Let's face it: The fact that practically everything built in America has been built around the automobile -- and around the assumption that everyone will have one -- is a problem. It is one of the biggest and least-discussed problems America has. It would be a problem even if we did not have to worry about climate change or depletion of the global petroleum supply. It's a quality-of-life thing: Living in a neighborhood where kids can't go anywhere or do anything without Mom as chauffeur, where you have to drive outside the neighborhood to get a loaf of bread, where all your neighbors are at exactly the same income level as yourself -- this does not make for good quality of life. Having a lawn is hardly an adequate tradeoff for what is lost, if you compare Levittown and its countless imitators to the prewar "streetcar suburbs" or traditional towns and cities. Strip malls are not good things and would not exist in a healthy society.
Ever see It's a Wonderful Life? George Bailey's vision of Bedford Falls transformed into Pottersville is actually unrealistically optimistic. It might be a honky-tonk town of gin mills, but it has life in the streets. In a real-life Bedford Falls, everything downtown would be boarded up and vacant by now. A situation to which George himself would have contributed, by building Bailey Acres. His own children could not have the childhood he did, as a free-range kid who could walk anywhere he wanted to go.
There is a solution -- kindasorta. The New Urbanism. A movement to build high-density, walkable-scale, mixed-used communities. Best represented at present by the Congress for the New Urbanism.
I say "kindasorta," because how can all the sprawling auto-dependent residence-only suburbs now existing possibly be retrofitted along New Urbanist lines?
Ever see It's a Wonderful Life? George Bailey's vision of Bedford Falls transformed into Pottersville is actually unrealistically optimistic. It might be a honky-tonk town of gin mills, but it has life in the streets. In a real-life Bedford Falls, everything downtown would be boarded up and vacant by now. A situation to which George himself would have contributed, by building Bailey Acres. His own children could not have the childhood he did, as a free-range kid who could walk anywhere he wanted to go.
There is a solution -- kindasorta. The New Urbanism. A movement to build high-density, walkable-scale, mixed-used communities. Best represented at present by the Congress for the New Urbanism.
I say "kindasorta," because how can all the sprawling auto-dependent residence-only suburbs now existing possibly be retrofitted along New Urbanist lines?
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