My latest piece in Resident Urbanist is about Leesburg, Virginia’s annual Flower & Garden Festival specifically, and in general about making the most of our old, beloved urban places.

Here’s Leesburg, a small town in Loudoun County, on festival day:

When you think about it, quite a lot of small towns close streets to cars or restrict traffic for street festivals, and nobody thinks of it as a radical measure. Winchester, Virginia has the Apple Blossom Festival. Madison, New Jersey has Bottle Hill Day. I’ve been to a handful of others. Some of these festivals are decades-old traditions and some are newer and part of the modern effort to claw back space for people and enterprise from moving and parked cars. Some are just ways to bring people to town and generate business: think art shows, car shows, live music weekends, “sip and stroll” events, etc.

But while we’ve kept these things from decades ago or even done them anew, what we’ve lost is the sense that old urban fabric should be granular and productive and bustling all the time. That this is its best use and its intent—the use most compatible with what it is:

The United States doesn’t lack cities or good urbanism, contra what some folks say. What we lack is an urban mindset: a canny understanding of how to best use cities: how to tailor commerce and mobility to an urban environment. People don’t have to be coaxed or convinced to sit in traffic and wait for parking, or get a ride, to go to a flower festival or a Christmas market. They don’t feel wrong or weird dining outdoors in a former parking spot. They like urbanism. But we lack the language to even describe this. We lack the language for conveying that most of the noise and discomfort of cities is down to cars and traffic.

What wandering around a historic downtown during a street festival says to me is that this is a normal human activity. Much as walkable urbanism might be trendy these days, it’s something ancient. We haven’t entirely lost it, but we’ve done something harder to remedy: we’ve forgotten what it is, how to describe, or how to even discern that we like it. What I saw in Leesburg wasn’t some novelty. It was old urban fabric used and inhabited as intended.

What I’m saying is, as an American who grew up in and still lives in the suburbs, there’s something uncommon, unusual, novel, and exciting about the idea of closing a street to cars and just getting to walk around in the street with thousands of people. Just getting to…exist. It’s the same feeling as playing hooky, as waking up to find you’ve got a class canceled, as doing some little technically wrong thing that gives you a little frisson of excited danger. In other words, my brain interprets it as a kind of cheating, as a kind of treat, as a kind of unearned thing. I can’t totally excise the idea that I don’t deserve it, and that by participating in it I’m doing something slightly wrong.

It makes me wonder—I’ve wondered this before, too—whether we don’t do this more often because we like it. Because our culture has gotten so far away from understanding how to inhabit cities that we view genuine urbanism like dessert. Eat your veggies, and then you can have a little. Or like vacation. Sure, a little break, but then back to work. As if we ration our access to what we love, because we mistake something ancient and deeply human for something soft and indulgent, and because we mistake pleasure for laziness.

I say all of this after realizing this was my own way of perceiving walkable urbanism. It took me a long time to break down the notion that the car is serious and adult. That walking around and sipping a little coffee and chatting with friends is soft or immature, or, worst of all, European. That saying “Maybe I’ll take the Metro” isn’t like saying “Maybe I’ll skip work today.”

That frankly America’s own urban heritage can run with Europe’s any day, and that the only difference is we turned our back on it and then forgot we’d even done that.

So in those moments when we manage to capture and make present that old urban spirit, I feel both a sense of loss and a sense of possibility. A sense of hope, but a dismay that we could have been doing this all along.

Related Reading:

Cities Aren’t Loud, Cars Are Loud

Expressway is as Expressway Does

“Streets Closed to Vehicular Traffic”

Ban Pedestrians

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