Teen columnist: The ruins of suburban sprawl
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A good friend of mine installs blinds in model homes.
His occupation is a vessel directly into the most extreme manifestations of suburbia.
Every week, it seems, he is witness to a newly fabricated, corporately managed subdivision assembled pedantically on the fringes of Tucson or, sometimes, Pima County.
I recently went with my friend to a job site, one of many identical masses of dense, commodious homes.
Standing outside the model home and trying to enjoy the surrounding scenery was a most unsettling experience.
From a high point less than a mile from the main ascent of the Santa Rita Mountains, I could see subdivision after subdivision after subdivision. Model home after model home after model home.
Each hive of corporate housing requires its own semblance of a town: places to shop, places to eat and places to send children to school.
Being overly dramatic isn't necessary, and it's not fair to the housing manufacturers that profit off of Arizona's rampant growth so heavily that they must have our best interests in mind.
But the landscape bequeathed a sense of decay, excess, even pointlessness.
Each competing developer has its own set of corporate flags, which they raise in clusters near the sales office of each development.
The expanse of valley is interrupted by identical developments, each competing and pretending to constitute suitable homes.
Sociologists have continually stressed the error of suburban life.
The trend of situating the population bases of major cities as far from one another as possible - to be separated by miles of roads, lined only with (corporate, again) strip malls - is socially and economically foolish.
It's a design that necessitates consumption of voluminous quantities of oil simply to commute, a design that perpetuates a severe misappropriation of resources.
While we are preoccupied with the possibility of terrorism and catastrophic events, we refuse to consider how intelligent urban and suburban planning might mitigate the damage of a catastrophe.
Worst-case scenarios aside, the greatest social problem posed by sprawl is perhaps the problem of simulation.
Every facet of life is gradually becoming more standardized and symbolic. We are engendering a mind-set that denies the importance of authenticity.
Few people seem distressed by Tucson's sprawl. Fewer still are able to offer solutions.
It is difficult to redefine an entire economic movement in the name of humanistic beneficence.
The very identity of the West always has been the impetus to expand, profit and innovate.
Perhaps technology and insight, refined by institutions concerned with conservation and climate change, could enable suburban populations to exist in a balanced, ecological manner.
Perhaps the only lasting problem caused by this eager geographical entrepreneurship will be the pervading architecture of nothing being real.
Teen columnist Daniel Schaller is a junior at City High School. E-mail: ds-schaller@yahoo.com
- Read All Comments » 6 TOTAL COMMENTS
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M C. (mc)
Apr 10, 2007 @ 8:59pmThis kid doesn't know anything...just a snobby kid with no idea of the real world. Did he ever bother to think that by building houses this way it keeps the costs of them down so people can afford to have their kids grow up in a decent house? -
Bennett K. (#2973)
Apr 10, 2007 @ 5:11pmGee, I think Schaler should let people live their lives and develop a life of his own. Some folks like the suburbs, some don't. As long as they're not imposing external costs on me or harming me, so be it. Different strokes for different folks.
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Jim b. (#2980)
Apr 10, 2007 @ 11:39amNo, it's a kid. They like to use those big words when they first learn to write. Adults know better. Families have children, children grow up and have families and they need a place to live. Unless the writer plans on living with mom and dad the rest of her life she'll be a part of the sprawl soon.
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