After reading Dietz's essay, I don't think she's implying that walkability is an artificial perk. I think she's saying that because going to Walmart is not easy anymore, she's not tempted to go spend money on something she can fix with ingenuity instead.
We all go through different seasons in life, sometimes most valuing thriftiness, sometimes most valuing convenience.
The idea that there's something like cheating or shortcutting necessary work in walkability, more broadly the Puritan-ish idea that things we like are necessarily bad
Something I enjoyed about walking around the older SFH neighborhoods of Seattle was stumbling across random houses that were originally built with ground-floor shops (good example: 1st Ave NE & NE 62nd). Usually it's obvious why these spaces are no longer used for retail, but a part of me wishes we could at least turn them back into small cafes or offices or whatever. I think the big challenge is that these neighborhoods are now so expensive that the old shophouse concept doesn't pencil out unless the shop is just a hobby.
That being said, Seattle was actually pushing mixed-use pretty hard for a while. The catch was that it didn't really override other restrictions on commercial usage, so most buildings might have a tanning salon or yoga studio on the side facing a busier street while the rest of the ground floor space was taken up by live-work units. You have to encourage the right kind of development and let people actually use the spaces for something good.
Marvelous piece of confected urbanism. "Stuckness" does seem to have some agency. I think it's Screwtape that has seeped into the system. But we can't game the system. We can't "will" that it move for us. What a bring down as we age. For awhile we were so efficacious through our screens. If we could limn it out in detail, summarize in a meme, and the girl across the table nodded "Yes," we imagined we were about to "seize the day."
After reading Dietz's essay, I don't think she's implying that walkability is an artificial perk. I think she's saying that because going to Walmart is not easy anymore, she's not tempted to go spend money on something she can fix with ingenuity instead.
We all go through different seasons in life, sometimes most valuing thriftiness, sometimes most valuing convenience.
Addison, I totally don't get the following sentence. What is the implication that Dietz is possibly intending to make?
Obviously I disagree with that implication, if Dietz even intends to make it, but there’s something there.
The idea that there's something like cheating or shortcutting necessary work in walkability, more broadly the Puritan-ish idea that things we like are necessarily bad
Thx.
Something I enjoyed about walking around the older SFH neighborhoods of Seattle was stumbling across random houses that were originally built with ground-floor shops (good example: 1st Ave NE & NE 62nd). Usually it's obvious why these spaces are no longer used for retail, but a part of me wishes we could at least turn them back into small cafes or offices or whatever. I think the big challenge is that these neighborhoods are now so expensive that the old shophouse concept doesn't pencil out unless the shop is just a hobby.
That being said, Seattle was actually pushing mixed-use pretty hard for a while. The catch was that it didn't really override other restrictions on commercial usage, so most buildings might have a tanning salon or yoga studio on the side facing a busier street while the rest of the ground floor space was taken up by live-work units. You have to encourage the right kind of development and let people actually use the spaces for something good.
Marvelous piece of confected urbanism. "Stuckness" does seem to have some agency. I think it's Screwtape that has seeped into the system. But we can't game the system. We can't "will" that it move for us. What a bring down as we age. For awhile we were so efficacious through our screens. If we could limn it out in detail, summarize in a meme, and the girl across the table nodded "Yes," we imagined we were about to "seize the day."