On Walking

2023.10.08

Lindy Expectancy: 30 Weeks

I like walking. I prefer walking in nature, but a suburban area with ample vegetation will do. Modern urban areas are my least favorite place to walk, but some walking is still better than no walking.

This post is less about the walking and more about where the walking happens… the closer to nature, the better.

Why Walking

Going on a walk is almost never a bad idea. It’s relaxing, it’s calming, and it’s cathartic.

I like taking meetings walking when I can, both when they’re calls and when they’re in person. Why would I not? I already spend enough time seated when I’m writing/coding/emailing/messaging/eating/attending class. Of course, if it’s been a while and the meeting has to be virtual, a video call can be nice. Still, making an effort to get more walking in never hurts.

Other than the concentration of very bright, passionate, and driven people, that’s one of the principal reasons I like Ann Arbor so much–it’s very, very walkable. As a matter of fact, those two things pair very nicely together… there is no shortage of awesome people to go on nice walks with.

Ann Arbor has a lot of trees and not many very big buildings; it feels like a good place to walk. What makes a place good to walk, though?

Nature Walks vs City Walks

On more than a few backpacking trips, I remember the feeling of meandering through an unending, slowly undulating path; something that looked like it had no curve greater than 30° and would always correct back to moving in roughly the same direction.

It was strange in the sense that we couldn’t see the end of it most of the time… it felt like a Jacob’s Ladder of a trail. If anything, it was almost hypnotic. Just walking and talking and living. No destination mattered.

On the other hand, I’ve always found something quite stressful about walking through Manhattan or any other large urban sprawl; the experience feels cold, almost alien and, sometimes, even stress inducing. All these straight lines telling you where to go, and these massive hunks of steel and aluminum ripping down the streets.

There’s a slew of studies suggesting that going for walks in nature can be cathartic–they can help you destress and focus more, putting you in a much more zen state. A lot of these studies are encapsulated in this meta study about walking and geometry: it’s called What Happens in Your Brain When You Walk Down the Street? Implications of Architectural Proportions, Biophilia, and Fractal Geometry for Urban Science… for our purpose, I’m just going to refer to it as Fractal Geometry for Urban Science.

So, what’s up? I like walking in nature, I like walking in modern cities (but no where near as much as the woods), and I do like walking in Ann Arbor (but certainly not as much as nature)… I also like walking in Paris, but I like walking in Lisbon more than that, both of which I like more than Manhattan. Chicago, it’s been a while, but I think you’re just one below NYC, pretty close to LA.

Looks like we have some sort of scale now:

Intuitively, I might postulate that the places I like better are more “natural.” Am I maybe just more biased to the woods? Is this a product of my upbringing? Maybe I haven’t spent enough time anywhere but in the midwest, who knows.

Regardless, the paper Fractal Geometry for Urban Science attempts to biologically justify my preferences.

Fractals

A line is 1 dimensional.

A square is 2 dimensional.

A fractal is something in between dimensions. Samples:

I’m relatively new to this, too, but you can build intuition here pretty quickly by looking at enough labeled pictures. Just google “fractals with dimensions” and doom scroll for hours. It’s like machine learning, but for humans.

Fractal Geometry for Urban Science points out that fractals that the human brain has evolved with and perceives as beautiful are between 1.3 to 1.5 dimensions. This result comes from other studies of nature and art–the paper’s contribution to science is the postulation that this preference can be scaled up to urban design.

Scary Cities

Calculating the fractals of cities sounds terrifically difficult, but it’s not quite as hard as you’d think; there are a lot of out of the box solutions for it. When I actually get some free time, I’ll maybe revisit this post with the dimensions of pictures I’ve taken of places I’ve liked and disliked.

Thankfully, this paper already did the analysis over time for a few different cities, and found that the dimension has been increasing towards 2 and away from 1; as of now, the highest value in Manhattan found in the study was 1.846.

For context, Fractal Geometry for Urban Science computed the dimension of this hellish prison scape to be 1.9:

Blocky might be a good way to describe this. Overwhelming. And, from a biological perspective, that matters. For contrast, mountain scapes are mid 1 dimensional; aren’t these nicer to look at than a block?

Beauty as Objective

What are the implications of having cities that are geometrically close to visually presenting the citizens with a square? Fractal Geometry for Urban Science claims that it makes the walk much less pleasurable and oftentimes anxiety inducing.

Visually, we use fractals to help us navigate space; when you start to distort them and take away their character, our brains have a harder time knowing where to go. That can be stressful.

Nature doesn’t necessarily have everything right, but our species grew up with it, so our bodies and minds adapted to it. Beauty is not entirely objective, but from a biological perspectives, we’re more used to some things than others.

So where’s your actionable takeaway?

Again, I love walking! Alone, with friends, while on the phone, whatever. It feels great. And, if I find myself in major city, I’ll still walk, but I’ll make an effort to walk in the most natural place possible.

Like most things, it’s pretty intuitive; you don't need the math or science, because you already know it internally. Before I read any of these papers, if I couldn’t get to a truly natural place, I would go on walks on side streets with more trees and less traffic. Simple as that.

Sometimes, there is a certain feeling you get when you’re walking–experience is spacious, and time is irrelevant; you’re existing in this state of bliss, meandering through the world as it slowly ages.

It feels good. It feels “luxurious,” in a strange way.

Luxurious walks are nice.

So go for one, with a friend or by yourself. Preferably as close to nature as possible, but anything will do.

Live Deeply,