Serendipity and the Grid, cont.
Noah Nathan responds on Bluesky to my previous post:
Thanks for engaging with the piece! Really interesting.
On your last point about suburbs, an interesting moderator for generalizing the argument is likely the interaction of transit mode choice and street layouts.
In a city like Accra, where something like only ~10% of residents have private cars, the main comparison is walking in a gridded layout vs walking in a more tangled layout. The greater inefficiency in paths through the tangled layout then can create more street-level interaction among pedestrians.
But in the US, the grid vs tangled layout comparison is confounded by transit mode choices: the inefficienecy in paths in the tangled layout induces people to just drive, and avoid each other, rather than meet. Nobody walks in those kinds of suburbs because the routes are too circuitous.
But in an urban grid, where the paths are more efficient, people will likely choose walking more often, which creates more street-level interaction. The opposite effect of my paper, basically.
Makes complete sense. I might add that even when the general population can afford private cars, some “legacy” street layouts are so narrow and tangled that the choice is essentially between walking and something so cute that it is likely to provoke serendipitous interactions:
