The Office Park

While Palin has her Drill! mantra going, I've got my bad urban planning mantra going. I continue.

Clearly there was a need in the remote past for zoning laws. It made sense that if you owned a home and suddenly a tannery or rolling mill opened up shop next door it would lead to instant slumification. There was also an issue with pollution, as early industrial activities weren't at all concerned with their effluents, emissions, discharges, leakages, off-gassing, or wash-outs.

But what about today? Why the hell do we force office workers to commute from their suburban compounds to an "office park?" What is so obnoxious about this activity? I'd argue that the bulk of Merkian jobs nowadays are performed in cubicles -- almost every industry imaginable sports a cube worker -- hospital administration, financial planners, distribution engineers, IT managers, fire marshalls. Especially in this so-called digital/information/service economy.

Now consider one major consequence of zoning these activities separately...parking. During the workday, all the suburban infrastructure required to maintain motor vehicles (private parking lots, garages, street signage, lane striping, curb cuts) goes unused, while during the evening the acres of parking and/or parking garages around office parks goes unused. We have to build-out redundant vehicle infrastructure and of course freeway and collector road slums to link the two together.

Many of the most desirable places to live (in the world) combine the two activites, and all these were built generations ago. It's only recently, recent in a human civilization timeframe, that we've fuckered up the relationship between man and his environment.

An office park, isolated in its proximity to anything else, setback ninety five feet from the sidewalk, and surrounded on all four sides by pavement, divorces the practice of building from the historical and social meanings of building. These "parks" are nowhere near any of the other activities we use on a daily basis: hardware stores, coffee shops, florists, dry cleaners, restaurants, locksmiths, groceries, pawnshops, titty bars, pornshops, and crackhouses. At lunchtime or break, you either sit in your cube or you climb in your car, you've got no other choices.