Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [51]
Much has been made of recent suburban high school shootings, and even The New York Times has suggested that suburban design may be to blame.5 It is unwarranted, however, to automatically presume a causal relationship. Since suburbia houses most of America’s teenagers, it is bound to have its share of violent ones. Yet it is easy to imagine how a homogeneous and unstimulating environment might lead thrill-seeking teenagers to inhabit an alternative reality, whether it be computer games or psychosis. And one might speculate that the sterility of the suburbs—their very unreality—could make the leap to fantasy more possible.
There are other ways in which suburban sprawl victimizes America’s youth. The building pictured here is not, as it may appear, a refugee relocation center or a storage depot, although it could be considered a storage depot of sorts: it’s the place where we store our children while earning the money to pay for their cars. The reason that so many new schools look as dismal as this one is that there is not enough money left over after the road-building budgets are allocated. Even while we fret about the sorry state of our schools, our government spends the greater part of our public wealth on horizontal infrastructure: asphalt surfaces for cars.
At the top of the public funding hierarchy our schools
At the top of the public funding hierarchy: our roadways
It is true that the United States has the most luxurious road system in the world. We build magnificent new highways at a cost of $30 million per mile,bn and every cloverleaf is more generous than the last. We happily spend twice as much per capita on transportation as do other developed nations.bo Nothing seems too good for our cars. Meanwhile, more and more of our children attend school in fields of prefabricated portable barracks with air-conditioning back-packs, surrounded by chain-link fencing. It is difficult to be encouraged by what this says about our national priorities.
It would clarify matters if Americans would think about schools, town halls, libraries, and other civic buildings as vertical infrastructure, to be financed out of the same purse as our horizontal infrastructure. Such buildings are not mere luxuries but investments in community-making that evoke identity, pride, and participation in public life. A society’s civic buildings are ultimately as important as its roads, and we should not use the table scraps of public funding to construct them. Most Americans would tolerate aging asphalt and fewer new lanes if they knew that their children would not be educated in the equivalent of trailer parks. Unfortunately, this choice is not offered.
STRANDED ELDERLY
Whether or not the suburbs work as promised for children, they are intended to benefit families, especially young ones. As families age and disperse, however, parents begin to find themselves in an environment that is no longer organized to serve their needs. As driving skills diminish with age, parents become increasingly dependent upon others for mobility, just as their children were once dependent upon them. This situation may represent some form of divine justice, but hardly a satisfying one, since being forced to drive and being forced to ride are equally unpleasant.
Many seniors choose to retire to a house in the suburbs, especially in the Sun Belt—at least, they think that’s what they’re doing. But they would be mistaken, because, as soon as they lose their driver’s licenses, the location of that house puts them out of reach of their physical and social needs. They become, in effect, nonviable members of society. Unless they are wealthy enough to have a chauffeur, or are willing to burden a relative, they have no choice but to re-retire into a specialized home for the elderly. Then, having left a second community behind, they spend the rest of their days quarantined with their fellow nonviable members of society.