Density is not a conspiracy. I said this, I think in a conversation at a happy hour to another urbanist, and he sort of laughed and said, yeah, of course it isn’t!

I mean, that’s obvious to us, but it struck me that that’s the underlying source of a lot of the suspicion I run into talking about this stuff with ordinary people. There seems to be an assumption that density or cities are plots or conspiracies that some people want to impose. That can run the gamut from environmentalists or YIMBYs wanting to make choices for other people to lurid stuff about cities as prisons and all that. I’m not talking about that; I’m talking about the idea that seems to be commonly held out there that cities are the result of people who advocate for cities.

And that simply isn’t true. It might be true in the bare sense that if those of us who do like cities could instantly reform the planning and zoning regime, we would get more and larger cities, and more density in more places. But it wouldn’t be because “we” master-planned it. If that happened, it would simply be because enough people actually wanted it or at least put up with it.

The flipside of density not being a conspiracy is that density is naturally occurring. Cities are naturally occurring. (I’m using cities and density together because they’re separate but obviously very related things.) Nobody “invented” the idea of a city. Nobody invented the idea of residential density. These are things we do in our own households, and when you scale them up, you get cities. I think what we had to “invent” was communities which did not naturally increase in density over time.

I used this example once, briefly, but I’m going to expand on it here: think of a home library running out of bookcase space. Maybe you have some low-slung three- or four-shelf bookcases that looked nice, but which are now full. But you have ten-foot ceilings in your house. So you go buy some big, tall, bookcases that get much closer to the ceiling—maybe, for example, the popular Ikea Billy. Now the same horizontal space can fit double the books, because of the more efficient use of vertical space.

Let’s say you don’t replace your bookcases, but you also don’t want to cut back your book collection. There are two options: let the books sit around and become clutter, or move them to another room. Maybe there’s a spare bedroom you’re keeping sparsely decorated for future use, but the books kind of end up in there. Maybe you get one or two more smaller bookcases and the home library now lives in two rooms, in two sets of low bookcases.

I’ve just described first density, and then suburbia.

This is literally what “density” is—the efficient use of space in regard to people, and of land in relation to vertical space. All of the ideological stuff comes later. All the attitudes about cities come later. That doesn’t mean you have to like more people or taller buildings. And fine if you don’t—one reason to allow density in places which can support it, as the example of the two-room library suggests, is to reduce growth pressure on more distant places that might not.

Look, let me tell you—none of this would have been intuitive to me a few years ago. It sounds facile. It sounds too perfect. I can hear one of my old right-wing friends saying, yeah, nature just happens to wire us for what the left wants! My answer isn’t “yes,” but rather, to read politics into land use in this manner is as ridiculous as trying to divine someone’s politics based on the height of the bookcases they own.

This all makes me think of this:

You see that dirt path beyond the sidewalk? That’s what we urbanists call a “desire path”: an informal path, usually visible through grass, where you can see lots of people have cut through to save some distance, often at an angle to the official path. It looks like here the desire path was actually semi-finished, and now it’s a real dirt path instead of a line of bald grass.

You could look at that and say, why should we reward people for trampling on the grass? The path is the path, use it! You could turn it into one of these moralistic questions and ask, why do you feel entitled to damage the public landscape for your own convenience? Etc. etc.

But none of that rings true, because everyone has cut their own path through a lawn or other landscape to get a shorter route. It’s a natural thing to do. It’s obvious that this is a design question, not a moral question.

Urban density—though it might not feel like it, laboring under our culture wars—is like that. The desire path is the tall bookcase is duplexes and rowhomes and apartment buildings. These things are so closely related to natural human needs that they’re almost extensions of them—they’re not newfangled answers but ones which simply arise in any human society.

This is what made me an urbanist: the realization that urbanism wasn’t about innovation, wasn’t a novel answer to global warming or some other contemporary problem; that “urbanism” is simply the name we must give, and housing advocacy the thing we must do, to restore a set of land-use rules that allows us to be fully human.

Related Reading:

Apple Orchard Upzoning

The Path of Most Desire

Upzone Your House

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