Five years ago today: “The more greatly a place conforms to post war auto centric design, the more injurious it is to people.”

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Gahan, Rosenbarger set to go full frontal Pinocchio about their urbanism credentials when the Congress for the New Urbanism 27 meets in Louisville June 11-15.



Originally published on June 3, 2014 and just as true today as then.

Are we bugging you with facts? We don’t mean to bug you.

More Narrative (Rational Urbanism)

There are conceptual links which, somehow, form narratives in the news media, and others which don’t. Urban homicides form a narrative. Whether at a bar at closing time, a domestic dispute, a drug deal gone bad, or something gang related they are all bound together as a tale of death and the streets. That they are linked more to behavior and identity than place goes unnoticed and uncommented because it unwinds the narrative.

The story of death and the road, as distinct from death and the streets, is told much differently. It is told as a tale of behavior and identity (speed, age, drunkenness) but almost never a story of place. Place rating sites completely ignore traffic fatalities and pedestrian deaths in their calculations of livability despite the fact that there is clearly a causational link between place and fatality and injury: the more greatly a place conforms to post war auto centric design, the more injurious it is to people.

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