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6. Great Neighborhoods
- University of Washington Press
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79 w e know that there are patterns of development that make people feel good. We also know that certain patterns of development lead to lowered vehicle miles traveled. If we emphasize the second but ignore the first, we will never get compact patterns of land use that are actually desirable, profitable for developers to build, and carbon efficient all at the same time. Getting neighborhoods right is important for a number of reasons. First, neighborhoods are where people consistently find identity, belonging, and community. When these human needs are met, people’s satisfaction with their living environment increases, and their inclination to transience declines. Second, neighborhoods are where people experience the built environment on foot and on bicycles, at speeds that allow them to notice the details of their surroundings. Third, neighborhoods are the scale at which access—to people, activities, goods, and services— can happen unencumbered by the barriers of distance and time. Complete and connected neighborhoods are time-efficient and satisfying places to live. The current reality of disconnected, incomplete neighborhoods is a relatively recent phenomenon. In earlier times the village was the scale of human interaction and access. Because walking was the dominant form of CHAPTEr 6 grEAT nEIgHborHoods Don’t buy the house, buy the neighborhood. —Russian proverb CHAPTEr 6 80 transportation and long-distance trade was minimal, villages were, of necessity , self-sufficient with respect to food, products, and services. Many contemporary parents and children are fascinated when reading books such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods by the self-sufficiency of homesteader families in the late nineteenth century, who made almost everything they used. It’s quite the opposite in today’s cities and global trade environment , where every person and region is specialized and where access seems to almost always require long-distance, vehicular mobility. We can choose from a dozen varieties of sausage in the supermarket butcher case, but hardly anybody knows how to make sausage anymore. The amazing global access we now enjoy is made possible by advances in technology and transportation. Getting groceries doesn’t require the thirteen-hour, horse-drawn journey that Wilder’s father made, but today’s mobility is still expensive, not to mention carbon-intensive. It’s both costly and inefficient to move yourself around to all the things you need if you are moving a four-thousand-pound SUV along with you. There’s no question that most people are very happy that they no longer need to sew their own clothing , cure their own meats, and make soap from scratch. But still, there should be a way to get the things we need without spending hours in the car each day. Because we consume most of our goods at home, wouldn’t it be better if they were generated near us when feasible, and if they came directly to us, resulting in the same amount of travel for the goods and zero travel for us? The solution to this is in the paradigm of neighborhood focus. Building complete neighborhoods is about more than community; it’s also about access and shortening supply chains. recognizing greAt neigHborHoods If we think about what we need to access in a typical day, we come up with a list something like this: our workplace, a cup of coffee, some help installing new tires, some exercise, a visit to the doctor, food for dinner, friends to eat dinner with. If our lives are organized at a neighborhood level and our neighborhood is safe and pleasant, these trips can be made quickly and efficiently by foot or bicycle (maybe the new tires are for the bicycle). In that case, our exercise regimen could easily be our walk or our bike ride, adding further efficiency to the day. If we don’t have time to cook from scratch, the deli is so close that it’s easy to stop in on the way home and pick up fresh foods prepared locally instead of relying on packaged products that were driven cross-country [34.203.242.200] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:14 GMT) GREAT NEIGHBORHOODS 81 by truck or flown in from overseas. Perhaps some of the food we eat is even grown in our neighborhood. Our friends that come over for dinner are free to enjoy an extra beer or two because they can walk themselves home at the end of the evening. Obviously, the global economy is too efficient in too many...