Land and architecture - the foundation of culture.  Changes made to the mind are fleeting, and can reverse in an instant; but changes made to the physical environment are lasting.  Even if a society changes its mind or its mood, our architectre (including how we manage land use) remains stationary, and anchors us back into whatever state of mind we were in when we came up with the design.


Architecture reflects the mindset, conditions, and worldview of its designers.  And the longer we stay in a particular architecture, the more of its mindset we pick up, and the more it solidifies into habit.  


And if you look at the way most of our towns, cities, and ESPECIALLY suburbs, are planned and laid out, and how the land is used, it is clear what type of attitudes were responsible for the planning:  Greed, selfishness, divisiveness, paranoia, blind obsession with money and status, no concern for ecology, no concern for any species besides our own, no thought for the future, total obliviousness to the consequences of ecological degradation, and the willingness to sell priceless social capital.


In many cases, those bidders were car companies, whose agents infiltrated town and city councils across America, manipulating and seducing urban planners into designing our landscape for cars instead of people.  


Everyone paid the price, for now we have disconnected communities, alienated households, long commutes, asphalt covering what used to be living soil, and a crack addiction to black goop we have to suck out of the ground.  


100 years ago, we grew all of our food within walking distance of our homes.  All we needed, to get food, was a pair of feet.  


Now, our food is miles away, and in order to get it to our kitchens, we need car corporations, oil corporations, billion-dollar refineries, plastic packaging, garbage collection, tanker ships, endless military quagmires to secure the pipelines - not to mention the chemial preservatives and corpse-embalming fluids we have to inject it with in order to prevent it from spoiling over such a long journey (and all the medical treatments necessary to offset the effects of those chemicals, along with all the oil necessary to manufacture those treatments, etc. etc., ad infinitum).

 

And we PRIDED ourselves on this.  We said, "Look!  See how much distance we can put between our homes and our food!"   We thought it made us civilized.  Superior.  More advanced.


And the farther away we could live from our food, the more clever and advanced we perceived ourselves to be.  


Perhaps the ultimate goal was to have one side of the planet grow all of the food, and the other side have all of the houses, so that the Sun would never be forced to shine on both homes and crops at the same time.  Hmmmm.......


This was, of course, by design.  Design of the oil companies, car companies, and in general, the entire business world.  Capitalism itself grows when people are dependent, and shrinks when people are independent.  What do you need to buy and sell for, if you have everything you need right in your backyard, or at least within walking distance?  


In order to grow capitalism, the self-sufficiency of communities had to be sabotaged, putting them at the mercy of all of these big corporations to deliver their needs.  


And that sabotage was conducted through the suburban land-use model.


The suburb is a weapon.

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The way to truly "repair the social fabric" is land reform.


I know that that term has been used before.  But we have ALREADY HAD land reform - capitalist land reform. We are living on reformed land, right at this very moment.


Whenever a forest is cut down to build a minimall to sell pointless consumer toys, whenever an old farm or established neighborhood is torn down and paved over to build a suburban tract development, whenever a developer goes around buying up farms to convert into suburbs in which the houses are so far apart that the entire population of the development could have fit onto a fraction of just one - those are land reform.


The land has already been altered into an unnatural form.


All we're going to do is change it back.


Back to normal.


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