If you want to learn about cities today, take a long walk along rural trails and through historic cities and towns. All photos by Charles R. Wolfe

The Practical Confessions of an Urbanist Pilgrim

After 12 days of walking the Portuguese Camino, the importance of many urban planning and development concepts — from the urban-to-rural Transect to balanced growth — became abundantly clear.

In order to understand places, built environment professionals and real estate developers need to also understand the places between, and practice on-the-ground, inter-urban, and inter-settlement walkability. This approach is an essential way to anticipate the context of a given site, using the “serial vision” pass-throughs once touted by urban design pioneer Gordon Cullen, and championed by Edmund Bacon in his still-worthwhile Design of Cities. In making similar assertions in my prior books and articles, I’ve also questioned whether technology-based journeys (whether by app or Google Street View) can really do this proposition justice by themselves.

After 12 days of walking the Portuguese Camino (Coastal and Litoral Routes) from Porto, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain, I submit that this “serial vision” type of journey reveals even more holistic truths about today’s urban trends than previously imagined. For me, this journey became a research endeavor in its own right, intrinsically valuable to my work…