Sunday, August 12, 2012

Community vs. Car World


As a result, many people suffer from a lack of contact with other people. An area loses its community. These frustrations due to disconnection would not occur in a true neighborhood. In an urban neighborhood, face-to-face interactions are unavoidable. Members of a community typically recognize the faces of their neighbors (often, they have frequently had interactions with them), and everyone has some sort of niche, much like in an ecosystem. Values and opinions are known, youth have a place to converse, walking is an option, and people are healthier. However, in a suburb, things are a bit different. What is perceived as a neat network of homes with safe streets and a neighborhood park is actually a ghost town, where people rarely exchange a word and where people leave and enter through their garages in order to go elsewhere. There is little close-up view into the lives of others. 

In the ideal suburb, residents have privacy. Houses have large gardens and enough space exists between houses. However, the suburb has become Car World.  Houses like mine are kept separate from commercial areas. Instead of straight, quiet roads and sidewalks being the infrastructure in neighborhoods, noisy highways cut through them, and meandering streets (often with speed bumps) to nowhere and congested three-lane roads are the only way out. Americans got to this point with a sudden economic boom and large expanses of land, and our ability to grow anyway we wanted. 

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