Urbanization and vacation

[rebeccmeister]

Quite a while ago, No Impact Man wrote about taking urban vacations with his family. As a part of his pledge to have close to no net environmental impact, he and his family ride their bikes or walk for transportation. This limits their mobility considerably, and led NIM to question both current urban design and Americans' vacationing habits (the desire to flee to the "wilderness"). I've been giving this idea considerable thought, especially as I start to feel a bit worn down by being similarly tied to one spot. I haven't gone camping or hiking in ages, and yet there *are* opportunities to get outside around here, like the country's largest municipal park (the South Mountain preserve), and the nearby Papago Park. But my continued dissatisfaction with those options suggests that perhaps I'm looking for something else.

I've also been thinking quite a bit about a recent article in the Stranger about rising rent in Seattle's urban core forcing people out of some of the older neighborhoods. On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to such complaints, as I wonder similarly about how the expensive housing coming on the market near my house will affect the quality of life in my neighborhood. On the other hand, the people who were forced out weren't really all that marginalized, and instead are relocating to other neighborhoods that already have an established feel.

Both of these lines of thinking are tied to a single line of questioning: how does the American urban lifestyle need to change? What *is* the ideal American urban lifestyle in the first place, and how does it meet peoples' basic need for shelter and extended need for other things? Somehow I don't see us suddenly modeling American cities on old European cities (really, should we?), but perhaps that's because I live in an infamously sprawling city.

I wonder if, for example, we should consider cities as urbanized networks instead of centralized cores (=downtowns), where nodes, or centers, within the network are work-, community- and service-based. But really, I have not even a remote idea how such a shift in planning could be accomplished, or if it would be a worthwhile experiment. Usually my awareness only reaches as far as wanting to gripe about infrastructure I dislike, such as malls (strip- or "regular") or overpriced, isolating condominiums. Perhaps my dissatisfaction will be a good thing in the long run, if it provides the impetus for change.

Comments

[crume.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my course of study . . . or at least partly. Your idea of multiple centers is, in fact, where most American cities are today and where most cities in "developed" countries are increasingly shifting (I just read a research paper about it . . . I'll have to find it and share it with your).

I think a lot about these things and don't really come to any good answers. In my coursework there isn't a lot of time put into this, even though there is a lot of literature.