Urbanism is on my mind.

I've been reading a lot about urban design, walkability, and zoning in the States lately. I've always been interested in cities, even when I was sorting apples and shoveling mulch in the country.

Urbanism is the study of city life. It overlaps with architecture, politics, identity, and more. Get deep enough and you'll start researching trees and local zoning laws. Today, I'm going to force an additional layer of overlap. What can urbanism teach us about designing spaces in rpgs? How do we make a space feel real and actionable? Urbanism has some ideas.

#1 It's about relationships. Not parts.

This idea has been proven time and time again. Every part of a city and neighborhood is made more engaging and dynamic by its connection to other parts. For this reason, it's better to design things as connected pieces of a larger system. Housing improves people's lives when connected to places of work, recreation, and worship. A bike path gets more use, and more support, when it connects two crowded points of interest.

Sean McCoy won a Bloggie for applying this idea to rooms in his post, Writing Rooms in Pairs. Murkdice did something similar with their follow up, Writing Encounters in Pairs. What urbanism might teach us is that these connections can be even less symmetrical. Give different pairs a shared degree of separation. Write rooms as a pairing of one room and one inhabitant, then make another pairing share the same room or inhabitant. Let the conflicts self resolve. One thing urbanism can build onto this idea, is how subtle these relationships can be. Small parts can trigger larger ones if put in the right place.

#2 Forms make space. Not space alone.

The park or plaza is not defined by its grass or bricks, but the buildings and forms that enclose it. A park that isn't enclosed by buildings, trees, and barriers gets less use. The plaza without a sense of enclosure is less memorable. When "urban renewal" burned its way through American cities in the post-war boom, it turned downtowns into a patchwork of spaces without silhouettes, usually for cars.

In rpgs, maps feel better when their spaces are depicted as clearings or spaces carved from forms. In a dungeon, these are the white rooms 'carved' from crosshatched stone. In a city, it's the streets, city blocks, and alleys between the cages of city blocks. Even in a hex map, a plain is more evocative when it's enclosed by mountains, cliffs, and rivers. This is one advantage traditional maps, and even hex maps, have over pointcrawls (which hurts me to write).

#3 If everything is a landmark, nothing is.

Big-name architects love to design buildings that stand out. The problem is that when a city is nothing but spotlight-hogging landmarks, the space loses its sense of shape and meaning. In urbanism, object-like buildings work best when they're reserved for civic buildings, monuments, and historical landmarks. When landmarks are kept sparse and meaningful, they anchor the landscape, orient residents, define neighborhoods, and create natural paths of travel.

The same can be said for dungeons. If every room is a set piece, players grow exhausted. Landmarks play a crucial role in exploration—they provide a point of reference, suggest different spaces, and break up the journey into pieces. If designing a fictional city, landmarks are what players form relationships with. It can be big, like a massive statue, or small but unique like a tavern.

#4 Design for activities. Not uses.

What makes a park, coffee shop, or bench lively? If we focus on just uses, we get boring transactional spaces, the kind that go under appreciated. Activities pull people in, accommodate multiple uses, and prompt a variety of interactions. A park designed for fresh air is less engaging than one designed for bird watching, volleyball, or activism. A coffee shop that just serves coffee is a glorified vending machine compared to ones designed for working, reading, and meeting friends. Even the humble bench is elevated by identifying activities besides sitting. A bench made for people watching, waiting on family members, or watching street performers is a bench that can host stories.

The best way to apply this idea is probably in dungeon design. A guard room isn't just for guarding, it's also where orcs pass time, sharpen their axes, roll bones, and practice singing anti-dwarf songs. Identify activities within rooms to give them more texture and points of interaction. Let the activities in a room fill them naturally. A kitchen in a dungeon is more evocative and easier to write when we identify what kind of cooking and eating it's for.

#5 Hint at what's in store for them.

Pedestrians don't enter spaces that leave no sign of what's inside them. It's one reason why stores have window displays—so people know what they sell (and how cheap or expensive the goods are). It's also why bars like having their music pour out into the street. Why parks grow trees and build landscapes that frame their contents. Even something as simple as a door, and the architecture framing it, tells us something about what to expect.

The rules that motivate pedestrians to enter new places at the risk of dissatisfaction or embarrassment, also motivate player characters to enter rooms where their limbs might get ripped off. Thankfully, in rpgs, we can reasonably assume players will open the door anyway, but they'll make more informed choices and feel better about making those choices, if we hint at what to expect. Make the action or value in the room seep out of it. Give doors and hallways character, whether it's a spooky demon carving or a welcome mat. Hallways should always have sights, sounds, and smells spilling into them.

Books to read on urban design.

If you like what you've read here, and want to learn more about urban design, urbanism, and walkable cities. I strongly recommend the following books.

101 Things I Learned in Urban Design School by Matthew Frederick and Vikas Mehta. If you're looking for some top-level ideas to skim off the top, this book is a fun intro. It summarizes concepts found in lots of other books, usually with a little illustration to accommodate it.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America by Jeff Speck. This is the most user-friendly but still in-depth exploration on urbanism I recommend. In addition to being a great primer on sidewalks, parking, and city design—the author has a dry, sarcastic tone city goers will be familiar with. The sequel, Walkable City Rules, is even better in some ways if you decide to become an advocate.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution by Charles Marohn. If you're not American, this book isn't for you (consider this a blessing). It's about fiscal policy and urban development patterns. I should warn you, the author considers himself a fiscally conservative libertarian—which will surprise you when the book's ideas are more often championed by anarcho commies and socialists. Centrists have no idea leftists know how to balance a checkbook and upkeep sewer systems. If you pick up this book, think of it this way, you finally have a way of selling urbanism to conservatives using a common language.

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. This is a legendary book. It's as dense as the Bible with over 1,000 thin pages, but it's hard to describe. People tend to describe it as a manual for building beautiful houses—which is like calling The Great Gatsby a great book about billboards. Let me put it this way: the magical thing about reading is that you spend your whole life with thoughts and ideas never articulated or shared with anyone, not even yourself. Then one day, you open a book and find those exact thoughts and ideas written by someone else. They wrote it for you. That's A Pattern Language when talking about city streets and cramped cafes. It's excellent.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. This is the ur text of urbanism. It's a little dry and overlong in parts, but it's still the formative text that everything else is built on. I recommend reading it. Actually, I recommend reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro and then this book like some kind of nerdy two-part epic—but that would require reading 1,830 pages. If you're a total freak, I recommend it.

Final thoughts on urban design.

If I can be a little vulnerable here. Picking up urban design after a long break has pumped me up, but had a cooling effect on my rpg writing. I think the genocide perpetuated by the US government, cost of living, the rpg discourse, and the recent anti-art sentiment has forced me to look elsewhere for satisfaction. I can't help but think, If I'm going to be quote tweeted or forced to read another manifesto, why not do it over legislation or local issues?

I'm still pretty excited to write about other things on Explorers Design. I could write three more posts just like this one. There's a lot of overlap across different design disciplines. Tabletop games are inter-disciplinary in ways other mediums are not. Let me know what you think. Until next time, I'll keep exploring.

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