The Giving America Series · Proposal Nº 6
3D Cities
Where home extends beyond the house
In the 3D Cities article, we described five ways that a 3D city is different from the 2D cities most of us grew up in. But reading about a 3D city only gets you so far, so we’re building a small interactive for each of the five. The first one is ready now, and the other four are on their way.
3D Cities Are:
3D City Tour Guides
In the article, we called most American cities captive: outside of New York, you practically need a rental car just to get in the door. But plenty of places already have 3D pockets today, if you think outside the box of cars for a little bit. Here are one author’s three-day itineraries for two big American cities you can absolutely do without a car: Boston and San Francisco. You can follow this author’s itinerary as written, or use it as a starting point for your own.
Getting around
Photo credits
Take it with you
Once you’re actually out in the city, you won’t want to scroll back through an article. So on your phone, the itinerary turns into a little pocket guide: where you are, how to get to the next place, and a button for when you’re ready to move on.
It picks up wherever you are in the itinerary you’ve chosen above.
- It follows whatever you picked above: the city, the day, and even the pastry shop.
- Your progress is saved on your phone, so if you lose signal on the Red Line, you won’t lose your place.
- For live times, every ride links out to your maps app. We didn’t see much point in rebuilding Google Maps.
Is your city a 3D city?
Not every American city can be done this way, at least not yet. Plenty of places have perfectly decent trains and buses, but the things you’d actually want to see are spread too far apart, or the best parts are out in the nature past the edge of town, where the transit doesn’t go. Most of our cities were simply built around the car over the last seventy years, which is exactly what the 3D Cities proposal hopes to change.
Still, pockets of 3D city are all around us, and not only in big cities. Residential college campuses are one. The historic downtowns of New England towns like Salem, Massachusetts are another, since they predate the car; and Carmel, Indiana has made incredible 3D-city improvements in recent decades. It’s still hard to live completely without a car in places like these, but it’s easy to experience a bit of that density and diversity day to day.
If you live somewhere that already works without a car, we’d love to see it through your eyes. Send us your itinerary (three days, or even just one), and we may add it here.
Familiar: Where does home end?
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