The Book A Pattern Language has become an indispensable desk reference for many designers. Most of what this book deals with has to do with scale and proportionality. While this may seem like a mundane technical aspect of design, it is anything but. This issue, in fact, has epistemological dimensions.
In his Book Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Rudiger Safranski writes, “Central to Reflection on technology is, therefore, the question: Should man…adapt himself to technology, or should…technology be cut back to a human scale?” While this may seem abstract and unrelated to the need for design at a human scale in our homes and our communities, the connection is real and significant. The isolation that comes from the expanding scale and dimensions of our technological creations seeks balance in intimate spaces.
While the philosophers are pondering scale at the level of nuclear weapons and autonomous technology, in design the rubber hits the road …well, at the road. Few technologies have affected design more than the automobile. In urban design we have gone from communities that were designed for walking as a mode of transportation to suburban sprawl where scale is dictated by the automobile. In College Station Texas, where I am a Planning and Zoning Commissioner, the city was incorporated in 1938. Its name came from a connection to the railroad but its development has been dominated by a pattern tied inextricably to the car. Our sister city, Bryan, also owes its existence to the railroad. The citizens of Bryan voted to incorporate in 1867 on the new rail line. Though the rails helped determine where communities would spring up, railroads did not so significantly impact the ways in which the community would developed. The difference in auto driven patters of development from those scaled to walking are well illustrated by College Station and Bryan. Bryan has a downtown that College Station lacks. And Bryan, as developed before the dominance of the automobile, is laid out on a logical grid to facilitate direct connections. College Station and the areas of Bryan that developed after about 1930 have distant neighborhoods laid out with little concern for economy of transportation.
With the advent of the automobile, no longer were neighborhoods snuggled in as close as possible to town to facilitate access by foot or horse. Now people could live further out. Goods and service were no longer spaced at a walking distance. With cars, stores and other services could be many miles apart. Malls with massive parking lots replaced downtowns. Big boxes replaced mom and pops. The spacing of services meant that more driving had to be done and congestion ensued.
Most communities now stretch along major roadways. Small towns shrink as large supper centers in nearby larger towns seek to attract commerce from larger distances. These supper centers tend to go in at the perimeter of towns where land is less expensive but that is not so far out that consumers are reluctant to make the drive. As the town expands older large retail centers are closed in favor of larger ones further out. And so sprawl begets urban decay.
All of this happened slowly.
Within the span of a couple of generations sprawl has become the norm and assumed to be a fair trade off for economy of scale pricing, expanded selections and life in the suburbs.
Are these sound assumptions? And is it within our capacity to make more deliberate decisions for our communities? We will address that question in part three of this series.
