Debunking the Cul-de-Sac
21st September 2011
For decades, families fled the dense urban grid for newer types of neighborhoods that felt safer, more private, even pastoral. Through their research, Garrick and colleague Wesley Marshall are now making the argument that we got it all wrong: We’ve really been designing communities that make us drive more, make us less safe, keep us disconnected from one another, and that may even make us less healthy.
And why was that?
The Federal Housing Authority embraced the cul-de-sac and published technical bulletins in the 1930s that painted the urban street grid as monotonous, unsafe, and characterless. Government pamphlets literally showed illustrations of the two neighborhood designs with the words “bad” and “good” printed alongside them.
The FHA had a hand in developing tens of millions of new properties and mortgages, and its idiosyncratic design preferences evolved into regulation. From the 1950s until the late 1980s, there were almost no new housing developments in the U.S. built on a simple grid.
Your tax dollars at work. Whenever the government gets involved, what happens is that a bunch of ‘experts’ decide what’s best for everybody, and so everybody has to do it that way. And when the experts prove to be wrong, as almost inevitably happens, everybody suffers.
“It’s ironic,” Garrick says, “but the thing is the patterns that we used to use in American cities are patterns that were built over thousands of years. And there’s a reason they were built that way.”
No shit, Sherlock. Sometimes the old ways really are best.
September 22nd, 2011 at 02:23
So Professor and expert Garrick is wrong, thrn.
September 22nd, 2011 at 09:51
I’ve seen it all around me throughout my life. I’ve lived in houses both in older neighborhoods where the streets actually formed blocks and in newer ones where you couldn’t find your ass in the dark with both hands if you didn’t have a map (or didn’t live there, which I think is the more pertinent criterion; the suspicious, “Y’all ain’t from ’round here, are ya?” is not exclusive to Texas).
The older neighborhoods were good for walking: sidewalks, shopping areas close by, parks, etc. The newer neighborhoods were such that you could not live there without a car. I serviced 75 newspaper customers in my old neighborhood in the same time that it took my son to service a mere 20. People say they want to live surrounded by “green space” and in a place that isn’t conveniently “on the way” to anywhere else, then wonder why they feel so disconnected from their neighbors and their community. In the old neighborhoods I knew most of the folks who lived within a block; in the newer neighborhoods I was lucky to know who lived next door on either side, and just forget the one across the street–I never saw him/her once in three years.
Yes, sometimes the old ways are best, for the community and for the mental (dare I say spiritual?) health of the residents.