What if you could relive the same day over and over again until you got it right? It sounds like fantasy, but much like Phil in the film Groundhog Day, we become experts at the things we relive every day—routines like commuting.
An excerpt from Groundhog Day
[Phil and his love interest Rita sit at a table in a diner. Phil has just told Rita he is immortal. Rita has her doubts.]
Phil: “How do you know I’m not a God?”
Rita: “Because it’s not possible.”
[Phil runs around to various diner patrons, revealing personal details he has collected through years of observing the same day again and again from countless perspectives.]
Rita: “This is some kind of trick.”
Phil: “Well maybe the real God uses tricks. Maybe he’s not omnipotent; he’s just been around for so long he knows everything.”
If repetitiousness is next to godliness, it may seem unfortunate that we only get to repeat things like travelling between home and work or school, but we can learn so much about how cities work from routines like these.
I for one have become an expert at walking to school. I live in Federal Hill in Providence, on the other side of the downtown from Brown University, and I walk there almost every day. Since I’ve been organizing Providence’s first Jane’s Walk—a festival of free walking tours led by city-dwellers about what matters to them in their own neighborhoods—I’ve been thinking a lot about my own daily walking routes, and how they have changed since I first moved to Providence. So on a whim, I decided to write this blog post about my daily walk to school, starting with a map tracking how my route has evolved.
My evolving daily path to school. The blue path represents my current path of choice, while the red ones represent other ways I have tried.
As I drew this map, it struck me how my route had improved over time as I found new shortcuts and tricks while avoiding annoyances. My route didn’t just change over time willy-nilly—there was a logic to it. It was evolving.
In Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities & Software, the computer scientist David Jefferson points out the simple circumstances necessary to create a system of Darwinian evolution: “All you need are objects that are capable of reproducing themselves, and reproducing themselves imperfectly, and having some sort of resource limitation so there’s competition.”
Jefferson used this basic axiom to create an evolution simulator called Tracker, a program where generations of digital ants would slowly learn to follow a trail. The first generation of ants, all starting from the same point on the grid, would move randomly around the screen, but only the ants closest to the path would be allowed to reproduce. The ability of the next generation to follow the path would closely resemble its parents, but with some randomization so a few might get even closer. Again, those closest to the trail would reproduce, and so on.
Left: The trail used by the Darwinian evolution simulator Tracker to test the “fitness” of its digital ants; Right: A diagram comparing how city-dwellers navigate short blocks and long blocks from Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities.
My daily commute closely resembles Tracker. Much like the ants, I didn’t know what the “fittest” path through the city might be, but through “generations” of iteration and experimentation, I found a path that made best use of my limited resources: time and effort. But unlike the arbitrary path used in Tracker, my evolving path through Providence doesn’t only measure my own navigational fitness; it also measures the fitness of the city.
The navigational choices I make, as I learn the city better, reflect my observations about how the city works and how it does not. For instance, I generally avoid traffic lights in Providence whenever possible, because pedestrians always have to push the button to get a walk light, and the downtown sports a number of particularly inconvenient and dangerous intersections. Instead, I try to seek out mid-block zebra crosswalks, where I do not have to push a button, or wait, or worry about multiple directions of traffic.
In turn, these value judgements that we all make have concrete social and economic effects on the city in aggregate. As Jane Jacobs observes in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, my path determines which businesses I patronize and which people I run into. Neighborhoods that offer multiple convergence points for various people’s paths offer greater economic opportunity and public life at those points, and a better distribution of services. Many planners, architects, and developers now value mixed-use neighbourhoods (another of Jacobs’ tenets), but a mixture of uses requires a mixture of users. Understanding and harnessing people’s everyday habits and routines can help build a diverse group of patrons to support a diversity of endeavours.
Iovino’s Market: a true convenience store. This shop on a corner near my apartment serves a diversity of clientele. It’s on my own path home, but it also draws people from a nearby school, people living in the neighbourhood, and no doubt, other people on their paths to and from work. Their stock seems to reflect this splintered clientele: a balance of fresh vegetables and other groceries, packaged snacks, and home-cooked food.