Sunday, July 28, 2013

How the suburbs steal your sight

I love big open spaces where you can strech your eyes and see for miles to the horizon, the mountains, the ocean, etc. Anyone in early America, or most of history, would have little problem finding vast spaces like this, for example the ocean, the coastal plain, the Shenandoah Valley, etc. Humans had not clogged up the landscape with strip malls and stoplights which cut off your ability to see far.

In Suburban Nation Andres Duany explains that suburban housing developments are deliberately designed with winding, curvy roads even when they are not necessary. Why? To hide the cookie-cutter landscape. If the roads were straight, you would see a long, endless street with scores of houses that look exactly the same. But by making the roads into a maze of one curve after the next, you can only see a few houses in front of you at any given place, so the redundancy on the landscape is less apparent.

The downside of this is that in the suburbs it is nearly impossible for your eyes to see a long distance. Everything is cut short, at a curve, a stoplight, a cul-de-sac. Anybody with eyes made for big vision will feel like they are boxed in.

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