5 ms·
There's a quote from Bill McKibben's forward to "Creating Cohousing" by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett that I think about every time someone brings this u
by SamWhited 2y ago
There's a quote from Bill McKibben's forward to "Creating Cohousing" by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett that I think about every time someone brings this up (it's about the U.S., but it applies to lots of other places and you may recognize your own countries development model here too, or not):
"For fifty years, our economic mission in America, at its core, has been to build bigger houses farther apart from each other. And boy have we succeeded: a nation of starter castles for entry-level monarchs, built at such remove one from the next that the car is unavoidable."
You're a person after my own heart; thanks for working towards a more connected world!
- flir 2y agoThat's a nice quote. Evocative. Is it possible to support the goal of vibrant, interconnected communities, to understand all their advantages, but still want to live at least a quarter-mile away from the nearest human? Asking for a friend...
- pchristensen 2y agoIt's totally fine to do that. Most "urbanist advocates" just want to make other options legal so the quarter-mile away isn't the only choice.
- SamWhited 2y agoyah, absolutely; like I said in another post, small towns near where I grew up are frequently that way. You enjoy the city vibe you live in the apartments or houses right off the square. You don't, you live on one of the outlying farms (and even those in one case that I can think of have small neighborhood establishments; they all use the same farmers machine shop to fix stuff in one case, or there's a random coffee shop/pub way out that the surrounding places frequent, etc.) and when you go into town to go to the hardware store or the grocery or whatever you still have lots of opportunities for chance encounters because of the mixed zoning and way everything is built fairly close (so sure you have to drive to get to town, but then once you're there you walk around, do errands, stop in for a coffee, etc. without having to think about how you're going to get around as much). As opposed to the actual town that I grew up in nearby where everything is spread way the hell out and you have to go on a giant 5 lane highway to get to walmart on one side of town and the hardware store on the other and 30 minutes in another direction to get to a coffee shop, etc.
- chairmansteve 2y agoI live in Phoenix, Arizona. Infamous for it's sprawl. The solution to your problem is a bicycle. Phoenix is not walkable, but it is very bikable.