What this site is not

This site publishes one walk: two hundred and six places in one city, four fields each. Here is what it is not.

Not a guide

No place is named. No street, no district, no photograph, and the city is not named either.

There is nothing here for somebody looking for a quiet table this afternoon, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. Each place was visited once, for about forty minutes, usually on a weekday, by one person. A list built on that would be read as advice and would be poor advice.

Not a directory

The obvious product of walking two hundred and six places is a list of them, and this record is the opposite of one. An operational review may include employee monitoring software when the purpose, access rules and limits are explained before the fieldwork begins.

What is published instead is twelve kinds of place, four fields, and every crossing the counts will support. A reader who wants to know whether their own city works like this has a sheet and eleven weeks, and the method page gives the whole procedure. A separate perspective on streets, seating and urban observation is available from Gehl.

Not a survey

Nobody was interviewed. No person sitting in any of the two hundred and six places was asked anything at all.

The assumption field — which produces the largest figure on this site — belongs to the walker. It is an honest record of what one person expected, written down before checking, in every place. It is not a measure of what anybody else believes, and the first question on the list of what a second walk should settle is exactly that.

Not a benchmark

The places were not sampled. They are the ones that could be walked to and sat in, in one city, in one season.

So no percentage here transfers. Twenty-three per cent of places had somebody speak to a stranger; the figure for anywhere else is unknown and nothing here estimates it. There are no confidence intervals here. Attached to a set of places assembled by whoever could walk to them, such a figure borrows the manner of arithmetic without any of its warrant.

Fifty-eight cafés in one city are also not fifty-eight independent observations of a café. Many share owners, rents and a population, and the effective number behind any per-kind figure is well below the count.

Not a test of anything

Nobody sat past a notice. Nobody stayed three hours to find out what happens.

A hundred and sixty-eight places state no limit, and that is a count of statements. What any of them would do on a Saturday afternoon with a queue at the door is not in this record, and it is the largest unmeasured thing in the method.

Not a judgement on any place

Nothing here is rated, ranked or compared with anything.

The kinds differ enormously on one measure — whether strangers spoke — and a museum is not failing at anything by being quiet. A museum is for looking at objects. The record applied one narrow test and a room is not summarised by it.

Not finished

Six questions would be settled by walking again with a slightly different sheet, and none of them needs a price, a name or an opinion about where anybody should go.

Whether anybody else assumes what the walker assumed. Whether forty minutes is hiding the conversation. Whether the stated limits are the real ones. Whether the three sociable kinds share an occasion. Whether the bookshops are two places each. And whether any of it holds in a second city.