Not so long ago, when I was living in quite a large city, I would regularly walk my dog, Pearadox, to a field (really an empty lot behind the hospital) a few blocks from my apartment. At the time, this field was our frequent companion, and we spent at least two daily sessions there so that Pear could relieve herself, play with her tennis ball, and chase the other dogs that congregated from the surrounding neighborhood. I found the necessity of such hiatuses a pleasant excuse to stand in the sun and listen to the the birds as they sounded in the handful of suburban trees. The lot was at the end of a dead-end street and was constantly filled with local dog owners and kids, who would play soccer or skateboard in the small cul-de-sac. I got to know a number of my neighbors, too, an event almost unheard of in many American cities. Indeed, the communal centrality of the lot seemed to me almost an anachronism, a hold over from a time when cities were built to the scale of the neighborhood.
Anyone who has spent any time in the great cities of Europe will be instantly familiar with the layout I am referring to. Much of Venice, for instance, is designed around block-sized neighborhood units traditionally holding a church, a well, houses, and a number of shops necessary to the lives of those living there. These neighborhoods often have their own patron saints, whose images guard elaborately carved gates accompanied by the Virgin Mary or the imposing figure of Saint Mark’s lion. On visiting such places, one is struck by the completeness, the accessibility of all human requirements. In theory, a Venetian from this time could supply all of his or her needs without every stepping beyond the domains of one neighborhood block. This is a far cry from the modern American city, wherein houses are rarely within walking distance of shops, churches, or areas of recreation.
As far as I can tell, the fundamental difference between these two types of city is the scale to which they are built. While the premodern European city planners worked on the scale of the human being and the corresponding human community (and I assume sometimes that of the horse and carriage), the modern city is based on the scale of the automobile. Rather than neighborhoods in which everything a person is likely to need, from employment to groceries, is within walking distance, cities have been divided into districts, one of which contains businesses, another housing, and still another areas of recreation, such as local parks. Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule, and many urban areas retain a park or two or a small branch of shops. The city with the aforementioned lot was roughly divided into small communities, for instance, and I lived down the street from a small stretch of shops and restaurants. Even in such relatively idyllic contexts, however, the houses are set apart from the businesses and conglomerate in sprawl or tightly knit housing and apartment blocks and parks are few and far between. In many cities, moreover, even this kind of luxury is rare or nonexistent. To run simple errands requires driving from one end of the city to another. If one desires to spend time in nature, one must drive a considerable distance outside the city limits, or else content oneself with small and .
The result of all this is that we see the vast majority of the places where we live through the windows of our cars, and we only see our neighbors in the brief intervals we spend in parking lots, if we see them at all. Such a condition necessarily abstracts us from the place in which we live and enforces atomistic thinking. The time spent traveling from district to district in my car hardly serves to develop any kind of genuine relationship with the various streets and people around which I live. The very space I traverse is condensed into a kind of semi-existent waiting room, an obstacle to be overcome before a certain goal can be reached. The city is thus collapsed into a few islands of shared space accessible only by a dreamlike passage over a hardly noticed and generally bleak landscape of roads, intersections, and highways.
This kind of abstraction should concern us, as individuals and as a society, for people who do not know a place, have never had the opportunity of getting to know it or of mingling with its inhabitants in shared spaces, rarely ever come to love that place. And it is only by loving a place that we can care for it. If one has never learned to love a particular climate, earth, river, community, architecture, or culture, one cannot sincerely care for any of these things. Such is the state of many modern people, especially here in America.
While this is rather inconvenient for people such as myself, and while it certainly serves to isolate us from one another and from the places in which we live, this state of affairs imposes an even more significant burden upon the poor. One must have both the wealth and the leisure to access all of the resources of one’s home or to spend the day in the woods. Those who would like to benefit from these resources must be able to pay for a vehicle, with all the corresponding fees, maintenance costs, and gasoline bills. If one cannot afford such expenditure, one is forced to take public transportation, thereby sacrificing a great deal of time and not an inconsiderable amount of money. Given that in many cities much that is needful is inaccessible by foot and impracticable to reach by public transportation, cars often become a necessity. One must thus take on a massive financial burden to be able to buy groceries, go to work, or take one’s children to the baseball field. It should be obvious who this benefits: car manufacturers, the oil industry, insurance companies, and creditors. These burdens only serve to further isolate communities and individuals from one another so that the alleviation of such conditions that could otherwise come from a friendly relationship with one’s neighbors or a sense of communal responsibility are curbed or destroyed altogether.
Thus, the scale and layout of the modern city is not only inconvenient and depersonalizing—it is unjust. The poor suffer, any sense of community is dissipated, and one’s connection to land and place is severely hamstrung. Meanwhile, the wealthy sequester themselves in isolated, often fenced, locales. What can the result of such mass alienation and oppression be but the enervation of whole populations and their indifference to their neighbors and environment? So long as our culture operates on the scale of the automobile and ignores the human, many of the necessities and spiritual energies of the latter will decay. So long as we remain isolated and abstracted, few positive changes can be made to our communities and to the lands which they occupy.
The solution to these issues is simple (at least in theory): we must build upon the human scale and foster accessible, shared spaces in which individuals can connect to a sense of community and belonging to place. One should know the people living nearby as well as the geography, the rivers and the trees. Perhaps more importantly, no one should be forced to submit to an environmentally destructive financial burden in the form of buying an automobile. This means that resources—including workplaces—must be more accessible and that alternative forms of transportation, such a bike paths and efficient public transport, must be readily available. This likely requires that a plethora of small businesses, each serving a relatively limited population, must replace the massive warehouse stores that draw consumers from all ends of the metropolis.
All this is, obviously, more easily said than done. It is difficult to imagine how one could go about altering cities that have already been built on the perverse principles of the automobile, and yet it is not difficult to see that these principles have led to a severe distortion of human communities and that they will likely have to adjust if said communities are to exist sustainably. One might therefore be pardoned for thinking the creation of such vast and inhumane structures is more unlikely and bizarre than their undoing, for it is the neighborhood, understood not as a mere collection of houses but as a community providing much of the local needs of its inhabitants, that is the more comprehensible, the more likely, and ultimately the more necessary.