Suburban Fantasy

While driving around Carver County (where I work, Shakopee, Savage, etc.) during my lunch hour one day this past summer I turned off the highway to look for some places to get food. I was greeted by a huge development of BigBox and flashy chain stores: a new Best Buy, Panera, Wal Mart, whatever the hell those new DQ restaurants are (grill and chill?) Sam's Club, several gas stations, Chilis, Flingers, and whatever else goes along with these types of developments. Yes, there were the typical housing developments off in the distance where every single unit looks exactly the same with a slightly different tint to its paint but still no trees. The landscape is a funny mix of newly built precast buildings that can be put up in a week with freshly paved parking lots completely engulfing the building making it an island in the maze of distributor roads blended with yet to be developed parcels of land (overgrown-prairie-grass-and-dirt-fields) that serve as excess parking during happy hour.

Scanning the surroundings at a stop sign I thought, why does it have to be this way? Why do we have to create our living environment that forces us to move vast distances to arrive at any particular destination. Aesthetically, it is downright ugly. Sameness, in a word, is what makes it physically unattractive.

So I come off as this urban elitist, bitching about the burbs in all its awfulness. And well... I am. The way cities were built during the post WW2 era was completely unsustainable, but it took 50 years for even a small fraction of people to start realising this is not the way to expand. So we end up with traffic congestion, pollution, health problems, expensive maintenance costs - just to list a few. The fact that I participate in all of this just adds to my detest of the burbs.

It has gotten to the point now where rings of suburbs are swallowing up what were once rural towns creating a strange mix of cardboard housing developments down the street from real small-town civic cores. Its a fantasy, an unreal living arrangement between big city and small town/rural setting.

*It took me 3 weeks to write this cause blogger kept deleting my drafts! Gah!