Play On

I wonder why Elk Grove, Sacramento, or anywhere in the U.S. has consistently failed to build places worth a damn:



What's fascinating to me is that there isn't a single American who would object to a city whose streets look like this. Not one. And if we did build one of these places, shit, the demand would so outstrip supply that the rents would immediately become out of reach for ordinary people. It tells us how much we humans want and need human scaled environments. It's really unfortunate that only those with exceptional, exceptional means can afford to live in such places here in the U.S. that were all built prior to our sad suburban wasteland experiment.

These Parisian businesses don't look like they are in trouble. Probably wouldn't suffer much in a consumer recession, either. They have consumer volume, too, by nature of the 4 stories above them. Not likely one will ever be boarded up, dilapidated, pigeon shit on the overhangs, or a rolled up steel security screen needed to prevent theft. There are so many eyes out here that theft is likely non-existent.

They also have consumer volume from passing vehicular traffic. Please, never confuse my hatred of the automobile with some notion that they should be banned...far from it. My point has only ever been that we ought to build realms where humans and vehicles are cohabitants. The civic designers only had to install a few black posts to provide for a marginal degree of pedestrian safety -- they didn't need a fourteen foot high sound wall. Vehicles ought to be secondary in our daily interactions, not primary.

Now imagine sitting at a table in the breakdown lane on this American road:



Sounds pleasant, doesn't it? Dining and socializing in the median would be a rewarding experience, no? Dining next to people commuting from their office parks to their strip malls and back to their suburbs. No human interaction in their neighborhoods, in their office cubicles, in their Targets, or in their cars. It is not surprising to me, at all, that my nation is so full of drugged up, undereducated and underinsured NASCAR morons. It's a direct result, a direct consequence, of our bad living environments. It's why we can't drink alcohol after the third period at sporting events, because we don't know how to socialize responsibly. It's why we need to pass through metal detectors to see a comedy show.

Perhaps you might understand why I root for our destruction, why I root for systemic collapse. There might be no other way for us to reconsider how badly we've built things, and to finally start to build better places, and build better relationships with others. Only through sustained hardships would we finally look to our neighbors as neighbors, not as roadway competitors or as people in front of us in line at the large format retailer.

I would embrace a depression. I think I not only would survive it, I would thrive in it. I certainly enjoy blogging about how fucked up our environments are, and I think I'm better prepared than most of our hundreds of millions of debt-addled consumers. I think America could potentially become a better place. Only a major, painful event could possibly shake us away from unending suburban sprawl and unsustainable debt-based consumer growth.

So if this is just the start to a real depression...play on.