What Kind of City Do You Want?
Answering this question can help us design better urban areas
Whenever we make a decision about our cities, we often take too narrow a view of the impacts of that decision.
When the larger implication of these projects is not taken into account, we can often end up with cities that don’t fit our vision of what we want them to be. That widened road or interstate that allowed drivers to cut a few minutes off their commutes has now separated neighborhoods and severed communities, changing the larger feel of that city.
“We were just doing what the numbers suggested,” a planner might say, holding up a graph that showed the increasing number of people driving through town and the need for an expanded transportation option.
That may be true, but the reactionary method of planning transportation options is an outdated one. Urban form begets transportation choice, which leads us back to how we design our cities from the ground up.
And that, of course, leads us back to suburbanization.
Suburbanization was in many ways in a phenomenon that sought to solve a few problems but ended up ruining the larger feel and operation of cities in the process.
The suburbs were intended to alleviate public health and congestion by separating land uses. Those…
