walking scale

There are all kinds of good reasons for adopting a walking life style and pursue walkable community. I'll be discussing as many of them as I can in these blogs - personal and ecological health, frugality, crime prevention, and so on. But some aspects of walking make it not just good, but urgent.
One is the life of non-drivers in an automobile culture. Another is scale.

Having owned a 2500 sq.ft. house on a 15000 sq.ft. lot for the past 8 years, I am convinced that this is more room than any four people need, and more yard than any one otherwise employed laborer can manage without the help of chemicals (stimulants and depressants) and motors. James Kunstler suggests that two myths shape the location of houses on lots in America, the big house on the plantation, and the little house in the woods. Both of these models do explain why we are offered such unmanageable designs.

But as I've spent more time walking, I wonder if the reason that we do not demand other options is that, from a car, these lots and houses look right sized. At 30 mph, these estates claim our attention for a couple of seconds: nice door color, interesting roof lines, pleasant sun room addition. Only when we're walking do they seem too big to manage. It takes me half a minute to walk past a house, and there really isn't that much interesting about it: a lot of grass, a lot of brick, a couple of trees, maybe a light post. It bores me on the first pass, unlike walking in my grandparents' Holland where 50 walks into town do not exhaust the details of architecture and gardening to take in. Curves that on a suburban street add interest to a drive and a changing line of sight seem, on a walk, to have no shape at all and offer little change from the monotony of grass. I reach the edge of the parking lot of the local walmart but still have a 5 minute walk across asphalt without shade.

Classical and Biblical writers are united in the opinion that humans, made in God's image, are the measure of all things. Whenever we start measuring things by some other scale, we diminish ourselves. And the diminishing of people is the source of all kinds of evil. So measuring our lives by a car scale endangers our dignity.

The scale on which we live, the perspective from which we gaze, really matters. Walking in the postwar suburbs impresses on me that these places are bigger than life, telling me that the life I actually live, the life of my body, is somehow too small.
I've learned a few tricks to restore a human perspective to suburban life. First, I walk. Second, I imagine people where I see none. If an architect's drawing for a new development, whether residential, retail, or commercial, lacks drawings of people, I imagine them: where would they go? And would they look puny? Third, I read Cottage Living - one of the only "house beautiful" magazines that espouses an older vision for residential life: small houses, an awareness of public space, walkable scale and capacity, and the relation of a house to its neighborhood. Finally, I pray. Every dehumanizing ideology that has ever risen has had it's clay feet revealed by people who claim their dignity in the face of their creator.