaller (and rather bland!) seven-to-ten story office buildings.

Newish (2014) tram line running through a part of Euroméditerranée largely used for medium-sized office buildings.

In addition, the largest old warehouse in the district has been preserved and has reopened as Les Docks, whose upper floors are devoted to offices, while its lower floors have acquired restaurants.

Les Docks, Marseille, an enormous warehouse converted into an office building with numerous restaurants on the ground floor.

These are also several hotels and entertainment venues as well as a big shopping center, Les Terraces du Port, which includes a nice terrace overlooking a part of the outer harbor (which, however, is no longer a particularly active section of the port).

There are apartment buildings as well, but most of these—both new and renovated—are on the edge of Euroméditerranée. The fact that Marseille has not emphasized residential buildings in Euroméditerranée probably reflects the fact that there has been only a modest market for housing in a quarter whose edges can still feel a bit grotty. But this is changing. Many new residences are planned, some of which will push Euroméditerranée into the difficult quartiers nord. Among these is a big project, Smartseille, whose status as an “ecocity” is particularly emphasized on the Euroméditerranée Website.

Transportation changes as always have accompanied renewal work. One of Marseille’s tram lines was extended in 2010 to serve central Euroméditerranée (see photo above). An elevated freeway was (a bit oddly) replaced in part by a surface boulevard and in part by an elevated one-way freeway paired with a tunnel for traffic moving in the other direction. The OpenStreetMap database shows Euroméditerranée teeming with pedestrian facilities, but, in fact, all that have been built are wide sidewalks, sometimes with a little used bicycle lane painted down the center.

Bicycling/pedestrian path along the edge of Euroméditerranée. The tall building in the background center is Jean Nouvel’s La Marseillaise office building. The building in front of it is the Silo d’Arenc, a concert hall created from grain silos. 

There are certainly people at all hours of the day and evening in central Euroméditerranée, but I wouldn’t describe it as being particularly crowded, especially in comparison with the area around the Vieux Port. Still, there is no doubt that Euroméditerranée has made a big chunk of northern Marseille a respectable area. It really is in some ways functioning like the modern (if blander) extension of Marseille’s central business district that it was intended to be. This is no small accomplishment.

It has also almost surely been one reason for the gentrification of Le Panier, a medieval quarter on a hill overlooking MUCEM. Twenty years ago, this was one of Marseille’s dilapidated inner-city quarters of poor people. Today, tourists are more common than actual residents. Cynics would be tempted to claim that Le Panier’s chief economic functions these days are serving “authentic” bouillabaisse and selling expensive souvenirs.

I had the impression that, perhaps in part because of the work in nearby Euroméditerranée, the traditional CBD around the Vieux Port is also more crowded and prosperous-seeming than it was a few years ago, even though it remains a more ethnically complicated place than the CBD of most big Western European cities.

Marseille has definitely not succeeded in reworking itself in the distinctive way that, say, Lyon has. Marseille’s inner-city neighborhoods still have many more poor residents than comparable areas in Lyon (and most other French cities). Furthermore, Marseille’s Euroméditerranée does not have the quirky architecture and substantial housing component of Lyon’s otherwise roughly comparable Confluence; a lot of Euroméditerranée just seems to have been built to project an image of normalcy. And there is nothing in Marseille comparable in scale to the pedestrian facilities along the Rhône and Saone either.

But Marseille has made a pretty serious attempt to get beyond its indifferent reputation in part by capitalizing on what is arguably a genuine and significant part of its heritage: its long role as a port city and its historical connection with other parts of the Mediterranean. Marseille’s Office du Tourisme offers some statistics that seem to demonstrate that it’s succeeded. Perhaps Marseille really has become a bit less of an outlier among French cities.

I spent a week in Buenos Aires last month. This was my fourth (and longest) trip to the city. I had been there previously in 1986, 2002, and 2015. In the course of my recent trip, I tried to learn everything I could about the self-conscious efforts that have been made in recent years to improve conditions for pedestrians and transit users in the city.

A little background is (as always) in order.¹

Buenos Aires was a poor and tiny place until late in the 19th century. Much of what is now Argentina was not controlled by the state until well into the century, and the city’s small hinterland contained no silver and was too far south to grow sugar.

Things changed radically in the last two decades of the 19th century when Argentina became a major exporter of wheat and beef (the latter required refrigeration that wasn’t available until the 1880s). By the time of World War I, Argentina had become one of the world’s richest countries, and it attracted immigrants (mostly from Italy and Spain) on a very large scale. The Buenos Aires urban area was, by one count, the world’s 12th largest in 1914, with a population of 1,630,000. In 1925, with 2,410,000 people, it ranked 8th, and it continued to grow rapidly through the 1920s and beyond.²

The fact that Buenos Aires became so big before World War I meant that its early growth took place before the era when the automobile could have a significant effect on urban morphology. Thus, as is true of the other big cities of its era, its core was built up to an extremely high level of density, and its most prosperous inhabitants worked out ways to live comfortably despite the crowding. That core is still there. It could be said to include most of the area now encompassed by the autonomous city of Buenos Aires (roughly the area served by the Subte [subway] on the accompanying maps, below), but the densest and most distinctive parts of the city are the areas within four or five kilometers of the city center, and especially the northern, more prosperous half of this zone. These were the areas that filled in during Buenos Aires’ late 19th-/early 20th-century decades of great prosperity. This is the part of Buenos Aires that gave rise to its being called the “Paris of South America.” Both public buildings and the housing of the well-to-do were built in an elaborate late 19th-century style well into the 20th century. Many of these buildings remain, and they give central Buenos Aires and neighborhoods like Retiro, Recoleta (Barrio Norte), and Palermo a distinctive architectural character different than that of any other place on earth. South and west of these central neighborhoods are middle-class quarters like Abasto and Belgrano where the older buildings are less opulent but otherwise not so different from those in the core wealthy neighborhoods. The southern parts of the city of Buenos Aires are with certain exceptions where poorer people live. These areas too mostly filled in at high density early in the 20th century. The older buildings in these neighborhoods were (as one might expect) plainer and less distinctive than those in the northern quarters.

Regional map showing most of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Includes two suburban railroad lines that are currently closed for renovation. GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

Map showing most of the city of Buenos Aires (the Distrito Federal). The coverage and sources are the same as on the previous map. Sources of GIS data as in previous map.

It could be said that in some ways daily life in the central and northern neighborhoods of Buenos Aires hasn’t changed enormously for the last century or so. Housing in these areas varies greatly, but it consists mostly of apartment buildings, both old

Palacio Estrugamou (1929), a luxury apartment building in Retiro. Photograph taken 2015.

and new.

Newish apartment buildings near the intersection of Avenida Santa Fe and Avenida Pueyrredón, Recoleta. Photograph taken 2015.

Walking is still clearly a major mode of transport for many journeys in these areas. Neighborhood sidewalks are crowded.

Sidewalk along Avenida Santa Fe, Recoleta.

They are lined with small stores as well as restaurants and cafés.

Café at the corner of Avenida Santa Fe and Avenida Coronel Díaz, Recoleta.

There are also numerous sidewalk kiosks where newspapers, flowers, and many other things are sold.

Kiosco (newsstand) on Avenida Corrientes.

A certain number of shopping centers have been added to the mix in recent years. So far they seem to have strengthened neighborhood commerce.

The Abasto de Buenos Aires, a shopping mall created from an old wholesale market in a middle-class neighborhood also called Abasto.

Many of the inhabitants of these areas are in the habit of taking the subway or riding the bus.

Subte passengers.

A substantial percentage even of prosperous households are carfree.³ And, if only because the area is busy and safe, it’s a magnet for people not only from the entire metropolitan area but from all over the world. Its inhabitants, as a result, have long since become accustomed to being in a place with people of many cultures and ethnicities.

Daily life in the central and northern parts of the city of Buenos Aires, in other words, resembles daily life in the other places in the world where well-off or middle-class people have been living at a high density over several square kilometers close to the CBD for many years, for example, in much of Manhattan; in most of central Paris and the analogous parts of many other large European cities; along the northern edge of Hong Kong Island; and possibly in a few areas in Tokyo. This really can’t be said of anywhere else in Latin America.

Argentina gradually lost its status as one of the world’s wealthiest countries after World War I. There were many reasons for Argentina’s much-commented-on decline. One factor was that the export of wheat and beef ceased to be the basis for great wealth. But poor government, corruption, and Argentina’s location on the periphery of the world trading system have also been proposed as reasons for Argentina’s problems.

Argentina, with a GNI per capita (PPP) of something like $20,250 (2017), remains a solidly middle-income country, and its middle-class and wealthy residents still live reasonably comfortable lives. Its poorer residents don’t, however. Income inequality is substantial,⁴ and what has been described as the “Latin Americanization” of Buenos Aires has been one of the major changes of the last few decades. Buenos Aires now has numerous squatter settlements, mostly away from its center, and there is a crime problem that it’s claimed simply didn’t exist in earlier times.

Over the last thirty or forty years, Buenos Aires has also suffered from the environmental problems that come with increasing automobile ownership. Despite a great deal of freeway construction, there are traffic jams on quite an impressive scale, and inner-city air quality can be poor. Higher automobile use also undermined Buenos Aires’ pretty good public transportation system, which includes Latin America’s oldest subway system, the Subte (whose first line opened in 1913), and what appears to be the most heavily patronized suburban railway network in the Western Hemisphere (its 800 km of tracks put it second in trackage length only to New York’s three systems). Both the Subte and the suburban rail network became pretty run-down by the 1990s.

Argentina could have allowed the automobile to continue to do its dirty work and ended up with a capital city whose central neighborhoods were just as depressed and decrepit as city centers in the rest of Latin America, but it didn’t.⁵ Over approximately the last thirty years, a series of generally unrelated and uncoordinated government actions have aimed to improve conditions for pedestrians and transit users in central Buenos Aires. While causation would be difficult to prove, these actions appear to have helped halt the decline, and many aspects of the traditional way of life of central Buenos Aires have been preserved.

[1] The rail lines were fixed up. Like many of the world’s cities, Buenos Aires has made an effort over the last two or three decades to revive its urban rail system. A few short subway extensions in the 1980s (including the “Premetro,” a light-rail line in the southwest) were the first steps in this process, which picked up in the 1990s. Operation of the Subte was turned over to private enterprise in 1994, and the new corporate managers renovated the stations and presided over the introduction of new rolling stock. Since then one new line (the north-south H Line) has been built, a short extension of the E line should open this year, and there are plans for further additions. The Subte these days appears to be doing pretty well. There are nearly a million passengers a day on weekdays (some sources say more than a million). The stations look great, and trains run frequently.

The Lima station on Linea A, the oldest of Buenos Aires’ Subte lines. The signage, the TV monitors, the yellow “don’t stand here” areas along the tracks, and the air-conditioned trains have all been added over the last quarter century.

Buenos Aires is unusual in that its suburban rail lines carry more passengers than its subway. The Subte only serves the autonomous city of Buenos Aires, which has less than 20% of the urban area’s population and occupies something like 5% of its land area. The suburban rail lines cover an enormously larger area, and some of the lines run trains nearly as frequently as many of the world’s subway systems, every few minutes during rush hour and every fifteen minutes at midday and in the evening. The lines were all built by private enterprise and, as a result, are not all of the same gauge and use different propulsion systems. Furthermore, none of them quite reaches the central city; only one of the six termini is within easy walking distance of the Microcentro. There have been numerous attempts over the years to make the lines more useful. They were nationalized under the Perón government in 1948, but, in the ensuing decades, no government was willing to invest enough to maintain them. Thus, as was the case with the Subte, operation of the suburban rail lines was privatized in the 1990s. Many received new rolling stock as a result. In recent years, most of the rail lines have been renationalized and put under the control of parastatal firms. This time, the result has been a great deal of serious renovation. The impressive downtown termini have all been fixed up. Tracks are being repaired. Furthermore, the surface San Martín Line is being elevated for part of its way through the city, and the branch of the Belgrano Sur line that traditionally terminated awkwardly in the somewhat remote Buenos Aires station is being rerouted into the Constitución station.⁶

Construction of an elevated portion of the San Martín suburban line. The old tracks (visible here) were on the surface.

Furthermore, there are serious plans, not yet implemented, to create an RER network by means of tunnels through central Buenos Aires. This project would, of course, be quite expensive. Even without this final step, Buenos Aires’ elaborate rail system no longer feels as though it’s in decline. Some sources say there are approximately 1,400,000 passengers/day; other sources suggest a lower figure.

[2] The bus lines have been improved too. Buenos Aires’ buses, like those in most places, carry more passengers more places than its rail system, but, as everywhere, their effectiveness has been undermined by traffic congestion. Buenos Aires’ Metrobús system, an attempt to get around this problem, has been added to the public transport mix in the years since 2011. The Metrobús system is a kind of light BRT. Unlike in, say, Bogotá and Curitiba, it doesn’t involve distinct branding and rolling stock. Instead, long-established bus lines have been rerouted onto special lanes that have been constructed in the center of several of Buenos Aires streets. Some of the wider streets now have four bus lanes in their center; the outer lanes allow passing. The buses are still subject to red lights and, in most cases, the stations have no prepayment facilities, but route times have been speeded considerably. It hasn’t been very easy politically to create the Metrobús system, since, in most cases, adding the bus lanes meant reducing the number of car lanes, but the system is now up to more than 50 km, approximately as many as the Subte system.

The four-lane Metrobús line that runs down the middle of the wide Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires’ city center.

[3] There have been some serious attempts to discipline drivers. Argentine drivers have a reputation for being quite aggressive. The Lonely Planet guidebook says that “Being a pedestrian in Argentina is perhaps one of the country’s more difficult ventures.”⁷ In fact, compared to their counterparts in, say, India or Indonesia, Argentine drivers seem pretty disciplined. They obey red lights. They know they’re supposed to yield to pedestrians when making turns and where there are clearly marked crosswalks, and, in my experience, they can almost always be persuaded to do the right thing, but aggressive pedestrian behavior is often required. This isn’t of course particularly comfortable or safe for pedestrians. When I was in Buenos Aires, there were signs all over the city telling drivers to yield to pedestrians (“Siempre prioridad peatón”). It would be nice to feel that these were having an effect. I did not, in any case, feel particularly unsafe there. The situation is roughly comparable to that in, say, New York or Chicago.

Digital “Siempre prioridad peatón” sign over a street, one of many thousands of such signs.

[4] Bicycle lanes have been added. Latin America, with its often narrow streets and aggressive drivers, isn’t a particularly logical place for pushing bicycle usage, but bicycle facilities have been added in numerous Latin American cities over the last ten years, including Buenos Aires. Protected bicycle lanes (“ciclovías”) appear to be particularly common in the most prosperous parts of the city, where they are definitely used at least to some extent.

Protected bicycle path at a street corner, Avenida Coronel Díaz, on the border of Recoleta and Palermo. Photograph taken 2015.

There are also several streets in the old central business district, the Microcentro, where something like half the street has been turned into a pair of corridors that might be termed “bicycle-priority lanes.” The Spanish term for this arrangement is “carriles compartidos” (“shared lanes”).

Street with a carril compartido (“shared lane”) in the Microcentro.

[5] There has also been a great deal of street pedestrianization. This has been especially common in the Microcentro, where Calle Florida, pedestrianized several decades ago, was for many years considered the most important shopping street in Buenos Aires. Several other streets in or near the Microcentro have been pedestrianized in recent years.

The pedestrianized Calle Lavalle, Microcentro.

It’s claimed that the advent of the Metrobús system has encouraged this since it’s allowed several routes that once ran on minor north-south streets to be moved to the Metrobús corridors along the Avenida 9 de Julio or along the route known as El Bajo that runs closer to the Rio de la Plata.

Further pedestrianization is planned. In one case a hybrid Metrobús/pedestrian corridor is under construction. Two lanes along several blocks of Avenida Corrientes, a street known for its entertainment venues, are to become a Metrobús corridor by day and a pedestrian corridor in the evening. (Exactly how this will work is a bit of a mystery.)

What will become a bus lane during the day and a pedestrian path in the evening along Avenida Corrientes.

Unfortunately, some of Buenos Aires’ pedestrianized streets, while bustling by day and well into the evening, have acquired a reputation for being dangerous at night despite the presence of dozens of police officers.

[6] A serious effort is being made to fix up sidewalks. A major problem for pedestrians is that the sidewalks are not maintained very well.

Broken sidewalk along Calle Defensa in San Telmo.

Buenos Aires’ insistence on using ornamental bricks rather than concrete slabs means that sidewalks require frequent repair. A Plan Integral de Veredas (“Complete sidewalk plan”) has been established to deal with the problem. There were definitely quite a number of repair projects going on when I was in Buenos Aires last month. In the short term, these actually make walking a bit harder, because pedestrians must detour around construction zones, but they might eventually make a real difference.

Sidewalk under repair, probably along Avenida Pueyrredón, Recoleta.

[7] Parks are being added. Buenos Aires is not particularly well supplied with parkland, and most of the bigger parks that exist adjoin its well-off neighborhoods and are somewhat cut up by roads. There are some weekend road closings, for example in the 3 de Febrero Park, but they only help so much.

The Parque 3 de Febrero, Palermo.

A particularly wonderful park that adjoins the central city has been added in the years since the 1980s: the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur. This park was created on islands in the Rio de la Plata that had formed to some extent accidentally as a result of river currents and landfill disposal. These islands eventually acquired plant cover and attracted wildlife, and they look natural even if they’re not at all. The area covered by the Reserva is bigger than Central Park,⁸ but the park includes substantial lakes and mangroves, and much of it is quite reasonably fenced off-to discourage pedestrian access. The paths that do exist enormously increase the number of close-to-CBD pedestrian spaces in Buenos Aires, and they get pretty busy on weekends.

One of the few open spaces with dry land in the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur. The large water body is the Rio de la Plata.

Heading back to the city from the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur late on a Sunday afternoon. The tall buildings are in Puerto Madero.

[8] Puerto Madero, a new neighborhood, has been created to be pedestrian-friendly. Puerto Madero is a residential/commercial neighborhood that has been replacing the old, obsolete port since the 1990s. It is comparable in many ways to neighborhoods like London’s Docklands and Hamburg’s HafenCity. As in these other cities, the designers of Puerto Madero preserved some older buildings (as well as numerous cranes). They also added quite a few, including many of Buenos Aires’ largest skyscrapers, some residential and some commercial.

Pedestrian “street” along the old harbor in Puerto Madero. The tall buildings include apartments or offices.

As with other “neoliberal” urban renewal projects throughout the world, Puerto Madero’s advertising often stresses its ecological soundness, including its pedestrian facilities, but there is no hiding its attempt to be sound commercially as well. Puerto Madero includes, for example, two pedestrian “streets” along the old harbor. But these aren’t the kind of streets where local people leave off their dry cleaning on the way to work. They’re lined so completely with cafés and restaurants as to become a little uncomfortable for pedestrians who simply want to walk. Elsewhere, the streets of Puerto Madero have good, wide sidewalks, and there are several new parks as well, but the developers have included parking facilities in every building and have also left space for arterials.⁹ Puerto Madero was clearly not built for pedestrians in quite the way that much of the Palermo district, for example, was, but at least pedestrians have not been forgotten. And no one would argue that Puerto Madero is a failure. It’s become the most expensive place to live in Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires, in other words, has made a real effort in recent years to restore and improve the status, safety, and comfort of pedestrians and transit users in much of its central city. The phrase that much of the extensive documentation on this effort sometimes uses is “prioridad peatonal” (literally, “pedestrian priority”).¹⁰ By all accounts this effort has been reasonably successful. It’s also been popular politically, at least with the inhabitants of the central city, who (unlike most Latin Americans) have never lost their taste for high-density urban life. The well-off and middle-class parts of the city of Buenos Aires still seem for the most part to be healthy, reasonably safe, and deeply urban places.¹¹

I spent a few days in Abu Dhabi in early March. I had been there once before, but only for a couple of hours on a very hot day in 2010. This was my first extended stay in the city. I was particularly interested in looking at Abu Dhabi’s pedestrian facilities.

It’s impossible to consider or understand Abu Dhabi without comparing it to the United Arab Republic’s other major city, Dubai. Dubai is much larger. It has perhaps three and half million people, but the Dubai urban area, which includes adjoining Sharjah and Ajman, has a population of something like five and half million. It contains more than half the population of the UAE. Dubai, in other words, has become by any standards a very large place, a key component of the world urban hierarchy. Abu Dhabi is a substantial city too, but it is considerably smaller than Dubai. An urban-area population figure of 1.8 million is sometimes given.¹

Dubai has a probably well-deserved reputation for being by far the bolder and more innovative city. After all, it has the world’s tallest building, largest shopping mall, and longest indoor ski slope. For quite a number of years it had the world’s longest driverless metro, and it’s in the process of constructing the world’s largest airport. Abu Dhabi can’t claim any of these distinctions, and, in fact it has not been nearly as good as Dubai at following through on its more ambitious plans. Plans to build a metro, along with a branch of the Guggenheim Museum, an ecologically sound settlement in Masdar City and, in general, much of what was aimed for in the Abu Dhabi 2030 master plan, have been put on hold.

There is another difference between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Dubai is considered in the context of the Arab world a socially pretty liberal place. It’s not hard for non-Muslims to buy alcohol or pork; and it’s more or less okay to wear mildly immodest clothing. Abu Dhabi isn’t Riyadh, but it prefers to keep activities that are considered un-Muslim by religious conservatives pretty much invisible. It is definitely the more conservative city.

Curiously, however, Dubai has more well-preserved older neighborhoods than Abu Dhabi. Districts like Deira and Bur Dubai have few genuinely old buildings but function in many ways like traditional Muslim cities. Abu Dhabi, in contrast, completely obliterated the pre-1960s settlement after the oil started flowing.

In the broad scheme of things, the two cities have much in common. Both are very car-oriented and have numerous huge skyscrapers. Both are wonderfully multi-ethnic places in which foreigners outnumber Emiratis by something like ten to one. The foreigners come from all over, but include particularly large numbers of people from southern India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the poorer Arab countries. Foreigners include well-paid professionals (among whom there are many westerners), clerical and service workers earning modest salaries, and badly exploited manual laborers. Solid data are unavailable, but it’s pretty certain that the level of inequality in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi is as high as it is anywhere.

I was struck when I was in Dubai last December at all the efforts that have been made in the last few years to mitigate two or three decades of car-centric development (see my earlier post). Dubai hasn’t exactly become a pedestrian paradise, but it now has good public transit; drivers almost always yield to pedestrians at crosswalks; and there are now numerous facilities aimed at pedestrians and cyclists.

Abu Dhabi has been moving in a similar direction but generally on a much smaller scale. It’s never built the long-planned metro, but it has quite an elaborate bus system.² And it too has some facilities for pedestrians and cyclists and is planning more, although the geography of pedestrian life in Abu Dhabi is quite different from that in Dubai.

Central Abu Dhabi, with facilities for pedestrians and cyclists emphasized. These include both major paths like the Corniche along the top of the built-up area and some short bridges and tunnels and (in a few cases) purpose-built sidewalks. GIS data come from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, somewhat modified.

Broader view of Abu Dhabi. Some of the settlements on the city’s edge are earmarked for construction workers. GIS data again come from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, somewhat modified.

Abu Dhabi’s central business district (Markaziya), for example, is quite different from any of Dubai’s centers. Actually, it’s been constructed to accommodate pedestrians perhaps a little more smoothly than any of Dubai’s newer developments, which, despite the size of their buildings, are very car-oriented. Central Abu Dhabi, laid out in 1968 by an Egyptian city planner, Abdul Rahman Makhlouf,³ seems in some ways startlingly North American. The wide streets are arranged in a grid. There are sidewalks almost everywhere. Tall buildings—a mix of office and apartment towers—line the major streets. Most have shops on the ground floor. The chief oddity of the arrangement is that the blocks are huge, averaging something like 500 x 500 m. Also, separate right turn lanes are often carved into the sidewalk. Because many buildings rise to about the same height on some streets, central Abu Dhabi can vaguely resemble parts of downtown Washington or Ottawa, where height limits created the uniform landscape (but Abu Dhabi’s buildings are taller, and housing and retailing are more important land-use components there).

Zayed the First Road, Abu Dhabi. Note the uniform heights of most of the buildings and the parking in the lower bottom that interrupts the sidewalks available along most of the street. 

Within the Abu Dhabi CBD’s huge blocks, there is a great deal of variety. Often, the block centers include surface and low-rise parking facilities. Typically, there are also other low buildings, between which are winding pedestrian paths and drivable streets.

There is a surprisingly healthy pedestrian life along the arterials in Abu Dhabi’s CBD. There are people walking on the streets until late at night. There are also some open spaces that have become informal meeting places.⁴

Crossing streets—which can be extremely difficult and even dangerous in much of the Arab world—is easy as long as you’re willing to walk to a corner with a traffic light and then wait for the light to change. It’s quite common to have a wait for a couple of minutes in the middle of a busy road.

Waiting to cross Zayed the First Road.

There are also several dozen underpasses that will take you across main roads. These never, however, have escalators or elevators. Jaywalking, subject to a large fine, is practically non-existent.

Pedestrian tunnel under Zayed the First Road.

Pedestrians do have to watch out for changing sidewalk levels, and in front of some buildings sidewalks have been partially replaced by surface parking. There is no doubt that even in the CBD the expectation is that most movement will be by motor vehicle, but it really isn’t that hard to do without. In central Abu Dhabi at least, I saw nothing as hostile to pedestrians as Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai.

Away from Abu Dhabi’s CBD, there are many fewer pedestrians, but it does seem as though sidewalks exist in most places, at least on Abu Dhabi Island. They become scarce in more remote suburbs, and the new tall office and apartment buildings that have been built in several outlying areas are not easily reachable on foot, although, as in Dubai, many new developments do have pedestrian paths and advertise their walkability (example here). They wouldn’t do this if there weren’t some demand for walkable space.

Abu Dhabi, like Dubai, also has some specially built pedestrian facilities, most of which are clearly aimed at recreational users. The most outstanding example is the Corniche, which runs nearly the whole length of the northwest side of Abu Dhabi Island, a distance of about 8 km, with some branches around the breakwater and toward the Emirates Palace Hotel at its southwestern end. There are also many supplementary paths in the adjoining parks.

Abu Dhabi’s Corniche.

The Corniche actually goes back several decades, but it’s been moved northwest and improved as part of a landfill project that created both a through road and a considerable amount of parkland along Abu Dhabi’s edge. Unfortunately, the parallel road is never far from the pedestrian path, especially along the Corniche’s southwestern two or three kilometers.

The Corniche is well-used, especially in the early morning and the late afternoon and early evening. Most users are either walking pedestrians or people sitting around and socializing. There are also some runners and cyclists, the latter of whom are supposed to use a separate bicycle path that runs nearly the entire length of the Corniche but don’t always. Users appear to come from all of Abu Dhabi’s many ethnicities.

The bicycle path that runs along nearly the entire Corniche. Photo also shows the pedestrian path (right) and Corniche Road (left).

The Corniche adjoins the Markaziya, and its southwestern end is right next to a very impressive cluster of skyscrapers that form a subsidiary business district. Users of the Corniche thus have a wonderful view of Abu Dhabi’s skyscrapers. In Dubai, in contrast, the beach paths generally adjoin medium- or low-rise residential neighborhoods, so the urban views aren’t nearly as striking.

There are shorter pedestrian facilities elsewhere in Abu Dhabi, for example the Eastern Mangroves Corniche opposite Mangrove National Park in southeast Dubai and a (brand new) path on the western the of Al Maryah Island, where another subsidiary high-rise business and residential district is being developed (among other things it contains a branch of the Cleveland Clinic).

New recreational path on Al Maryah Island, which, for the moment, seems to be attracting only a few users.

There are also some pedestrian facilities on Al Saadiyat Island, part of which is becoming a cultural district. The first branch of the Louvre outside Paris—one of the elements in Abu Dhabi’s most ambitious plans that has actually opened—is located here. One problem, however, with the Saadiyat Island complex is that it’s not possible to walk or bicycle there, at least from central Abu Dhabi. You need to take a limited-access highway, which has no space for anything but motor traffic.

There are plans to increase the number of pedestrian facilities, even in the outer city.⁵

The United Arab Emirates of course has an economy in which the extraction of oil is the most important activity, and most of the UAE’s oil is located in the Abu Dhabi emirate.⁶ Abu Dhabi could have aimed to become a city in which nearly all travel was by automobile. The fact that it has chosen to put at least some of its resources into creating pedestrian facilities appears to reflect the sophisticated understanding of its decision makers that complete automobile dependence creates an aesthetically disagreeable place with limited recreational opportunities. It would be nice to think that they’ve also realized that a completely car-centric city is one where the carless have serious mobility problems.

I wrote about Singapore’s “park connectors” in an earlier post. Park connectors are paths for pedestrians and cyclists that now provide access to much of Singapore. They have been built quite self-consciously to promote Singapore’s goal of becoming a “car-lite” society. Despite their name, they often don’t connect parks. Their geography has chiefly been determined by the location of places where it was easy to insert them. This generally means corridors with few road crossings, which end up being for the most part along waterways, lakefronts, and coasts. There are now more than 300 km of such paths. Here’s a map:¹

Map showing park connectors and rail transit lines in Singapore. The “Rail Corridor” is the corridor through which the rail line to Kuala Lumpur once passed; it’s—slowly!—being turned into a recreational trail. The MRT is Singapore’s urban “heavy”-rail system. The LRT (administered jointly with the MRT) is a grade-separated people mover serving certain new towns. “U/C” = “under construction.” GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and from the government of Singapore, modified; see footnote 1.

Most park connectors have been inserted into already built-up parts of the city. I made a point on a recent trip to Singapore of visiting Punggol and its neighbor Sengkang, two of Singapore’s newest “new towns,” where the linear recreational pathways that were later called park connectors were built into the urban fabric from the beginning. I was particularly interested in seeing just how these functioned.

Punggol and Sengkang are in extreme northeastern Singapore. The area in which they’re located was the site of villages many of whose inhabitants were farmers and fishermen as late as the early 1990s, the period when the area was earmarked as the site of two new towns. Thanks to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and then the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, development was rather slow. Many parts of Punggol and Sengkang are still not built up, and there is a great deal of construction going on, especially along the areas’ northern and eastern edges. Here’s a map:

Punggol and Sengkang, Singapore. See previous map for explanation of legend and list of sources.

Like Singapore’s other new towns, Punggol and Sengkang were planned under the influence of “modern” concepts of how to build a city. Buildings do not touch neighboring buildings. Land uses are kept separate. Congestion is avoided. Despite the origin of these towns in the 1990s and their implementation in the 21st century, the ideas of “new urbanism” apparently played no role in determining their basic morphology. There are no vibrant shopping streets in Punggol and Sengkang. The commercial heart of both Punggol and Sengkang is an enclosed mall, set next to the subway station.

Waterway Point, the center of Punggol Central District.

The two subway stations are connected with the rest of Punggol and Sengkang by what are called LRTs in Singapore: miniature driverless trains that some would call people movers.

The LRT in Sengkang.

Essentially all the housing in both Punggol and Sengkang is high-rise housing, mostly put up by the Housing & Development Board (HDB). HDB housing in Punggol and Sengkang, like other new HDB housing Singapore, is of high quality and not easy to distinguish from private housing. The negative stereotype of public housing in the United States or Britain does not apply to Singapore.

Housing in both Punggol and Sengkang is built on very large blocks, through which it’s possible to walk or drive slowly on somewhat irregular paths and streets. There are also arterials, which have a great deal of traffic and which pedestrians must usually cross by bridges. The arterials do have sidewalks, but they take you quite close to the traffic. There are very few pedestrians walking along the arterials.

Sengkang East Drive. Part of a park connector on the right.

The physical geography of Punggol and Sengkang is significant. Most of these areas consist of a low plateau, surrounded on three sides by substantial water barriers. To the north lies the Johor Strait, which separates Singapore from Malaysia; to the east and west are former rivers that have been converted into reservoirs. The Punggol Waterway joins the two reservoirs. The waterways are several meters lower than most of the housing.

The park connectors all lie along the watercourses, just as they do in most parts of Singapore. As a result, there is no cross-traffic to deal with. But it’s almost inevitable that your starting and ending points will be several meters higher than the park connector. The views from the park connectors are often uphill to housing.

Man running along the park connector that follows Punggol Waterway. In the background, up a hill and behind a tree, an LRT train.

My impression was that most park connector use is recreational in nature. There are lots of cyclists (joined, I think unfortunately, by users of what in Singapore are called “personal-mobility devices” (PMDs), that is, electrically powered scooters and bicycles).² There are also a fair number of runners and of people who appear to be fairly serious walkers, or at least dog walkers. Most of the park connectors in Punggol and Sengkang (as well as elsewhere in Singapore) have acquired a solid line to separate pedestrians from cyclists and PMD users; in a few places there are two separate paths. There are only a small number of benches along the park connectors; they do get used, and I rather suspect that additional benches would be appreciated. I wouldn’t describe the park connectors of Punggol and Sengkang as being overwhelmingly crowded at any time, but they aren’t empty either.

Park connector near central Punggol, viewed from a higher roadway bridge.

The fact that the HDB shows what appear to be park connectors in some of its advertisements suggests that people find their presence a positive thing.

Advertisement for Housing & Development Board (HDB) housing near Lorong Halus Bridge, Punggol.

However, it’s almost impossible to imagine that the park connectors would be enormously useful for doing most errands. Even aside from the fact that most trips will end with a climb, the park connectors rarely constitute logical paths to shopping areas, transit stations, or housing. I didn’t see a lot of park connector users who seemed to be on their way to work or who were carrying shopping bags. You do see such people along the park connectors like the Siglap Park Connector that have been inserted into older neighborhoods near Singapore’s center and that are much more likely to take you directly to subway stations, stores, and housing.

The Siglap Park Connector, which runs along an older drainage canal through long-established neighborhoods in southeastern Singapore. It’s pretty clear that, unlike the park connectors in Punggol and Sengkang, this park connector attracts numerous commuters and people doing local errands.

It’s easy to see how the park connectors improve lives for residents of Punggol and Sengkang who want to get a little exercise. I wish all city neighborhoods had them. It’s a little hard to see how they contribute substantially to making Singapore a “car-lite” society. This is not a secret to Singapore’s intelligent and thoughtful planners. A pedestrian path (a “green finger”) from the Punggol Waterway to central Punggol is planned for the future.³ The idea is that this will help integrate the park connectors into the street fabric of Punggol. You’d still usually have to go out of your way to use them, however.

Dubai is known as a very car-oriented place.¹ Exhibit number one is Sheikh Zayed Road, a 16-to-24-lane limited-access highway that extends through nearly the whole length of Dubai’s post-1990s neighborhoods including those containing most of the city’s famous skyscrapers.

Sheikh Zayed Road from the pedestrian bridge built to allow Metro passengers to cross it. Dubai Metro is on the right, Dubai Tram is on the left. For the first twenty years of the widened road’s existence, it was practically impossible to cross it on foot.

Pedestrian needs were the last thing on its creators’ minds when it was built, and for several decades Sheikh Zayed Road was all but uncrossable on foot. A New Yorker article from 2005 suggested that Sheikh Zayed Road was “as if Fifth Avenue had been allowed to evolve into the Long Island Expressway.”² Sheikh Zayed Road is not the only problem faced by pedestrians in Dubai. The fact is that, if you try to walk just about anywhere in one of the newer parts of the city, you will frequently come to places where the sidewalk ends or where cross-traffic makes it impossible to move forward.

Pedestrian-unfriendly commercial urban street. Southwest of Burjuman station, Dubai Metro in the background. Photograph taken February 2010.

In fact, as I was reminded in the course of a recent trip to Dubai (my fourth), this stereotype exaggerates. The older parts of Dubai—especially Deira on the right (northeast) bank of Dubai Creek but also Bur Dubai across the Creek—predate Dubai’s massive automobilization. Deira isn’t particularly old–there were just a few dozen buildings there in the 19th century—but, even without old buildings, it does a pretty good job of functioning like a traditional Muslim city.

Commercial street in Deira.

Its streets are narrow and irregular. There are small street-level shops lining many streets. Some streets have been pedestrianized, and a few pedestrianized blocks have even acquired rooves.

The gold market in Deira. Covered section is in the background.

The latter mostly serve a tourist market that seems to be doing pretty well. Across the Creek in Bur Dubai, there are even some tiny neighborhoods—Shindagha and al Fahidi—where traditional urban buildings have been restored or (I think more often) reconstructed, and these neighborhoods are even more pedestrian-friendly. There is a path along the Creek on which motor traffic is forbidden, and it gets quite a lot of use.

The walkway along Dubai Creek in Shindagha, Burj Khalifa (8 km away) in background.

Even the outer parts of Deira, like the area around the Riqqa Metro station, where the streets are wide and straight, have busy sidewalks, full of restaurants and hotels and apartment and office buildings built flush with the street. It’s hard to imagine a more pedestrian-friendly area.

Along Al Rigga Road, outside Deira proper.

The fact that, faced with draconian fines, drivers do respect pedestrians—they stop at red lights and even at crosswalks—helps enormously. Deira and Bur Dubai are much more pleasant—and safer—for pedestrians than just about any other places in the Arab world.

Even in the much larger parts of Dubai that have mostly been developed over the last thirty or so years and that really were built mostly to accommodate the automobile there have been some developments over the last decade that have in some gentle ways changed things a little.

The most obvious change is that a Metro was built, complementing an already existing pretty good public bus system. The first Metro line opened in 2009, the second in 2011.

Map of Dubai and vicinity focusing on rail lines and pedestrian facilities. GIS data from Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified considerably, chiefly by the addition of some recently built walkways. The database includes pedestrian facilities like bridges across streets and extremely short alleyways that may be somewhat confusing in a map at this scale, especially in the older parts of the city, but the broad patterns should be clear.

The Metro was constructed in every way to modern standards. For a time Dubai’s Metro was the world’s longest driverless system. The stations (even those on the elevated portions of the line) are all air-conditioned.

The Al Ghubaiba subway station, Dubai Metro.

Trains come along every couple of minutes during peak times. The system is generally considered a great success. There are approximately 350,000 riders a day (in an urban area of maybe three million). There are definitely some issues for people who want to walk to the stations that are situated in the outer part of the city. But these have been at least mitigated. When the Metro was being constructed, it built enclosed, air-conditioned bridges over the roads it follows, even Sheikh Zayed Road. You don’t have to buy a Metro ticket to use these bridges. There are also additional pedestrian bridges, typically not built as part of Metro construction, that take you to destinations close to but not right at stations. The most spectacular of these is a 1-km enclosed bridge between the Metro’s Burj Khalifa station and Dubai Mall (said to be the world’s largest). Anyone who doubted the willingness of Dubai’s residents to walk anywhere would be amazed by the sheer number of people who use this bridge. Cynics would say that it’s no coincidence that Dubai’s busiest walkway is air-conditioned, includes moving sidewalks, and takes you to a mall.

The covered (and air-conditioned) bridge between the Burj Khalifa Metro station and Dubai Mall. Photograph taken October 2015.

A “tram” system was added in 2014. This light-rail line complements the Metro, intersecting with it in two places and serving several new developments in the Jumeirah area. There is also a monorail to Palm Jumeirah. Neither the tram nor the monorail has attracted a huge number of riders. The price of the (private) monorail may be a factor. The fare is 15 AED (USD 4.08). (The fares on the Metro and tram are reasonable.)

Even more significant (and contrary to every stereotype about Dubai), the government has embarked on a program of building walking and bicycling paths and urging their use. These are all separate from the road network. As in many other automobile-oriented cities, it has seemed easiest to build new pedestrian facilities that have nothing to do with the existing road network rather than to try to improve sidewalks and street crossings and perhaps to impede traffic. The catch is that, as in most places, the new pedestrian facilities don’t fit together very well or necessarily permit walking to places where one would want to go.

The first large-scale construction of pedestrian facilities may have occurred in semi-private developments in a part of Dubai known as the Dubai Marina.³ The most impressive single development here is Jumeirah Beach Residence, said to be the largest new residential complex in the world (2010). This area was marketed particularly to Europeans, and the advertisements endlessly extol its “7 km of landscaped public walkways.”

Ad for the Marina’s walkways. This ad is plastered over nearly every construction fence in the development. It’s clear that the project’s builders believe this to be a selling point. Photograph taken October 2015.

Most of these paths follow a waterway that connects with the Gulf at both ends.

Walkway in the Marina.

There is also a street called the Walk (2008), which has a wide sidewalk and only a narrow automobile lane.

The Walk, Marina, Dubai.

The street is lined with restaurants (mostly North American fast-food restaurants putting on a very elegant face) and seems to attract quite a lot of business even during Dubai’s hot season. In other words, the developers have done what they could to create a congenial walking environment here.

Several other new developments in southwestern Dubai have followed suit and have incorporated walking facilities into their planning. Note all the green on the lower left of the map.

Pedestrian paths have also been built (this time mostly by the Roads and Transport Authority) along beaches. There’s a 6.8 km “Jumeirah Jogging Trail” between roughly the Burj al Arab and the new Dubai Water Canal dating from 2014.

Jumeirah Jogging Track. Its relative emptiness is typical.

It continues in two separate shorter segments south of the Dubai Water Canal. It attracts both runners and walkers—and a few (not quite legal) cyclists.

The massive Dubai Water Canal project has led to the construction of possibly the most ambitious pedestrian development of all. The Dubai Water Canal is in effect an extension of Dubai Creek southwest from its former terminus in the Nature Reserve. It passes southwest of “Downtown Dubai” and then turns back toward the Gulf, passing by the new Business Bay, a mammoth development of skyscraper office and apartment buildings. There are walkways on both sides of the Water Canal and some pedestrian bridges too (latest segment opened, 2018). The walkways are impressive, but I couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be very few people using them when I was there.

Dubai Water Canal walkway with lone runner and cyclist. Note “Downtown Dubai” and Business Bay in the background and the construction site to the left. Despite Dubai’s reputation for being a high-rise city, most middle-class people probably live in two-story single-family houses more or less like those shown in the middle distance.

Runners, walkers, and cyclists were greatly outnumbered by the mostly South Asian laborers employed to maintain the paths. The paths did get a little more crowded after sundown. There are even a few lone women joggers after dark, a real sign that this is a safe area.

There are a few more users along the Dubai Water Canal late in the afternoon and even after dark.

It also needs to be said that many sites along the Dubai Water Canal are still undeveloped. It’s often mentioned that this billion-dollar project has inspired ten billion dollars in development work, and, when this work is further along, more people may use the Canal walkway. But it’s clear that the development of the Dubai Water Canal walkway has not turned very many residents of the housing developments on its banks into avid urban pedestrians. This appears especially true of Asian residents of these developments. I couldn’t help but notice that most users of the walkway are ethnic Westerners, largely expatriates.

The walkway along the Dubai Water Canal is supposed to be extended to the old Dubai Creek someday, but, for the moment, it stops where there’s a tangle of limited-access highways at the edge of “Downtown Dubai.”⁴

End of Dubai Water Canal walkway.

There are also quite a number of new cycling paths at the edge of the city, which I haven’t visited. There are supposed to be 500 km of “cycling tracks” by 2021 and 850 km by 2030.⁵ Note that Dubai has a pretty good record of actually building what it sets out to build.

It’s quite striking how much Dubai has had a change of heart when it comes to its urban development policies. Dubai’s urban decision-making is not at all transparent, but what is clear is that its government is acutely aware of foreign comments and completely au courant with current trends in planning. I’m sure that there is wide awareness of the fact that Western planning agencies no longer think that accommodating the automobile should be the most important goal of urban planners. There is also the issue that Dubai’s government loves to astonish the world, and it has chosen to do so in part with its decisions about urban architecture and planning. The emphasis on turning an automobile-oriented place into one more congenial for pedestrians and cyclists is surely one manifestation of this tendency. The fact that Dubai is competing with Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, and other places—many of which have their own schemes for tilting modal splits away from the automobile—has certainly also been a factor in the shift in emphasis.