[This is a post from the "Understanding Community" sociology unit of my social science degree, pasted here after Blackboard mangled it.]

I'd like to make a few observations based on things I've been interested in for a while that chime with issues raised in topics 2 and 3. This TED talk from 10 years ago (!) is a blackly comical look at post-war urban planning in America (the situation is not that different in Australia). James Howard Kunstler is very good at articulate rage when it comes to urban design (oh, language warning on that TED talk, by the way), even if on some other subjects his gears are just spinning furiously, unconnected to anything.

It certainly seems to me that most of the urban design where I live (Sawtell/Coffs Harbour) is a major impediment to Gemeinschaft. To illustrate the difference between pre-war and post-war urban planning, let's say you feel like getting out of the house and hanging out somewhere where you might bump into a friend, and maybe enjoy a coffee or a beer. Would you rather go here:

Or do you find the prospect of a lazy afternoon here more appealing:

Take a wild guess at which of these two types of urban environment we're still enthusiastically constructing. Fortunately, just around the corner from here is the community centre where you can find help in managing your drug and alcohol problems, which in turn help you manage the problem of living here. This mini-mall was the nearest non-residential building to a house I lived in for about a year, nearly going mad in the process. It was just under an hour's walk through an open air prison of pre-fab bungalows, two to a pre-subdivided quarter acre, along wildly curving crescents and cul de sacs, provided you didn't mind jumping the odd fence or drainaige ditch. This is where the real "locals" get pushed to as the desirable places to live are gentrified for/by seachangers.

I didn't yet have my driver's license when we moved to Boambee East, "just minutes away", according to real estate agents, from the beach and cafes of Sawtell. By helicopter, presumably. One day I went so stir crazy that even this carpark seemed more appealing than another 24 hours staring at the walls. So I set out to enjoy a cup of coffee and a newspaper. When I arrived I found the bakery which served coffee was shut, as was the sub-newsagency and the chemists. It was Sunday afternoon. So, determined to keep up the pretence of civilisation, I bought a can of Coke from the supermarket. There was nowhere to sit with it. The only seats were stacked up behind the locked doors of the bakery. I sat in the gutter, taking in the view of a deserted carpark. I would have wept were it not for the passing gaggle of teenage girls, heads bowed in supplication over their phones, the only visible evidence that I wan't alone in a post-nuclear-holocaust world.

You don't have to tax your sociological imagination too much to predict what the result of a couple of generations of kids raised in such a sterile, unstimulating, alienating environment will be.

Against this dominant model of urban planning is the new urbanism movement, which makes crazy demands for things like like every neighbourhood having a centre within easy walking distance of most dwellings, streets in a walkable grid configuration (no jumping fences, trespassing, or wading through mud to get a reasonably direct route), laneways to keep cars, bins, etc. out of sight; basically planning and architecture of the kind considered normal when Sawtell was built. Seems like a no-brainer to me.