Maybe It's Time to Start Listening to Tom Low

This is an excellent article on New Urbanism's take on sprawl, with a bonus of being about my hometown of Charlotte:

Maybe It's Time to Start Listening to Tom Low - Charlotte Magazine - July 2011 - Charlotte, NC

The firm they refer to, DPZ, and its co-founder, Andres Duany, are the reason why I'm a planner. Six years ago I went to the US Green Building Council's GreenBuild Expo in Atlanta, GA. Ayako and I met up there to look for environmentally-friendly product design jobs, but the expo floor was filled was stalls hawking bamboo flooring and high-efficiency HVAC systems--nothing for high-style consumer product designers.

So, we spent most of our time attending lectures. I continually found myself drawn to urban planning topics. I vaguely remembered learning about planning senior year at CMU, when PennFutures protested the building of a tolled highway by offering an alternative project that boulevarded existing street networks (sound familiar, Seattle?). Ayako, and her then-boyfriend Ryan, went to mostly different lectures, and thus I found myself sitting alone in the back of a large auditorium listening to Andres Duany talk about New Urbanism.

He explained the basic tenets of New Urbanism and how they sought to imitate, and update, old town centers. Then he compared the functions of those centers - open space, gathering places, entertainment - to the specialized rooms being offered in Texas McMansions built on the outskirts of town. Massive homes, 5,000 square feet and more, with personal theater rooms and sun-filled breakfast nooks that resembled outdoor cafes. Huge lawns, in the desert, in the middle of nowhere.

Meanwhile, he says, the owners of these homes will be stuck in traffic for over an hour to get back into the city for work or services, where they will pass by movie theaters, parks and outdoor cafes. Then an hour through terrifying, stressful, frustrating traffic to arrive home cranky, missing two full hours of time with their kids, for the privilege of having a private movie theater, huge lawn and cafe that they don't have time to use.

"The lifestyle of the American middle class is the number one thing ruining the environment," he stated baldly*. It was like a light switch went on in my head. I don't know that he's 100% right, but he's close enough. I lived that life, I know those people. He's right, I said. If I want to do something for the environment, designing environmentally-friendly products that will be purchased once is next to useless if the people buying them are living in 5000 square foot homes with gigantic lawns in the middle of a desert. The real opportunity for change, for helping people and the environment, is in where and how people live their everyday lives. Those are the effects that add up, because it's not just millions of products, it's millions of people doing the same thing, over and over again, every day of their lives.

Sitting in the back of that auditorium I felt my perception shift, and feelings of joy and determination filled me. I had been saying for years that I didn't want to go back to school until I knew what I wanted to do. Until then, it was Starbucks and fruitless applications to design firms where, deep down, I didn't really want to work. School is difficult, expensive and worthless if you don't believe in what you're doing. Now, I knew. I felt sure. As he wrapped up his lecture, my mind was whirring, planning out the next few years of my life.

Now, six years later, I have a master's degree in Urban Planning. I've written a thesis on the relationship between dense development and the ability of natural systems to adapt to climate change. I have three years of planning experience. And it's all because of a single 90-minute lecture by Andres Duany.

*This is not an exact quote - it was six years ago.