Blogs and the short block

Jason Kottke posts about the virtues of short blocks, which he's noticing with fresh eyes now that he's relocated to the West Village. (Welcome, Jason!) Jane Jacobs talks about this in Death and Life: why the tighter, short-block grid is preferable to the looser grid with long stretches between intersections. It's one of the gems from that book that I didn't address in Emergence, but I've talked about it in a couple of speeches, including one at O'Reilly's Emerging Tech conference last May. Jason and I were emailing about the idea -- and how it potentially connected to the web, and the blogosphere -- and I realized that I'd never published anything about short blocks. (As far as I can remember.)

I think there is a useful connection to be made here. The power of short blocks is ultimately that they create a more even density in the city fabric: because short blocks offer more potential routes from x to y, they diversify the flow of pedestrian traffic through the city. In the long blocks model, pedestrians are funneled onto a few primary pathways, which quickly become over-crowded. With short blocks, they spread out through the entire street system. So you get some people on every street, unlike the long blocks model, which puts all the people on some streets, and no people on other streets. In the long blocks model, you get Times Square interspersed with desolate stretches; in the short blocks model you get the West Village: a bar or restaurant on every corner, a few interesting boutiques or bookstores in between, an interesting mix on the sidewalk, but never so much that you feel crowded out.

If you translate all this over to the Web, it seems to me that the blogosphere is the closest thing going to the short blocks neighborhood: the population density is not nearly as oppressive as what you find on the major sites (much less old media networks.) But it's not as atomized as the world of IM. Short blocks is 50 people on the sidewalk at any given time, instead of 5 or 500. The blogosphere is 50 people on the site at any given time, instead of 5 or 5 million. (Which reminds me of Dave Weinberger's line: "On the internet, everyone is famous to 15 people.") That's a very human scale, I think -- it opens you up to new perspectives, but doesn't overwhelm you at the same time.

Comments

[Maciej Ceglowski]

This topic reminds me of a recent experience I had at a website called Perlmonks, a programmers' hangout for Perl experts and novices alike. Despite being swamped with newcomers, the site manages to maintain a culture and community through several innovative little features.One of the best is a little "who is around right now" right-margin box, which lists members who have loaded a page in the last five minutes or so. Immediately under the box is a tiny HTML web chat called the "Chatterbox", open to everyone, which updates with each page reload. Since the nature of the site requires a lot of page loading, this gives a tolerable approximation of a real-time chat.
A few days ago, I accidentally turned both of these features while cleaning up my user preferences ( I had been a member for a few months ), and I immediately found that the site felt colder and less interesting. Where I used to read almost every question, now I became much pickier and less likely to respond. Although I had never used the chat feature or consciously looked at the user list, being able to idly listen in on the passing conversation had added a subliminal hum of activity to the site that was missing. To use the city blocks metaphor, with one change in preferences I went from walking down active streets with lots of chatter in the air, to feeling like I was in an empty museum of some kind, reading notes on a wall.
The most striking thing about this is how tiny a change it took to completely transform my experience on the site -- this after I had made far greater changes in the default template, layout, and other design elements, without any effect. I'd be curious to hear from others about features they've found on successful community sites that had this effect, particularly things we might steal for the blog community. For my part, I would encourage readers to visit perlmonks even if they don't speak a word of code, just to see how that one clever bit of design ( along with a neat voting system) helps make the site work, in fact mitigating a pretty awful look and feel.

[Anil]

I'm not sure longer blocks don't serve a useful function. I like that my block is quiet since I'm on a street, not an avenue. (For those outside of NYC, the long blocks are on streets, the short ones are on avenues.) Perhaps it's amplified by the fact that my street is closed off to traffic most of the time, but the closest approximation to a residential neighborhood that one will find in Manhattan is usually on longer blocks, where traffic density is lower and commercial real estate is much less common on the ground level.

To put it another way, a community needs to balance its high-traffic intersections where conversation goes on with low-traffic streets where the thinking is done.

The parallel in the web community would clearly be the tendency for the long-block old media outlets to generate the ideas that the short-block weblogs and IMs end up discussing.

[Greg]

Well. That explains LA....

[francesco]

Anil's right -- there's a value to getting away from the activity, but I'm not sure about the human density being more evenly distributed in the short-block model.

It's too complex to look at Avenue vs. Street blocks -- as primary conduits of traffic, it's natural that Avenues offer more sub-branching options (i.e. shorter blocks) than the secondary conduits, 'streets', and that same hierarchical order dictates that arteries lie further apart than their secondary tributaries (hence longer street blocks). The short-block/long-block comparison in, say, Midtown is more a hierarchy observation of how the "interesting" stuff will cluster along these primary conduits to chase the higher traffic counts, and not necessarily a pure long/short comparison.

A clearer comparison would be between long and short east-west blocks -- I will take some liberties here and guess that despite the Chelsea graphic accompanying his text, Jason *might* be noticing how quiet short-block streets in the West Village compare favorably with the equally quiet -- but much longer -- streets north of 14th street.

Assuming similar traffic levels on both types of street, the greater appeal of the shorter block lies in the variety; the hundred-yard blocks of pre-grid New York present the walker with a decision every minute, as well as a second degree of freedom for the eyeballs. You've barely cleared one intersection before happening across the next, with all the unexpected elements that lie around each corner.

By contrast, walking 18th street from 6th to 7th avenues, say, takes so long to navigate that you can't help but notice that you're moving in one dimension only. Everything you're going to be travelling past is already in your line of sight and you've still got a ways to go before the next intersection, with all it's possibilities and surprises.

Of course, the downside is obvious: heavy commuter crowds traversing 32nd street move quickly and linearly, without distraction. The same density of foot traffic in SoHo stops, starts and turns around, and the actual rate of flow is laughable. Then again, who's enjoying themselves more?

There's still an old media/new media parable in here somewhere, surely...

[nick sweeney]

Anil sums up my feelings about the role of 'long blocks' in Manhattan: sometimes people don't want to live amid the urban hum. I'm reminded of the curious sense of space and quiet that you can find, sometimes, in the 'off-streets' of the Upper East Side around by the Met. I think what's important in that regard is that they're long narrow streets, without too much traffic: there's a sense of being on a street, with the opportunity to cross over and so move diagonally, rather than simply being on one side of the street in the way that francesco describes. (This is in contrast, say, to the rather lifeless streets on the right bank of the Seine, radiating from L'Étoile, where you're stuck on a narrow pavement by a wide road.)

Now, in London you have that opportunity because there are lots of alleyways punctuating the main routes, rather than the grid pattern. And it's often here that you'll find the places where people live. (The odd, obviously expensive world of Zone 1 residential.)

[tim]

Thanks for the tip on the "Death & Life", just picked it up at the library. Oh yeah Emergence was very enlightening too. :-)

Any ideas or feedback on how to save/improve a neighborhood that is split by a 4 lane 45mph 'beach road' and would be considered suburbia - with a mix of fancy beach condos and old beach houses?

I've noticed a lot of ideas & philosophies about city design while surfing but nothing yet on suburbia. Getting neighbors interacting more often online is one of our highest priorities since we need to drive most everywhere and don't really get to 'pass each other on the sidewalk'.

Any discussion led down the suburbia path would be appreciated.
our 'hood can be found at opcl