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If Design Speaks, What Does Suburban Sprawl Say?
Developing a mind for design is a bit scary, just as learning anything can be.
I look around, and where I used to see innocuous happenstance, I now see arrangements filled with intention — rarely the intentions of designers, but those of the powers that employ and direct them (often the state in cooperation with corporations, but sometimes exclusively corporations).
For example, U.S. suburban sprawl is not an accident. And multiple centuries of established practices for meaningful, communally enriching public planning were thrown out in an instant. Extremely historically curious.
Everything we knew about shared spaces, about fostering interaction and connection, about local scale and circular (or at least efficient) economies, about accessibility and beauty and pleasure, we scrapped it.
Not because anyone actually thought it was a good idea overall but because suburban sprawl would cement the centrality of the automobile in American life and, therefore, a future of profit for car companies and the oil companies that teamed up with them to buy and literally destroy excellent public transit systems (e.g., California), to monopolize the sale of buses and streetcar parts just so no one else could buy them, and so on.
