You wake up on a Sunday morning and realize you are out of coffee and eggs. You hop into your car and drive a few miles to Dunkin' Donuts to get your immediate fix (who likes to go shopping without caffeine in their system?). Then, you drive a few miles more to the grocery store to buy coffee for tomorrow, eggs and a newspaper. Before heading home, you swing by the mall to buy a birthday present for your niece and you gas up your vehicle.... all before 10:30 a.m. on a Sunday.
We live in a car-driven world. In the 1950s, after WWII, suburbia, subdivisions and strip malls became the ideal, more and more people had cars and driving from one location to another was preferred.
While this idea may appeal still to some, those of us who prefer to keep our carbon footprint down as much as possible or those who fret as the price of gas continues to rise are looking for the chance to go back to how things were. A return to the downtown or the idea of a walkable community that makes the person more important than the vehicle.
Even our neighborhoods have become less about community and more about our two+ acres in between each McMansion. Common space rarely has a place in newer developments, making it more difficult to get to know the people around you.
Having grown up in a small Victorian village with 800 residents and has a very strong sense of community instilled from the start, I find many of the changes that have occurred to be upsetting. I can't imagine having to drive to the post office or even worse, as a child, having to be driven to a playground! In my youth, I knew everyone in the village and I had everything I needed in walking or bicycling distance - friends, playgrounds, basketball courts, a recreation program during the summer, woods and a stream to explore, even a candy store and a bakery.
The more we lose our sense of community, we lose a part of what defines us.
Unfortunately, a lot of us is already gone. It's hard to look at neighboring communities and realize that the fields of my youth are now filled with strip mall upon strip mall and miles of parking lot. Roads that were traveled in the past are now congested and more reminiscent of the epitome of spawl, Long Island, than ever before.
Being married to an urban planner, I have hope that we will ultimately see a return to where we should be. I just hope that the damage done in the meantime is kept to a minimum. Over the past several years, a trend has begun to bring things back to where they were within the urban design and planning industry. Smaller, more compact communities that provide everything a resident could need, in walkable distance - have found their advocates in New Urbanism.
I see firsthand the differences planners can make on a community as my husband deals daily with the damage that has been caused to communities by being obsessed with a car-driven world. While the work he does will not make a difference overnight, it will ultimately, drive us back to community and better growth.