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Rational Urbanism
Home » Posts tagged "Families"

Tag Archives: Families

Brand Suburb

Posted on July 26, 2014 by fdsfg23441drghs433retgsd

20140726-071839.jpg

“The suburbs” are a brand. It is a brand which so dominates market share that for most families the only question is the type of suburb to opt for. Much like the illusion of choice in our political discourse, the expression of difference is highly encouraged, but only within severely limited boundaries. In most regions of the United States for most of the middle class it’s Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, Regular Coke, Sprite, Dasani…you can take your pick…but you’re buying a Coca Cola product.

Convincing people to rethink auto-centeredness is akin to doing the same with patriotism or religion. The concepts are nearly identical in that the place where you are raised is so key to your mindset. It’s fairly obvious that the most patriotic of Americans would have been patriotic Italians or Danes had they been raised in Italy or Denmark, and the most devout Christians, devout Muslims had they been raised in Islam. So too, a suburbanite in the U.S. would believe that the traditional way of raising a family in Spain or Japan was “right” had they been brought up in that culture. If one has grown up in post war America, raising a family in a detached single family home in a community divided by the norms of Euclidean zoning practices is what one does if one is able to do so.

The difference between this “American Way of Life” and other traditional ways of life is that the former is untried and untested over the long term. It has thrived for a brief period, propelled by an increase in the extraction of fossilized energy at a pace which will be impossible to maintain. As absolutely true and undeniable as the previous sentence is, for most American adults it is all they have ever known, and for many it is all that they have ever seen. Convincing Americans that a people centered place, a walkable place, perhaps even an urban place would be a better place to live and perhaps, to raise a family would first require that something, in the words of Daniel Dennett, “Break the Spell”.

For me it was living in Spain, spending years living in six different Spanish cities and visiting dozens more and seeing with my own eyes how much happier, and how much more autonomous, young people were there. Very few of my American colleagues would notice it however. Most of them were from west of the Mississippi and could only bemoan the lack of jet-skis, pick up trucks, and In-n-out Burgers, and the delay in the arrival of the newest American film or song. I’m sure that the time I had spent in Springfield’s traditional, if declining, downtown prepared me to understand Spain in ways my friends from suburban California and Utah were unable to do.

I read what is being written now by parents bemoaning something different, something they see as having been lost in America: childhood. Children’s lives are too scheduled they say, with too much time spent strapped in a carseat being chauffeured from place to place. What about free play? What about going to the playground and making new friends? Auto centeredness has atomized us so thoroughly that everyplace which is not our home or our yard is enemy territory: “If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists”.

(This attitude is not altogether irrational as the suburbs are incredibly dangerous for young people in particular. Traffic deaths and suicide take more children than any other causes. They are both negatively correlated to density. Taking your child on, or forcing your teen to make, more trips, more often, over longer distances, at greater speed in an automobile puts them at greater risk. Living in isolation puts them at greater risk.)

A place where you still see hordes of unaccompanied children walking the sidewalks, riding their scooters, riding their bikes, shopping at the corner store, playing on playgrounds, and hanging out with their friends is the city. The kids doing this, in my town at least, are mostly black or Hispanic, and relatively poor. Their parents are not part of the culture which now demands helicopter parenting, although when they do intersect with that culture the minority parent is often judged to be lesser. Much like young black girls and body image, many urban parents are sufficiently isolated from the broader culture that they remain untouched by its detrimental effects. In cities “Free Range Parenting” isn’t a movement, it’s…parenting.

But the city has absolutely no marketing. At least no affirmative marketing. If I can be forgiven for stretching my original metaphor just a bit; city living is tap water. In spite of the fact that, in some places, it is of demonstrably higher quality than some bottled waters, and is much less expensive, is more readily available, and does less damage to the environment, tap water doesn’t have much of a corporate machine to drive it. Suburban sprawl, like bottled water, has built for itself a constituency. James Howard Kunstler would list home builders, road builders, bankers, and of course, the millions of Americans who are convinced that a suburb of some sort is the only decent place to raise a family, as cheer leaders for sprawl.

What is it that would make suburbanites consider moving to the city? They would have to see things with fresh eyes. Instead of seeing the green lawn, the driveway, and the white picket fence and thinking “this is the place”, they would have to start from a zero base and analyze exactly how a place works for children, and for adults, in terms of autonomy and engagement in the living of life. If they look carefully they’ll see that it’s where traditional America, perhaps the real America, still exists, especially for young people, if, right now, somewhat more impoverished and darkly complected.

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Anti urban bias, Children, Families, Free Range Parenting, Marketing, Suburbia |

Millennial Me

Posted on February 23, 2014 by fdsfg23441drghs433retgsd

I’m a misplaced Millennial. My parents lived through the Great Depression, my father fought in World War II, and I was born during the last year of the Baby Boom, but everything I read about the characteristics of my daughters’ generation speaks to the life I’ve already lived and the choices I’ve already made. I’m not much for generational conversations when the underlying premise is “woo woo” in nature, but if what is intended is understanding how the material realities of a time and place impact the tendencies of a cohort of people, then I can get in to that.

*“Desire to live in urban settings,”*

When I was finishing up my undergraduate degree and was completing my teaching certification I chose to live downtown because between my wife and me we had two jobs, I had to get to different high schools to complete my practicum, I still had to get to classes at the university, we only had one car, and the hub of the bus system was a block from our apartment. On most days I took the bus to school, walked to work, and my wife took the car. If I had to visit a high school off the beaten path, I took the car, she used the bus…and I still walked to work a block from home.

*”The top reason for our lack of interest comes down to money.”*

The pattern didn’t change even after we had our first child, only it was my wife who walked to work, and I took the car. When Xela and Mckenzie started school it was within walking distance and we were able to keep automobile expenses quite low. Because the looked for boom in urban living never materialized, we were able to buy a condominium downtown, in my old high school of all places, for under $100,000. We chose to do so and found that the time we weren’t spending on home maintenance and in a car could be spent with the girls taking them to parks, museums, or playgrounds. The Springfield Public Schools were still under a desegregation order and so a “school choice” magnet program was still in effect which brought students from the more suburban parts of the city into the downtown to make the racial profile of the school more closely approximate the make up of the district, so on occasion we’d have to drive the girls to “play dates” and sleepovers in what seemed at the time far flung parts of the city.

*”They’re much more likely to find value in experiences than they are to find value in things,”*

Our relatively inexpensive living situation allowed us to do more in the community, more hockey games, basketball games, more trips to Boston, more trips to the beach, more art classes at the museums, more music classes at the community music school, and eventually, we were able to spend a summer in Madrid as a family while I finished my master’s degree. Experience was what drove our day to day lives.

*”But you don’t see a ton of 5-year-olds,”*

But we were alone. When I coached my daughters’ basketball and soccer teams I would occasionally run in to acquaintances from high school. They all lived in the suburbs, they all opted for houses with yards, and they all wondered why I would have opted to live, not just in the city, but in the heart of the downtown. In the condominium where we lived, in those one hundred units, there was not one other couple with children which decided to stay in the building and send their children to school “in the city”. There were a few who had children, but as the children approached school age it was like a Logan’s Run scenario and the families would make for the hills. We stayed pre-k through graduation and reaped the rewards of two well-educated scholarship winning daughters going on to attend, and graduate successfully from, 4 year degree granting universities.

*”Urban living makes sense for these young people.”*

I can’t say why I was, in a sense, ahead of my time. I found everything about downtown exhilarating and invigorating from the very first time I wandered out of Baystate West onto the streets of the city center to encounter, what I was told, was nothing but the decaying carcass of what had been a vibrant city center. My mom had taken a part time job at a retail outlet, The Leprechaun Shop, which had an outlet at a mall and an outlet downtown. After classes at Forest Park Junior High School I would occasionally take a bus to visit her at whichever location she was working. I preferred downtown.

*”What’s the attraction? Street life, the opportunity for chance encounters, a social life that is not accessible only by car.”*

Springfield had a school choice system at the high school level based on interest; college prep, math and science, business, and vocational education. All but the last program were located in schools at the center of the city. As the city bus packed mostly with students, but also with adults commuting to their jobs, wound its way down Main Street I would focus on the life I saw on that street. To me there was something more integral and more authentic than what I saw in the drive-in drive-thru parts of the region.

*”This generation looked around their home towns and saw something missing.”*

My years in college spent in the horizontally expanding car paradise of the Utah Valley would later confirm this to me. I found the walled streets with sound barriers protecting backyards from the roar of traffic interspersed with Circle K’s (Circles K?), Seven Elevens, Mormon Churches, and gas stations not just disorienting, but dispiriting. People would talk about the beauty they saw in the Wasatch Front: I’ve never seen a less inspired place.

*”Sharing in the public space is the millennial’s modus operandum.”*

Conversely, I had the opportunity to spend a little over two years in Spain. The Mormon missionaries I was assigned to work with we’re nearly all from suburbs in the western United States, and they all looked down on the Spanish way of life, not just the Catholicism, but the narrow streets, the daily trips to the market, the old buildings, and especially, the emphasis on public space and public life and tradition. They preferred backyards, television, and the shiny and new. What I saw was the model I had been seeking: A family focused life in a beautiful and cultured man-made environment.

*”Kids are the indicator species of a great neighbourhood.”*

Thousands upon thousands of other young people had at least some of the experiences that I had when I had them, thousands of high school students attending school in classic pre-war schools, thousands of kids visiting parents working in traditional downtowns, thousands of Americans spending time working or studying in Europe, but very few took from those experiences the idea that the heart of the city was the place to live and raise a family. I’m hearing that fellow Baby Boomers, most at least a decade older than I, will soon be moving in to take advantage of the walkable city. As my wife and I dined last night at a packed Lebanese restaurant just a block or so from Symphony Hall it was obvious that dozens of other couples had the idea of eating at Nadim’s before attending the SSO concert. I knew that these people had driven in and parked their cars at a nearby garage, that they lived in huge, now mostly empty, overpriced and heavily taxed suburban homes in Longmeadow or Wilbraham. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few more of them decided to move downtown, especially with the hype surrounding the new MGM casino, but they’ve missed out on so much, and I feel that I’ve lived a marvelous one half of my life in this place, albeit with very few people of my race and class.

(As Millennialls contemplate living, working, and raising families in cities where that hasn’t been the norm for people with options, I’d like to think that my experiences give me something to share.)

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Baby Boomers, Cars, Children, Europe, Families, Millennials, Public Space, Street Life |

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