Sprawl and conservatism
[Rod Dreher  03/13 04:19 PM]

Kevin writes from small-town Georgia:

There are two thoughts that I particularly have in mind as we come to the Home chapter.

1) While post-automotive and post-modern wastelands continue to be thrown up all over Europe, same as here, there remain many cities and towns with historic cores that have survived down the years. While not all of them are Bruges or Dubrovnik, there is still a whole lot of beauty and grace and humanity to be found in every corner of the continent. (And in the historic core of, say, Savannah or Charleston for that matter.)

I think we could all point to various reasons as to why such buildings and towns probably stopped being built. But what I have never been able to wrap my mind around is how and why they *were* in fact built, in so many places over such extended periods of time.

To have been made so durable, so pleasing to the eye; to be arranged in such a way that one longs to live in that space — just what made this happen? The economics of, say, creating Venice seem nonsensical from today's point of view; and so much of the culture, particularly the aesthetics and values and priorities, that birthed these places is barely remembered now. But if we can come to better understand how these places came about, perhaps we would have a better chance of someday doing likewise.

2) Everyone is familiar with the issue of suburban and exurban sprawl. But what I see just as much of, driving around Georgia, is rural sprawl. Downtown is dead or dying even in small towns that are over an hour from the nearest big city, and over a half hour from the nearest Interstate. It doesn't even require a Wal-Mart — though of course that is sometimes a major contributing factor.

Maybe you know immediately what I'm talking about; but in case not, I'll mention some details about what I've been seeing. The fundamental problem seems to be that so much residential and commercial development is spread ever-further out of town. Some of this takes the form of the rural version of McMansions: a random pod of hastily-built houses plopped in the middle of a field. Other residential development is more piecemeal, and more closely approximates the modern rural ideal: a house on a big huge lot, either on or close to one of the main highways out of town; few and/or distant neighbors; the promise of splendid isolation. (Physical isolation, that is; the satellite dish and high-speed internet connection remove any danger of isolation from mass culture.) On the commercial side, every business will similarly want its own separate plot of land somewhere along that main highway out of town...preferably along the same stretch as the Wal-Mart Supercenter, if there is one. (The older Wal-Marts were more frequently placed near downtown, but few of those remain as they have been rapidly replaced by the Supercenters, always placed several miles out of town along the highway. And then many smaller businesses wind up migrating farther from town along with the Wal-Mart.)

The non-crunchy response to all this, of course, is: That's the free market, baby! If that's what homeowners and businesses have freely chosen, it must be right; or if not, there's nothing you can or should try to do about it anyway. But is it really a good thing to have small towns dissolve out into the countryside like this? For neither businesses nor individuals to really inhabit "downtown" anymore? For big chunks of our lives to be spent in the rolling bubble of the automobile as we drive from home to work to school to store — all of these places being remarkably far from and isolated from each other now even in the smallest of towns, and carefully constructed to minimize non-commercial public space and the chance of random encounters.

Maybe small towns are not as frequently and deeply messed-up in other parts of the country as they are here. But it sure seems a problem here in Georgia and in the neighboring states I have driven a good bit through.