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What has happened to our cities? | |
| Where is the center? In America, we have forgotten what it is like to live in a positive urban setting. At the beginning of this century, we still understood. The whole idea- knowing your neighbors, walking down the street to get some milk, sitting on your front porch while friends stroll by... it seems so foreign to us now. We don't walk anywhere, we only drive. We don't know our neighbors. We don't know the people from whom we buy groceries. | ||
| Cities are "scary." | ||
| The uncontrolled sprawl of the sub-urban
landscape has created an isolationist culture in which
person to person interaction is decreasing. Think of it:
next time you drive to Wal-Mart, sit back and examine the
situation. Talking to strangers (other than store clerks)
is almost unheard of. The corporate mechanisms that are
in place discourage human interaction to the greatest
degree possible. If someone is seen actually walking
along the street, they must be a derelict. After
all, if they had any means at all they would be in their
car, right? When is the last time you saw, in the
suburbs, someone crossing the street from a Wal-Mart on one side, to a McDonald's on
the other? It's just not done. This isolationism makes the whole idea of coming into the city "scary" to those who don't experience it regularly. This is a problem. Without the city, there is no community, no politik, no public discourse. |
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| What is to be done? | ||
| We must stop building at the fringe. The
American mentality of endless Westward expansion is
killing us. There is no "West" anymore! In our
imagination however, we act like there is. We build at
the edges of our cities in the hope that each of us will
somehow capture that comfortable, open place that no one
else has discovered yet. But that place does not exist.
There is no escaping the world around us. We're avoiding
it for now, but we will not be able to avoid it forever.
[ Click here to learn more about Urban Sprawl ] We must stop trying to escape our problems by fleeing to the suburbs and ex-urbs. We must re-inhabit our cities, reclaim them, own them again. If they are not safe for families, then we need to make them safe by living there. America has 10% of the Earth's population and uses over 50% of its resources. We live too big. We live too spread out. We must learn to deal with each other again. Remember... |
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| The city is not an evil place! | ||
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