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A trip to Europe is all one needs to see a better system of cities at work.  In a blog I wrote several months ago I talked about the problems with current American development standards and how I believe Europe’s to be better.  Now that I have been, I have been inspired to write up a blog about what I saw and how I digested this new found information.

I went with my class as a study abroad trip.  We went several places visiting many countries, cities, and experiencing different lifestyles.  My idea of touring is trying to understand and possibly “live” the life of a local so to speak.  For many it is visiting popular monuments and places but for many locals this is just a tourist thing.  I try not to buy in to all of that, sometimes I do if I believe it to be meaningful and that I will gain some sort of understanding about the city.  From town to town or city to city, I observed the lifestyles of the different inhabitants.  Although many were very similar each city had its own uniqueness.  Something that made it special.  Be it Germany’s Christmas Markets, or Paris’ appreciation for the Arts, I could sense this sort of pride.  These sort of associations are wonderful.  People feel proud to be a member of the community.  They can identify with it.  While observing this I tried to think about my hometown and things that brought the town together or why I might attach myself pridefully.  None thing really came to mind.  I am from a Dallas suburb that offers a premium selection of strip centers, shopping malls, and an addiction to highway expansion.  There was no central hub where people gathered.  No historic place celebrated.  Just Chili’s and the Northpark Mall.  I know, I know people can come back and say “well, what is wrong with that?”  I always think to myself “everything.”  It is explaining it that is tricky.  People do not like be told what to do, or what to like and not like.  How do you tell somebody at Target that they are irresponsible for buying laundry detergent with harmful chemicals in it when they could spend a dollar more to by the bio degradable, eco-friendly, paraben free (however you spell it) stuff?  You come off as smug, or bossy, or judgmental.  The truth is you can only associate with “your kind.”  I suppose we could get crafty in our information swapping.  I could turn to my friend I am with at Target and say (in a slightly louder than normal so the person buying the harmful detergent could hear me) “hey look at this detergent.  Did you know by using this I am helping the environment?  The toxins in everyday detergent leech from our sewage tanks and never really disappear.  Instead they seep into our soils and contaminate rivers ground water and even oceans.”  People just do not like to be told what to do.  I always explain it using reverse psychology.  I usually do the “you’re better than this” bit.  Not that that is any less smug.  However we are better than the conventional cities we live in.  We are better that the strip centers with window-less facades greeted by a sea of concrete to accommodate the 2,000 cars in the lot.  We deserve better.  We have fallen into this ugly system of development mainly because we didn’t know any better.  Or bad timing if you think about it.  Europe is old.  Much older than the US.  Towns were built around the human.  For the “people.”  America started doing that and at the same time was trying to keep up with the industrial revolution which made things stressful (ie: too many ideas being used and without any planning).  But America’s growth was interrupted.  Things were just starting to look good (yet still wore the appearance of bad to the common person) and then the automobile was made economical.  So we through out humans from the equation and just started designing around the automobile.  That’s right…  Cities do not develop to us first, instead they develop around a machine we are dependent on.  With the humans out of the mix we have no need for walkable downtowns or neighborhoods.  The car needs none of that.  Instead to make it easier on the car we decided to use more infrastructure and more land.  We even took the idea of the assembly line that worked so well for the automobile and applied it to our housing.  A cookie-cutter home is made with the same idea that a car is.  In Europe it was a bit harder for the car to take over, it never did.  Why?  Well…timing.  They were in the right place at the right time.  They were developed and America had a long way to go.  When I toured the countries I saw Europe’s version of a suburb.  It was just as I expected it to be.  Near the central hub of the village or city (or it had it’s own smaller central hub) walkable, beautiful and more peaceful.  The open air markets were also great.  Romantic really.  Why can’t I pursue something like this.  A lifestyle like this.  People (esp in the South and Southwest) have this negative perception of urban lifestyle.  Yet the same people go vacation at these cities with prominent urban or urban village lifestyle.  The cities in America receive this because many really are terrible.  Not to say that they were always terrible, but they grew to be or rather declined to be.  We left that life after WWII and who could blame us with the promise of the American Dream on the horizon.  The cities were just starting to work and we gave up.  We left all of our “problems” back in the city.  It’s no wonder we have this fear of the city.  With the abandonment of people who cared about the downtown, the place crumbled.  The poor bread more poor and the homeless people stuck around.  That is the label now.  We chose “progress” which can really be called digression.  The city I am from stands for nothing more than greed and irresponsibility.  That is the only candidate for my point of pride and my city.  This was all just bad timing. People didn’t know it would come to this.  We do things because society suggests it or because it is how our parents did it. People didn’t know about the energy crisis, or the misery of subdivisions until now.  Is it too late to “restore” our original plans?  Have we gone down the wrong path too long?  To get back on the right path means taking back what we neglected usually unfairly.  It means the subdivisions from hell will rot and nature will gobble them up.  It all seems doable until you throw humans back into the equation.  Like I said you don’t tell people what to do…so how do we change?

There is such a thing as a safe downtown and more efficient neighborhoods.  Probably just can find em in your current city.  You have a choice to live where you like.  You have a choice to make your life a bit more exciting than a subdivision.

Thanks for reading,

Keaton

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 3:02 pmand is filed under Sustainability: Social Aspect, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.