Free Range Talk columnist Deborah L Born has a fascinating piece on community-oriented New Urbanism today. _______ "In this country one of the things that has eroded over the past century is the sense of community that used to bind us together to build a barn or just stop and talk for a minute on a walk through the neighborhood. The results of this lack of community are many, a suspicion of our neighbors, a sense of fear of other, and a dislike of getting involved in other people’s business being among the more distasteful effects. The latter is the most often seen in our attitude toward strangers as witness the Trayvon Martin affair and a sad thing I read of just this morning. How much better it would have been had George Zimmerman offered a ride to the teen. Delta Airlines apparently forced a disabled man to crawl from his wheelchair to board his plane and not one other person helped him. Addicting Info has the story. Kanaan details his humiliating ordeal through a video he posted on his Facebook page. “I was forced by Delta Airlines, just days before having a spinal fusion surgery, I was forced to crawl from my chair, through the cabin of the plane, down a flight of stairs with no backing or sides and across the tarmac to get to my wheelchair. Here we are in the modern day and people who are able bodied were standing around with their arms crossed watching me crawl under the guise that they could not touch me lest they be liable.” And here we have a young man with a disability and no one would help him. What have we become? The airline is at fault, sure, and I hope he succeeds in his suit, but the people standing around him are, at the least, guilty of a lack of compassion. This is not a place for us to be, this unsympathetic gridiron of non-community. Community is a human and humane place to be. It requires, however, that we care for others in the place where we are, and ’tis difficult to care for people if your perception is of a threatening, faceless entity. There is a movement afoot to change the way communities are laid out , called New Urbanism, which is focused on giving us back that sense of community by redesigning the neighborhoods to encourage a more coordinated living space. ... Part of it is going to be when people realize how debilitating it is to not have a care for your neighbor, to go across the street or next door without fear to have a chat. To buy Girl Scout cookies from the girl next door. If we have a sense of our neighborhoods we will accept that not everyone is the same and be interested in the differences rather than condemnatory of others for these differences. And, part of it is going to be realizing that we cannot change all people."
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 18:06:36 +0000
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