So, this is what i think.
But here’s the experienctial evidence first.
I have been working in houses for the last 9.52 months. It’s great. restoring order, clean lines, cleanliness, simplicity and beauty to a house is refreshing. it makes me feel like i’m helping the world out, i’m doing my part, i’m giving back. Sounds strange, that’s fine.
while being in these houses daily, i’ve started noticing things and it was atriculated very well by a subcontractor-ish dude. one of the last big jobs we worked on was re doing the back patio of this one condo/townhouse. the buildings were put together real quick and dirty, so when all the dirt settled around the foundation and everything, the ground sloped towards the house making for bad drainage and the possibility for water problems in the house. that’s beside the point. The thing was, there was a stairwell going down into the ground to the basement. but it was an open stairwell. and the cinderblock walls, however quick and dirty they were built, mother nature goes on with her daily activities as if this were a papercut. And what made me really just stop and think, and the thing that was articulated so well (yet i can’t remember it) is no matter what we build, make, fortify, stabalize etc. mother nature doesn’t really care, and she will somehow make it break. whether it’s just the slow movement and erosion over time, the earth pushing in on a fixed feature because of the expansion and contraction and water, or the foundation of a building being infiltrated by roots over the past 80 years.
So that’s what I think. Mother nature doesn’t care, she’s not affected by our buidling, she doesn’t work around us. She’ll continue on her way and always impact the things we create. we build things that are static, immoblie, fixed structures. mother nature moves, she breathes and sways.
i think it’s interesting that we build and create and make things that are suppsoed to be constant, our damns, our houses, our bridges, our businesses. There’s comfort in consistancy, yet our bodys and the earth are ever moving and shifting. It’s an ever changing world out there be it in the human rhelm or the natural rhelm.

change is a course of human life. consistancy is something we strive for with life and is good in relationship. Life is ever moving, swaying.

I will go back to the privacy, but i said pedestrians are next. so here we come.

I was taking a walk through my suburbian neighborhood of different neighborhoods with a friend not too many days ago. But there was no where to walk. I started thinking about where the sidewalks were and could think of one, that started after all the neighborhoods, as you near the WalMart, expressway off ramp and elementary school. these are all located off a 5 lane, 40 mph road with numerous parking lot entrances.

Are You Kidding Me???

How am I supposed to take a walk there? and what if i need to cross the road? that’s just a ridiculous question, you’ve got left turn lights, right on red, and 5 lanes of traffic moving through, and when it’s a 5 lane road, no one’s watching for pedestrians. The suburbs have not been made at a human scale. (thanks to Kunstler, i have terminology now) Seriously!! no human scale whatsoever.
So we ended up taking a walk in a near by housing track. No sidewalks, no street lights, (and because everyone is in their houses with the shades drawn at night, there’s no need to keep an outside light on) and no shoulders. just a laneless 2.5 car width wide slab of pavement curling and turning in front of us. Now, don’t get me wrong, it was a nice walk. The company made it better, but I grew up biking around in those streets. I grew up on a dead-end street surrounded by 3 major traffic roads.

In quiet contrast (yes, i didn’t misspell it) I went out to coffee in the city with the same friend. We went for another walk. (he’s a walker as you can tell, i don’t complain) This time we went walking around all the sidewalks, from one main street to another main street to another via lots of grid-side streets. Because of our use of cars and the place they hold in everyone’s lives, some on the streets were still 4 laned streets. But the outside lanes were parking near some buildings, the speed limit was slower, the break up of streets by crossing streets slowed people down at a regular interval. And the houses weren’t 4 lots apart. each cute, adorable, historical, visually stimulating and interesting house sat close to the others, in community with the others. They all sat on streets with an old church on the corner, or a few restaurants, or an apartment, old beautiful apartment building near by. Now, what i’m hinting at here is Mixed Use. (another term from Kunstler) It makes it a functional area. You can walk places, you don’t have to drive. It creates a community. It was amazing.
It was an a Human Scale!! That’s what helped. The street lights were closer to use, there were benches on the sidewalks (some for the bus stop, but it wasn’t that weird hut). There were Trees. big, beautiful trees. and little new trees where old ones were replaced. AMAZING!!

See one of the things Kunstler says is that when there’s trees making that canopy like thing over a road, it creats an outside room. This creates a public space between your home and the shops or whatever you are walking to. This creates a space where people feel comfortable, or at least welcome being out on the streets. And there were big, beautiful trees in the yards of these houses.

That’s another heart breaking thing about suburban housing developments being built. I drove by one a month ago in the far reaches of my suburban town. The developers had completely cleared this foresty area of all trees (excpet the barrier between the wilderness and whatever houses may spring up in this dirtscape. There didn’t seem to be plans or work on houses even. They were still selling the lots, yet they cleared the whole damn area. Granted it’s more difficult to build around trees, but come on. Do we really have the power to just chop down these tree? What about our ethical responsibility to be caretakers of the earth? In some cases that warrents the removal or trees, nature whatever. But for a housing track, they’re going to plant trees anyways. Just save the old ones that have a habitat for the animals established and oh wait, SHADE! it really frusterates me.
I went to my grandparents house down south. They live on a man made lake that the army core of engineers “owns” There’s probably 25 feet from the waterside inland that the Core has jurisdiction over. They only allowed so many different areas for houses to be built and allow only a certain amount of docks for these houses, depending on the size of the cove, and if you want more than a trail from your house to the dock, you need to get a permit from the Core to put in a cement walk. it’s probably confusing, but that’s not the point. The point is, that there’s 25 feet of tall trees standing between my grandparents house and the lake, it’s beautiful. And their house was built within the trees. So much so that there was an Oak tree that stood at the front corner of the house between it and the garage. (Sadly, it just got removed due to it being diseased and what not).

I hope to have made a point in all of this. several in fact. Good luck in finding them. Off to the continuation of my thought