by Richard Risemberg
In this time when both oil supplies and civility are diminishing every day, J. H. Crawford may be the most important person you've never heard of. While the rest of us sit in gridlock, tweaking the knobs of car stereos and air conditioners, cursing our fellow drivers as they curse us for occupying the same lanes with the same intentions, and wondering why, when we get anywhere, even home, we don't feel as though we have really arrived, Crawford has been doggedly working to design not so much a plan for a better future as a plan for planning--a paradigm that we can use to mold our own future into a happier configuration. It is Crawford who recently published the most daringly, radically human book of urban planning principles since Christopher Alexander's team evolved its Pattern Language in the seventies. It is Crawford who is the spirit behind Carfree Cities.
We who have been born late into the last century in America were born also into the assumption that when we travel, we would travel by personal automobile, and, except in a few lucky cities, that is what we do. We never question the need to cover sixty to seventy per cent of our cities' land area with roads, driveways, parking, and garages; we never wonder whether it ought to seem odd to have to strap ourselves into a half-ton metal shell to pick up a loaf of bread or a video at store that may be five miles away, or just five blocks. It never puzzles us that we must shout to converse at the tiny tables of our favorite sidewalk café as the motors rumble, tires hiss, and transmissions whine just five feet away. We sit in our offices, sit in our cars, and sit in our houses in front of computer monitors and TV screens, growing fat and feeling mildly confused about who lives across the street. We think of getting a dog so we can have an excuse to take an evening walk, and the dog stays in the backyard barking at ghosts all its life because our suburb has no sidewalks. We are afraid to go downtown. We don't know what to do there.
Joel Crawford was never afraid of downtown, nor of questioning assumptions. He grew up orbiting the double star of New York City and Montreal, both rich, lively, vivid, intricate, invigorating cities; in college he touched on architecture and engineering before settling down to study sociology--the science of human relations--snagged a degree, then took off to see the world by sail. When he returned from his wanderjahren, he documented George McGovern's presidential campaign, then went back to school to earn his master's in social work. Thereafter began a series of careers that immersed him in every detail of human life in cities in towns.
Poverty and comfort, joy and grim persistence, emptiness and wealth, despair and delight, all were his milieu as he administered child welfare services, resolved customer service issues for the state transport agency, and got a rail electrification program back on track in New Jersey; consulted for a resort developer in South Carolina; and designed database-driven econometric tools for developers in California. He helped design robotic handling systems for shipping containers, and in the process learned the intricacies of international cargo shipping.
He learned to analyze the details that make up the big picture, and that big-picture sorts usually ignore. He learned the mechanical truths of the emotional truths that he had come to feel: that cities must work for the people on the sidewalks, and not just for the suits behind their desks--be those desks in city halls or in corporate towers. And he learned, in his travels throughout North America, Europe, and much of Asia, that designing cities for cars to use makes them very difficult for people to use when they're not in cars. And that nothing much of importance happens inside a car.
His work in American cities, combined with his sojourns in places as diverse as Bali and Venice, convinced him that to make a city live and work for humans, you had to make it possible for humans to live and work without cars. This has been Joel's quest for the last several years, and he has applied the principles he learned in his diverse careers and researches to devise a series of topographies that will serve as models for the cities of the future, cities that nurture commercial and emotional life in equal measure, and let us live together as human beings, and not just as consumers, employees, and our own unpaid chauffeurs. He has designed a set of principles that we can use to design the cities of the future, and redesign the cities of today, in a way that will make of them invigorating communities, modernized versions of the remnants of old Europe that Americans gladly pay thousands of dollars to visit for a few days of hard won vacation time each year. It is a vision, but it is a practical vision.
The first expression of this vision was his website, Carfree.com. The second was his book, Carfree Cities. The third will be the International Institute for Carfree Development. The fourth will be a real carfree neighborhood on the ground. If you're lucky, it just might be yours.
