3D Cities – Tour Guide
The 3D cities already around us
Our recent piece on 3D cities introduced a new model for the American city, in contrast to the isolation that many people feel in suburbia. A 3D city is familiar, and not unfamiliar; expansive, and not captive; resilient, and not fragile.
“[A 3D city] a place in which you feel the safety and comfort of home not just in your house, but in a much wider space, in which you engage with a real community.”
As the original article notes, most cities and towns in the US lack these attributes due to sparsity and a sort of car-focused captivity, but many places — even outside of New York City! — have 3D aspects today, depending on how life is lived.
Instead of telling you, though, I’m just going to show you around some of America’s greatest cities, completely car-free. Whether you’re from these cities, or from the suburbs, or from out of the US entirely, I would love for you to experience these cities as I do.
Most of this article, then, is a three day itinerary for Boston and San Francisco, no car needed. These definitely aren’t the only US cities outside of New York (the ultimate 3D city of the US) where it might behoove you to be car-free — Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New Orleans come to mind! — but they’re the ones I know best.
Living without a car makes you interact with the city in its entirety, in a truly three-dimensional way – you get to know your neighbours; you experience the weather; you help tourists find their way. My friends are often amazed about how well I know the ins-and-outs of cities; how I know all of San Francisco’s small parks, and D.C.’s cafes, and Boston’s tourist attractions that most locals have mostly forgotten about, and I tell them that it’s because I don’t have a car. I often walk places, if the walk is less than a couple miles, and I stop at different book stores and viewpoints and groceries; when I take buses and trains, I look out of the windows and note what I would like to see. I take pictures of flowers and trees and interesting houses; I pop into cafes and farmers’ markets and street fairs.
My experience has taught me that, if your city is 3D enough, being reliant on transit isn’t limiting. It’s expansive. An errand that in a car might’ve just been from A to B instead becomes an adventure of A to X to P to Q to B, and I discovered a new neighbourhood and met some shopkeepers and got a pastry and helped someone find their bus connection. It is not easy to be lonely or feel bad for long when you are on the train and bus all the time, seeing all of humanity in our glory and pain; when you are outside in the rain or sun — living.
Pockets of 3D cities exist not only in large cities but in smaller cities and towns – the original article mentions residential college campuses as notable examples. The lovely Salem, Massachusetts, and many other small historic cities in New England have downtowns that predate the car, giving them a 3D feel. Carmel, Indiana is an example of a small city that has made incredible 3D-city type improvements in recent decades. In these places, it’s still hard to live completely without a car, but it’s easy to experience some of the density, diversity, and expansiveness of a 3D city day-to-day.
Living a bit more 3D in a smaller city or town is a worthwhile article that maybe we’ll write soon! In the meantime, I’m focusing on Boston and San Francisco, because those are cities that I know. But if you know a city that you think more people should visit car-free, we’d love to hear from you! On our website, we’ve built this article into an interactive tour guide, where you can see the stops, plan your own trip to Boston or SF, and submit an itinerary for your own city, which we’ll add to the collection.
I’m from outside of Boston and have lived for years in the San Francisco Bay Area. In both places, you might miss a few things by not having a car, but it’ll be more than made up by getting to see the city slowly, in a way that allows you to intentionally interact with people and the environment. I hope that you’ll feel a bit like a local after these trips!