The Benefits of a Brick Sidewalk
As you might guess, I have some strong opinions on sidewalks. Probably my biggest concern is with sidewalk width, but what they are made of is also very important. While conceptually, what a sidewalk is made out of may not be as important as its existence itself, it can determine some significant qualities like longevity, impact on the environment and neighbourhood feel.
Perhaps my favourite sidewalks in the world are the Calçada Portuguesa of Brazil, which are made of small paved stone forming elaborate mosaics. If you have been to Rio you may have walked on the most famous of these that lines Copacabana Beach. Now I am not suggesting that we install Calçada Portuguesa on all of our streets, but it does show the extremes of where you can take sidewalk design when using brick.
The nimbleness of brick pavers is one of the reasons we have seen it used more and more in some of our newer construction projects downtown. The colour, size, and texture of the bricks can used to make patterns that are just not possible with poured concrete. What is more surprising to me is that we are seeing brick pavers being installed as part of our city sidewalks, even when there isn’t a new project going up next to it. This happened recently at Quadra and Caledonia.
It was actually the brick paver re-installation outside of the Emanu-El Synagogue that got we thinking about this article and made me think that we should be trying to put more of them in where possible. There are some significant positives and negatives to using brick pavers for sidewalks and I think that on the whole the positives strongly outweigh the negatives.
So what are the negatives:
Cost - making sidewalks out of brick is significantly more expensive at the outset. First there are not as many tradespeople that are familiar with bricklaying and those that are, rightly command a higher price.
Speed - A new concrete sidewalk can be poured and installed along a fairly long run quickly and it will just need a couple of days to cure before its done. Bricklaying takes a long time, as the work is quite precise.
Maintenance - A brick sidewalk does not necessarily last as long as concrete, though I have put this one at the end as I feel that brick sidewalks can also be more easily repaired.
I think it is pretty clear that if a product that is cheaper and faster to install, it is going to be chosen most of the time. That is why the vast majority of the sidewalks in Victoria are made out of concrete. Brick has some advantages though and I think that some of those advantages are why we might be seeing the tide slowly turning.
Positives for using bricks:
Look - I mean this speaks for itself. While you can colour concrete and stamp designs into it, there is something intrinsically appealing about brick pavers when installed well. The varied colour of brick pavers and the patterns that they can be put into are limitless.
Environmental - When looking at general production, brick and concrete are both pretty bad for the environment, that said if you have locally sourced bricks, it can reduce their CO2 footprint. At one time in Victoria there was as many as 41 brick factories, though I would imagine most would have been fairly small operations. Now there are none that I am aware of, which means importing the bricks and the associated higher carbon footprint. However, brick pavers have another environmental benefit, and that is their drainage. When you use brick pavers, especially when set on sand rather than with concrete, water can run between them and into the ground underneath. This means less water runoff, healthier groundwater and healthier creeks and streams. Given the more frequent atmospheric rivers we have been seeing in the last few years, anything we can do to reduce water runoff, seems like a good thing.
Repairability - While brick pavers may take longer to install, they are also easier to remove to access a pipe underneath the sidewalk or manage an upshift caused by a root. The underlying problem can be fixed and the same bricks can be put back after it is done. This is, in my opinion, a huge advantage for bricks. I have seen a concrete sidewalk go in many times, only to see it dug up a year later to fix an unrelated issue, which means a whole new sidewalk needs to be poured there.
Labour - This one might be counterintuitive, but if we had more brick sidewalks, it would on its own create a local economy of tradespeople that design, install and repair sidewalks. Over the longer term, I think that this would be a significant benefit to the local economy.
As you can see from the photos I have included, we do have a lot of brick paver sidewalks, however you will also notice that none of them look the same. I would love to hear from City Hall that there was a plan to encourage the use of brick pavers for sidewalks but I would also like to see some consistent implementation of them. I do think that if over the longer term we were able to make most of downtown street sidewalks paved with bricks, it would create a richness to the urban tapestry that we don’t have now. I would be curious as to what all of you think though, more brick sidewalks or less? What are some of the positives and negatives that I haven’t brought forward?
