I keep coming back to James Scott's concept of legibility: the state's desire to make society readable, countable, controllable. He wrote about it in the context of forestry and agriculture, but the same logic is everywhere in urban design.
The legibility impulse
Every city planning department wants things to be legible. Clear sightlines. Consistent signage. Predictable block patterns. Zoning that separates uses into tidy categories. The argument is always safety and efficiency.
But some of the most beloved public spaces in the world are profoundly illegible. The medinas of Moroccan cities. The back alleys of Tokyo. The winding streets of old European town centers. These places resist being read from above, and that resistance is what creates their texture.
What gets lost
When you optimize a streetscape for legibility, you tend to eliminate:
- Dead ends (which create quiet pockets and neighborhood identity)
- Mixed-use ambiguity (the barbershop next to the bodega next to the daycare)
- Visual clutter (which is often just evidence of human activity)
- Irregular geometry (which creates surprising spatial experiences)
The legible city is easier to police, easier to navigate, and easier to maintain. But it's also flatter. Less interesting. Less alive.
The question I'm sitting with
Is there a way to design for both? Can you give people enough wayfinding to feel safe without steamrolling the organic complexity that makes a neighborhood feel like a neighborhood? I don't have the answer yet, but I suspect it lives somewhere in the distinction between "readable" and "navigable." Those aren't the same thing, and conflating them has cost us a lot.