There is a man named Eddy somewhere in the world who I've crossed paths with on several occasions in my lifetime. I clearly remember one day in the fall of 2006; I was on a break from my maintenance job at the Super 8 Motel in Cochrane, and sitting across the field in a dirt semi parking lot with my childhood friend Eric who lived there in my old, broken down Chevy Malibu. I was wearing my usual work clothes: a white undershirt tucked in to navy cargo pants, black suspenders and a dark blue, unbuttoned short sleeved shirt - a pretty typical maintenance uniform. We were listening to the battery powered radio and smoking Captain Black's out of our cheap corn-cob tobacco pipes when Eddy walked up.

He had been wandering, as usual, and meditating on humanity and the pitfalls society is striving to overcome. He told us of how humanity has reached a dead end, and that we have nowhere to go but backwards, to keep the technology but reverse our lifestyles. We are in a state of undoing everything we've been doing for decades, so we can revert back to community living rather than the sprawled, impersonal, automobile-driven "life" we all lead now. We're all nostalgic for a time of suspenders, tobacco pipes, and real, neighborly relationships.

What he was describing was his own realization of a now widely discussed concept called 'neo-traditionalism' or 'new urbanism.' This concept was brought about as a way to combat what is known as urban sprawl, a major problem that has been building up on our continent for over half a century.

But what exactly is urban sprawl, and why is it a problem? Well, urban sprawl started off as what America saw as a means of achieving the American Dream following the second World War: Country living for everybody. Space and privacy, the promise of choice and originality in your home. Simply by moving from the city core to the outskirts of town onto larger, more separated plots of land, you could realize your every dream and desire. Yes, a single family house in the suburbs and an automobile or two will altogether raise our standard of living to unconceivable heights.

But in reality, suburbanization causes and contributes to a multitude of problems, from small to serious, in many ways. Living in suburbs, people tend to depend on automobiles and fossil fuels to get around rather than walking or riding bicycles. Such low density makes public transit in suburbs time consuming and inefficient. This leads to increased pollution, more

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