SMALL DESIGN DETAILS YIELD BIG COMFORTS (2024)

The book includes some text but is made up mostly of the author's black and white photographs, a number of small sketches and, on virtually every one of its 174 pages, bold-faced captions, headings, subheadings and highlighted quotations. With a kind of heavy-handed, desktop publishing look, the graphics are clearly intended to make the book enticingly easy to read.

Gradually, my judgment about the book's content has changed. After looking at "City Comforts" more than once, I discovered that, notwithstanding its simple format and overdone ty\pography, this little book is a valuable compendium of real world design conditions. Although many of the photographic vignettes depict places in Seattle, they are typical of most cities.

"City Comforts," Sucher says, "is an attempt to refocus our public policy discussion from abstract generalities, colored maps and grandiose projects to the details that create our daily experience. The book shows examples of small things that make urban life pleasant: places where people can meet, methods to tame cars and to make buildings good neighbors, art that infuses personality into locations and makes them into places." Sucher insightfully points out that "many of these small details are so obvious as to be invisible."

But the book is more than a collection of descriptive details and photographic images. Sucher, formerly a real estate developer as well as a municipal government employee, has produced an anecdotal text that is polemical and preachy in a folksy sort of way.

His chatty, well-illustrated homily gently proselytizes, provoking readers to think differently about the form and function of cities and the source of their vitality.

"City Comforts" sets forth numerous credos to believe in and commandments to obey. At the book's beginning, the author offers what he describes as "overriding" principles, among them: first, attend to details; copy the successful and eschew the novel; let urban land uses, such as housing, shopping and transport, overlap; recognize and reward good design work; and choose simple, economical solutions over complex, expensive ones.

The book then addresses specific issues in the ensuing chapters, each of which is filled, like the introduction, with pearls of wisdom and mandates for behavior.

The chapter on "Bumping Into People" instructs us to provide seating, food and drink, places for music, bus shelters with service kiosks and "conversation pieces." We are asked to encourage chance encounters, put public spaces in sunlight, build close to the sidewalk and grow plants.

"Knowing Where You Are" talks about giving people the time of day with many clocks, gateways for neighborhoods, bulletin boards, maps, and directional and orientational signs. Other chapters deal with safety, public toilets, landscaping, coping with noise, humanizing parking lots, promoting pedestrian welfare, patterns of streets and blocks -- Sucher is a big fan of grids -- and the installation of public artwork.

In "Getting Around," despite his advocacy of walking, he wisely states -- in boldface type -- that "any transportation policy which does not take into account our cultural proclivity and pleasure in motion is doomed to fail." But like many urban designers today, he wants to slow down cars in the city, not eliminate them.

To that end, he proposes a smaller turning radius for curbs at intersections, thereby increasing sidewalk space at corners. He advocates shorter blocks, more circular traffic islands, varying paving materials within streetscapes, raising pedestrian crosswalks, widening sidewalks and eliminating one-way commercial streets, which many drivers and most merchants dislike.

"City Comforts" doesn't omit bicycles in its discussion of urban transportation. Sucher not only observes that a lot of short automobile trips could be done by bicycle, he also suggests that provisions for carrying bikes on buses, along with more bike paths and bike racks, could contribute significantly to changing people's travel habits.

Sucher cites several writers whose books clearly influenced his thinking, books that have been bibliographic staples in schools of planning and architecture for many years. Jane Jacobs's classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" tops the list. Next comes Christopher Alexander, author of "A Pattern Language" and "A Timeless Way of Building," books that identify patterns of use and enumerate specific rules for designing buildings, streets and neighborhoods. Sucher also lists William Whyte's "City" and Oscar Newman's "Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design."

"City Comforts" reminds readers how much of the texture of the urban environment is ignored by zoning ordinances, building codes and other regulations governing the form of the cityscape. It reminds us that public officials and agencies -- planning commissions, zoning boards, public works departments -- rarely concern themselves with tactical design and small-scale gestures.

Planners, like policymakers, tend to be preoccupied with the big picture, the strategic plan, while overlooking the importance of details. Yet, as this book correctly asserts, details can make big differences in our use and enjoyment of the city, sometimes more of a difference than grandiose plans and policies.

The seemingly oxymoronic subtitle of Sucher's book, "How to Build an Urban Village," appropriately summarizes the author's point. Wouldn't it be wonderful if cities, with all the amenities that only urban environments can provide, embodied the charm, intimacy and comfort of villages? Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect and professor of architecture at the University of Maryland.