Urban Field Notes on How Towns Actually Work
New Cities Foundation documents the small systems that shape everyday urban life.
Not masterplans. Not concept renderings. The ordinary things people meet every day: bus stops with no shade, crossings that almost work, benches in the wrong place, queues that drift into doorways, civic buildings that cool you down without meaning to.
Most urban problems are not dramatic. They are cumulative.
A missing tree. A crossing delay. A pavement pinch point. A bench that faces full sun by 11am. A queue that blocks the pharmacy entrance because no one marked where it starts.
Individually these things seem minor. Together they determine whether a town feels easy, exhausting, accessible, hostile, calm, walkable, ageing-friendly, or usable without a car.
This project documents those small urban frictions directly.
Every observation is grounded in a real place, real timing, and real movement through space. Most tests are carried out on foot and focus on what happens at the level people actually experience cities: waiting, crossing, standing, sitting, carrying, pushing, navigating, overheating, resting.
The emphasis is practical rather than theoretical.
A typical post may measure:
- shade coverage at a bus stop
- crossing wait times outside a school
- queue behaviour in civic buildings
- bench spacing along pedestrian routes
- accessibility for trolleys, prams, and older residents
- thermal comfort in public spaces
- small failures in signage, seating, or pedestrian flow
Where possible, each study ends with one low-cost fix that could realistically improve the situation without major redesign or large budgets.
What This Is
New Cities Foundation is not a consultancy, political campaign, or smart-city platform.
It is an ongoing field notebook about how urban systems function in practice, particularly in smaller towns and everyday public environments that are often ignored by large-scale urban discourse.
The focus is on:
- public realm usability
- civic friction
- pedestrian experience
- waiting systems
- heat and shade
- accessibility
- walkability
- informal adaptation
- small urban interventions
Many observations are recorded in the Marina Alta and other southern European urban environments where heat, ageing populations, tourism pressure, and seasonal rhythms shape daily movement in specific ways.
Current Study Areas
Heat & Shade
How people adapt when public spaces fail to provide thermal comfort.
Waiting Systems
Bus stops, queues, crossings, ticket counters, and the hidden behaviours that emerge while people wait.
Crossing Studies
Short observations focused on school gates, zebra crossings, curb design, sightlines, and pedestrian timing.
Access Walks
Timed real-world journeys using trolleys, prams, walking aids, or everyday errands.
Civic Buildings
Libraries, town halls, health centres, and the unintended ways public buildings become part of urban survival systems.
Public Seating
Bench spacing, orientation, comfort, placement, and the social behaviour surrounding rest points.
Method
Most studies use simple observational methods:
- stopwatch timings
- route walks
- shade checks
- pedestrian counts
- waiting-time measurements
- behavioural observation
- accessibility notes
- repeated passes at different times of day
The goal is not academic perfection.
The goal is to document what people actually experience before those details disappear into averages, reports, or assumptions.
Why Small Things Matter
Cities rarely fail all at once.
More often, they become slightly harder to use each year.
People stop sitting in certain places. Older residents avoid particular crossings. Parents change routes. Bus users stand in the road because there is no shade at the stop. Public buildings quietly become cooling centres during hot afternoons without officially being treated as such.
Most of these changes never appear in formal metrics.
But people feel them immediately.
This project exists to record those moments while they are still small enough to fix.
Latest Observations
Recent studies include:
- bus stop heat exposure
- school-run crossing friction
- library heat-refuge usability
- market-day pedestrian access
- pharmacy queue behaviour
- bench and shade continuity
A Working Principle
Good urbanism is often less about large projects and more about whether people can comfortably exist somewhere for ten minutes without friction.
A bench.
A tree.
A readable sign.
A safe crossing.
A place to cool down.
A route wide enough for two people to pass.
Small systems. Repeated thousands of times.
That is where cities are really experienced.