The race for new urbanism

You may have noticed a growing movement in Vancouver toward reclaiming the "old fashioned" neighbourhood feeling in several areas. Some call this "new urbanism". What I'm talking about is a neighbourhood where people actually know each other, watch out for each other, walk to the local store for food, grow food in a community garden, eat in the local restaurants, and walk their dogs in the local park. What it's *not* is a place full of big box stores, freeways, McRestaurants, mega-plex theatres and 7-11s. I think this new urbanism is a reaction to, and an antidote for, the automobile culture that's built up over the past 50 years, and we as a society are finally waking up from our automobile-induced coma. As evidence, one need only look at the huge popularity and spread of the Car Free Vancouver Days across multiple neighbourhoods. It feels like people are really starving for great neighbourhoods, which, it seems, necessarily means fewer cars.

Matt Hern, the co-founder of Car-Free Vancouver days puts it best. “Some people go from their house to car to work to shopping without ever actually living in their neighbourhood,” Hern says. “But the less you rip past in a car, the more you actually live here, the more you notice what’s happening in your ’hood and the more you’re likely to work to make it a better place.”(1)

And that's the point. Jim Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, refers to suburbia as the "National Automobile Slum," and sees the big-box stores and cookie-cutter housing of the suburbs as a tragic misallocation of resources. "We can't overestimate the amount of despair we are generating with places like this," says Kunstler. He theorizes that suburbia neither informs us where we have come from, nor affords us a glimpse of where we are going as a culture, and as a consequence we end up with desolate public spaces that "are not worth caring about."(2)

We are very lucky that Vancouverites of the 50s and 60s had the foresight to reject freeways within the city. No freeway ever improved a city, in my opinion. By eschewing freeways, Vancouver has preserved its core and kept people in the city, together, instead of letting them be dispersed out into the black hole of suburbia (suburbs have still arisen, but not at the expense of the core). As the price of oil continues to climb (and yes, it will go higher), residents of the city will have to adjust, but not nearly so severely as those in the suburbs.

This era, the post-cheap-oil era, is going to be very painful for people who live far from their work, friends, and sources of day to day supplies and services. If the worst of the Peak Oil predictions come true, the new urbanism might not just be a lifestyle choice, it might be a necessity. According to Kunstler, "We're not going to be rescued by the hyper car; we're not going to be rescued by alternative fuels. No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to run what we are running the way we are running it. We are going to have to do everything very differently. And [we are] not prepared. We are sleepwalking into the future... Life in the mid 21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbours; be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbours and to your fellow citizens."

The link to talk by Kunstler is in the second endnote below, and it is really worth watching (17 mins).

P.F.

1. Vancouver Magazine. "Citizen Hern" March 2008.
2. TED conference 2004. James Howard Kunstler talk on public spaces.