Let’s take a look at a list of some of our society’s self-perceived problems.
1: Neglected elderly, visited at most once a week by any friend or family, living either alone or in and elderly community or nursing home. The feeling of being unwanted, unloved.
2: Reckless drug use among teens.
3: Rise in teen pregnancies.
4: Lazy habits and estrangement of our youth.
5: Gang violence.
6: Youth incidence of diabetes, asthma, obesity.
7: Loss of native species of flora and fauna.
8: Decline in quality of local water supplies.
9: Rise in traffic accidents, especially those with young victims, close to their homes.
10: Increased debt burden.
11: Loss of “family time.”
12: Long commutes.
13: Too much traffic.
14: Reduced funding for music and art in school.
15: Reduced funding for schools, libraries, parks, recreation.
16: Loss of vibrant communities, yearning for “old-time” charm.
17: Rise of homelessness.
18: Poverty, and the inability of those in it to lift themselves from it.
19: Increased pollution.
20: Fall of local economies.
That’s the best i can think of right now, off the top of my head. The preceding list is i’m sure a partial list of the unforeseen outcomes of car culture.
That is, the outcomes of not only depending on motor vehicles and their fossil fuels for our agriculture, and for our transport, but also to plan our cities, to define our economies, to define the relationship between ourselves and the street on which we live, between us and our neighbors, between us and our jobs. To define the very relationships between each of us and the other members of our family.
There are excellent reasons that so many united states citizens vacation in Europe, and they are not predominantly the weather, the specific shops, quality of food, or the political history (fascinating and largely unknown as it is to most of us here in the US of A). The primary reason, i posit, is a sense of place. It’s the same reason that i and so many others “want to see New York” . . . or San Francisco, or Chicago, or Boston, or (insert popular US city here). Because it just feels differently in those places. Those cities were built toward the end of last era in united states planning and building that place any studies importance on “the civic.” Much like the European cities by which those planner and architects were influenced, these places have a sense of place that is generated only by caring about that place as whole, not just your part of it. And while those cities i just mentioned are all intensely urban, large, and quite industrial, i don’t believe that’s a factor of why they’re appealing. Indeed, those reasons were the the same as for the invention of suburbs. The suburban sprawl in which many of us now find ourselves (and the design of which contributes to, if not causes, the above list of 20 problems) was invented to get away from the big city; to get away from it’s pollution, congestion, and crime.
Unfortunately, we’ve only managed to take these home with us, or exacerbate them.
in the last 2,000 pages of books i’ve read over the last 3 months i’ve been surprised to find something: the same things i complained and worried about as a teen are being complained and worried about by significant scholars in many various fields, and all pointing at the same thing (for different reasons). They’re doing all this in a much more eloquent way than i did, and with decades of study and experience backing it up, but they’re all pointing to the car. And if not the car than the individualism that leads us to favor a car to another mode of transit, that leads us to favor tax breaks, rather than civic works for all citizens, to favor Wal-mart, rather than our pal Douglas’ market just down the street. Or, if not individualism per se, then perhaps the industrial production system based in turn on fossil fuels, privatization, and tangled with intellectual property rights and our economic obsession with growth.
Perhaps because of growing up in the mountains, and never having driven a car, i have a different perspective. Partly in being Naïve, and with a utopian outlook, but also (and, i’d wager more importantly) a different vantage, and the critical faculties to interpret that vantage: i saw organically what many have to be trained to see. The effective bankruptcy of so many of the systems we forget are even there: the mental furniture of our culture.
For two big ones (and much longer documentaries than i’ve been posting previously), see these videos:
first, a 90 minute lecture by respected new urbanist / neo-traditional developer/architect: Andres Duany.
http://www.youtube.com/user/NuHerbAndIzm
second is the 54 minute, reasonably well produced documentary, the end of suburbia (the trailer for which was shown in a previous post).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug
(in shortened form, perhaps? i’m not sure)