Davis: development patterns must change

At the ULI/CNU meeting, opening statements were made by CNU Boardchairman and Seaside developer Robert Davis on the state of development patterns in the the U.S. Here are excerpts: For five millennia, we have built towns and cities with strong centers and clear edges, beyond which lay farms and forests and lakes and streams. For five decades, these clear edges have become increasingly ragged, and the centrifugal forces of sprawl have flung a strange collection of objects across the landscape. The strangest of these objects are large boxes with very specialized functions. They are connected to each other by swaths of asphalt and each is surrounded by a small sea of the same material. Their placement relative to each other and to the smaller boxes we live in is designed and planned for the maximum possible consumption of our time, and of energy in various forms, including human. Our monoculture development pattern started as a good idea: to separate steel mills and slaughterhouses from dwellings. Now we rigidly separate all uses: our homes, our workplaces, our children’s schools, the places we assemble. This not only insures the maximum possible consumption of time and energy, it also separates us from each other. The number of people with whom we have daily contact is limited increasingly to those we see in our homes and those we see at work. Our 50-year experiment has failed miserably. The automobile, once a magical machine for mobility, a tool for transporting us metaphorically as well as literally for rides in the countryside, has been turned into an indispensable appliance and a prison, an isolation cell which separates us from contact with our fellow citizens on that neutral, once hallowed ground known as the public realm. Our countryside is devastated and our cities partly abandoned. But we can rebuild our cities and towns, and we can stop the despoiling of our countryside. We must act as if tomorrow mattered.