MORE THAN ANYTHING else, it is the sound that I remember: children laughing. And for years, I didn’t understand why it stuck with me.
I was born in Philadelphia and went to college there in the mid-1980s. A friend of mine was murdered little more than an hour after I said goodnight to her. Months later, I watched thick smoke fill the sky as two city blocks burned to the ground. I had no real interest in understanding the roots of this dysfunction. I just wanted out.
After college, I took out a small loan, bought a backpack, and went to Europe. I was able to walk everywhere without fear, and I felt unusually connected to my surroundings. My most vivid memory wasn’t the charm of a particular neighborhood, the high-speed trains, or public spaces. It was what I would sometimes hear walking down a street: kids shrieking with joy and laughing.
Decades later, on a summer morning in Montreal, I hear those same sounds. I’m sitting in our small courtyard, surrounded by the brick walls of our home and the adjacent three-story building. I stop what I’m doing and open the gate. Across the street in the park, eight kids are playing soccer and jabbering away in French. All are around nine years old, except one who is not a day older than four. One kid breaks from the game, crosses the street bordering the park, and dashes up the stairs to his home. There are a few other adults in the park, but none appear to be supervising the children.
For a long time, I’ve tried to make sense of a simple contradiction. Many people value the idea of living in a walkable, human-scale community of the sort that allows you to experience most activities in ordinary life without having to step into a car. Think of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Savannah’s historic neighborhoods; or Vienna’s traditional districts. Yet they remain the exception rather than the rule in both Canada and the United States. Why?
I’ve encountered this question from different perspectives: as an urban planner who once tried to change how communities were built, as a parent raising children in very different urban environments, and simply as someone who has lived in places where ordinary life unfolds largely on foot. Together, those experiences gradually changed how I understood the problem.
Having spent years on both sides of the border, I’ve found that looking across it can reveal things about your own country that are difficult to see from within.
There’s no one neat explanation. But over time, I’ve come to see three dynamics: one distinctive to the United States, one distinctive to Canada, and one shared by both.
Before getting to them, it helps to understand what I mean by a “walkable life.” It’s more than simply being able to walk from one place to another. I mean something broader: a form of everyday life in which people routinely encounter one another in public and move through their neighborhoods with a degree of independence. Streets, sidewalks, parks, and other shared spaces between our destinations become an extension of daily life itself.
Today, our three children are young adults. Our oldest lives in Hamburg, Germany. His younger brother and sister live in Montreal’s Plateau, a predominantly francophone borough.
What all three share is the draw of a “walkable life.”
Exit our son’s five-story Hamburg walkup and the neighborhood presents you with tree-lined streets, corner cafes, and bikes. Two older women talk on a bench by a river. Behind them, children scramble about in a playground. The shops are busy. Stylishly dressed older men sit in a wine bar, animated in conversation. A handful of parents have children in tow, and a few babies recline in strollers. The architecture feels alive with glimpses of life behind the windows and on the many balconies.
My wife and I are a twenty-minute walk from our two younger children in Montreal. What I value is often heard as much as it is seen. Birds singing in the trees. Children laughing and shrieking in the three nearby school playgrounds. Church bells ringing two blocks away. I find this everyday soundtrack grounding—and I don’t even attend church.
In contrast to our son’s more upscale Hamburg neighborhood, the Plateau was built primarily for working-class and lower-middle-class residents. Yet daily life today feels remarkably similar. Human-scale brick architecture and balconies give the neighborhood a sociable character. Every day, it’s a mix of people. Tattooed, buttoned up, rumpled, and chic.
For me, what stands out most are the little kids I see with their parents, and the preteens I see in the neighborhood without a parent in sight.
Tonight, my wife and I will walk ten minutes to a larger park. Our route is lined with outdoor cafes and restaurants, full of people enjoying themselves under a canopy of trees and the stars above.
As we’ve done in the past, we’ll have a picnic with our son and his girlfriend. We’ll be joining hundreds of others spread out on blankets across the grass, alongside people playing bocce ball, making music, and exercising.
Along the way, we’ll pass generously sized flower gardens that extend from the sidewalk into the street at the end of many blocks, calming traffic and making the walk even more pleasant. They are a significant part of what makes the neighborhood feel so humane. We live amidst a well-managed urban forest that provides shade, beauty, and tranquility.
And yet, for all that seems ordinary about this life, it is remarkably difficult to reproduce. In Canada and the United States, political and civic cultures have produced systems in which walkable, human-scale communities—and the everyday public life they support—remain the exception rather than the norm. Why?
Much of the answer, I believe, lies in three dynamics: America’s unresolved racial past; Canada’s economic imperative for rapid population growth; and, shared by both countries, the persistent practice of urban sprawl.
MY WIFE AND I moved with our two small boys to Washington, DC’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. A double homicide at the end of our block and the death of a nine-year-old caught in a crossfire introduced us to a different way of urban life. Gunfire in the alley once prompted my wife to drag our boys to the kitchen floor.
Two years into our tenure, a bullet went through our neighbor’s front window. The house belonged to Mrs. Brooks.
Seventy-eight-year-old Mrs. Brooks was our favorite neighbor on the block. Born into a South Carolina sharecropping family in 1929, she moved North in the 1950s as part of the Great Migration that brought six million Black Americans from the South to cities north and west. For years she’d nannied for wealthy white women in Georgetown and didn’t think much of their parenting. However, when she’d see my wife with our two little boys, her face would light up. She’d quietly call out, “Christine! You’re super momma!… I call you super mama.”
Six months after the bullet went through her window, our home was put under police protection because of issues with a local drug crew. For several nights, twenty-foot-tall, gas-powered crime scene lights lit up the front of our circa 1910 townhouse like a movie set. A police van and squad car sat beneath our bedroom window.
Mrs. Brooks was one reason the neighborhood remained complicated for me. Another was my own history there.
I’d first gotten to know Columbia Heights in the late 1980s, when I spent several years tutoring on Saturdays in a local elementary school that resembled a prison. The area still bore the scars of the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. Many buildings remained burned out and abandoned. By the time we moved onto the block, investment was beginning to flow into the neighborhood.
After leaving Columbia Heights, the low-level tension and need to remain aware of our surroundings faded. What didn’t disappear was the knowledge that I was capable of racial animosity. All this drove me to try to understand what had happened to me and my country.
I grew up believing slavery was something that happened only to Black Americans and that it had little to do with me personally. I’ve since come to understand the caste system it produced as a multifaceted disease that affects how we feel about places, what we fear, and what we hate.
To say that America’s racial past is poorly understood requires some clarification. There’s more than a century of scholarship essential to grasping the nature of American life. In 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois documented how the legacy of slavery and the continued exclusion of Black Americans from mainstream life in the years following the Civil War contributed to rising crime. Decades later, John Dollard examined the forces that drove Black men in the Jim Crow South to kill each other in large numbers. And by 1944, Gunnar Myrdal was warning that agricultural mechanization would displace millions of low-skilled Black workers, driving many north to increasingly overcrowded cities where dire poverty, economic insecurity, and high levels of crime were already the norm.
The history is there, but we just never fully absorbed what it meant. The closest we got was the Kerner Commission report after riots tore American cities apart in 1967, but the sustained national conversation we needed didn’t last long. We never really talked about what we were in the process of losing as a way of life.
I went looking for an explanation and unexpectedly found my family standing well inside this history. It turned out I’m the namesake of Lewis Cass, a man at the very center of it all. As Secretary of War, he was responsible for implementing the Indian Removal Act, which opened up 25 million acres to white settlement and enslavement. As the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1848, he formulated a doctrine to accommodate slavery’s expansion which, when put into practice six years later, helped pave the way to civil war.
These events are not so long ago for me. My father was born in 1915 and delivered into this world by his own grandfather. That grandfather had four older brothers who fought in our Civil War. Three died as a result. The youngest fought at the age of fifteen in the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. Two others fought at Gettysburg, just south of where I grew up. When they fought and died, my great-grand-uncles were younger than my twenty-something sons are today. Sometimes, it’s as if I can reach out and touch them.
Examining an unresolved, tragic racial past didn’t leave me feeling shame or contempt for America. On the contrary, the better I understood our racial caste system—and a family member’s key role in shaping it—the more deeply American I felt.
This is the history Americans inherited. It features heroes, innovation, and humanity. But it has also produced the dysfunction that Du Bois and others observed and analyzed. Gunnar Myrdal completed his landmark 1,144-page book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, in 1944. In it, he writes, “The Negro problem is not only America’s greatest failure but also America’s incomparably great opportunity for the future.” If America could, as Myrdal urged, “demonstrate that justice, equality, and cooperation are possible between white and colored people,” then Americans could prove to themselves and the world it was possible to move beyond empty declarations of morality of the sort that deepen cynicism.
That didn’t happen for complex reasons that go well beyond individual racism.
Today, we have viable, up-and-coming, or already expensive human-scale neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn, German Village in Columbus, and Logan Square in Chicago. But there are hundreds more where this unresolved racial past reverberates in the present. The ordinary life I experience today in a Montreal neighborhood once occupied by industrial laborers remains difficult to find in America, much less affordable.
Our oldest son attended a charter school in Columbia Heights for two years when he was four and five. Sometimes my schedule allowed me to walk him home, as it did a few weeks before we returned to Canada. As we passed a house playing Latin music, he smiled and said, “Dad, it’s like the penguin song!” in reference to Robin Williams singing “My Way” in the animated movie Happy Feet.
We were approaching a flyer taped to a streetlight featuring the photograph of a boy who’d recently been murdered. Without missing a beat, our son calmly asked, “Why don’t they put up a photograph of the man who killed him to help the police?” It wasn’t the kind of question I wanted normalized in the mind of our child. Minutes later, we passed the local drug crew sitting on the corner across from our house. They’d arrived early on account of good weather, and I knew it was going to be another long night.
America has a past that has turned many cities into receptacles of trauma in a way that you won’t find across the border in Canada. The difference isn’t moral superiority. It’s the fact that the British couldn’t grow cotton north of the 49th parallel.
Next up…(September 2026)
In Canada, an economic imperative for rapid population growth…
In both countries, the long-standing practice of urban sprawl…
