What is missing?

[undergroundpanther]

Here is a site about suburban sprawl in sweden
This article tackles much of what makes modernity bad for communities.It is very insightful.

If everybody in New York had had the same incomes, the same type of clothes, the same background, the same possibilities, the city would die. It has always been this way, million beggars mixed with each other. And right behind the beggars the ranked among the best step into their stretched limousines. Sky scrapes and parks, diamond tiaras in the display windows and alcoholics who throw up in the streets. One gets shocked and motivated. Robert M. Pirsig.

...
The rupture between home and work was the first and most profound step towards the situation we have today. It was the father and mother of the homelessness of modern times, many people having their roots cut and finding themselves living in places without this healing power Heidegger wrote about, this magic quality of closing the rupture between man and things, making oneness out of existence.These become the most optimistic of modern times, with the democracy of money taking command over the world. The welfare society advances and the former worker’s society makes its class journey, ending up with most of its inhabitants defining themselves as middle class.



...Something peculiar then happens to the habitations. The differences become antagonistic and places have to compete with each other, in order to attract customers, whether these are looking for a place for living or a place to invest in. Now we are very far from Heidegger’s sweet dream of the forlorn dwelling , but it seems as he anticipated what was to come when he wrote

“In self assertive production, the humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which not only spans the whole earth as a world market, but also, as the will to will, trades in the nature of Being …” (Heidegger 1971:115).

In other words, the habitation and the dwelling transforms into commodities, along the same lines as other commodities have developed in this consumerist society of ours. Places are not anymore much of bridges between what human is and things, but rather reduced to things in themselves. This means that some places have sellable qualities and become winners. They offer spectacular views, beautifully situated high-quality buildings and different kind of attractions like golf courses, restaurants, theatres etc. Other places do not have any specific qualities and if they have the misfortune to be sites for big and ugly block buildings, they are almost surely to become losers. In consumerist society places compete with each other – some places are hot and attractive, others ill rumored, ugly and even dangerous.


People foul up systems, they get in the way. They make things untidy, they have whims, ideals, loves, hates, emotions; master plans don’t have any room for the freedom of people (1968:182).Robert Theobald


We are after all, social animals. We are an associating species whose nature is to share space just as we share experiences; few hermits are produced in any human culture. A habitat that discourages association, one in which people withdraw to privacy as turtles into their shells, denies community and leaves people lonely in the midst of many (Oldenburg 1989:203).

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:0477Q-qEAvYJ:www.pik-potsdam.de/urbs/projekt/Urban%2520Sprawl%2520in%2520Sweden.doc+sprawl+suburbs+isolation+emotional+stress&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=us&client=firefox-a


This has become true for me...I being stuck in the suburbs unable to drive ,amd walking uneven grassy roadsides dodging cars trying to get to places that are ALWAYS too far away, I have developed a hatred of the automobile.As I have developed my hatred for the car, in reaction to that I began to hate what a suburb is too and sprawl I dispise it. And it to me,suburbia is a sad no-place of isolation, breakdown of social interaction, and I see that people are inactive,and all the same prettyu much and I notice that they are sheltered and the world they see is what's on TV.And it drives me crazy.

The flip side of my issue is something like my moms idea .Mom who drives and who is sheltered from having to interact with different kinds of people and situations is a cityphobe. She has made in her mind this negative idea of cities. Cars, to people like my mom are shelters - protection, security, utility and yes, freedom and mobility. Ironic my mom has come to associate urban areas as places of crime, dirtiness, violence, unhealthiness, and stress.
Maybe because she never lived there, or maybe because her car has insulated her from interacting with differences?

What feels alive to me,feels threatening to her. Strange.