Why We Need Places to Care About

So life as I (and most Americans) live it is pretty much upside-down, in terms of our relationship to our sense of place.

Don't you feel weird when you walk into the middle of a suburban residential street, a little like a child stepping on the carpet while playing "Floor is Lava?"  I know I do.  How can all that the land directly in front of my place of residence, all that blacktop space, be so alien and off-limits?

Just a few minutes ago I saw a kid on the corner of St. College and Imperial shouting his lungs out while headbanging on a guitar.  It was a truly surreal moment, for his wailing had to fight so much just to be heard over the din of cars at the busy intersection, and I only heard it because my window was rolled down.  This wasn't like a bustling downtown metropolis, where street-side performers routinely sing for passerby, an open guitar case standing in for a tip jar.  Only a madman would attempt the same in this space, a world where everyone is locked inside their own private automotive sphere, and unshaded pavements and choking exhaust fumes render pedestrian travel a virtual non-happening.

Well, this guy's little display made me think of a very humorous (but very enlightening, and a little maddening) lecture given at a 2004 TED Talk in Monterey.  The speaker is James Howard Kunstler, author and noted proponent of "New Urbanism"--the idea that the rapid and vast emergence of post-WWII suburban sprawl must give way to a more local, more interconnected and convenient kind of urban life.

Watch a few minutes, at the very least (Click to play; language NSFW):

It's hard after watching that not to look around and see exactly what he's talking about.

Someone told me just the other day, "There's gotta be more to it than this.  Wake up, drive to work, come home at dark, go to sleep, get up and do it all over again--I can't, I can't keep doing it. There's got to be more."

Well, there isn't, so long as we continue this way of life.  And the stage we play our lives out on is more than just superficial set dressing--its form and utility directly reflects the lifestyles we lead, and determines what is and is not possible while living them.