Shifting from walkable neighborhoods to drive-only neighborhoods has degraded the environment significantly, diminished our sense of community, decimated local businesses, scarred the landscape, stressed us out, stripped our children of the chance to roam freely and explore their surroundings, and a myriad of other issues. It has been a complete and utter failure in every regard. Yet most cities keep pushing forward as if nothing has changed.
What is so frustrating, is that cities continue down this path, even though there is glaring evidence it is not working. More so, there are so many examples of success they could look to. The cities that are all performing the best have resisted adopting the convenience economy or have fought their way back to embrace traditional urban density. The concepts of new urbanism have taken hold in a lot of places, but it’s also not new at all. New urbanism is the oldest thing around, we don’t have to learn any new language or ideas to sort out our way back to health for cities, we just have to undo our mistakes.
Cities have to be willing to change, or more so, get back to the basics for their own good. The changes we have made to our cities dating back to the 40s have been really, really bad. They have produced absolutely awful results and it is beyond time that we accept that fact and move on. There is nothing worth preserving about the convenience economy.
Cities are ever-evolving and can make a change at any point. Just because you have been doing a thing does not mean you have to keep doing this thing. So many things done at a municipal level are a relic of a time when we were hell-bent on destroying our cities. These policies from the last half-century are just bad policies, and there is no reason to hold on to them other than habit and comfort.
*An excerpt from my book Your City is Sick available at https://lnkd.in/ga7myVxw
