Sleepdriving

You can't stop and smell the roses speeding in your car

Yesterday, in my commentary on this piece about massive drive-thrus in suburbia, I wrote, a little bit far afield from the piece:

There’s something here like familiarity breeds contempt. We don’t realize or appreciate what a powerful, fearsome thing the car is, what an expensive thing, what a wondrous thing. And we likewise fail to appreciate the vitality of the worn-out commercial strips we sleepwalk, or sleepdrive, through behind the wheel. Like Luca sort of articulates in that first piece here, a lot of being an urbanist is being open to wonder and serendipity. And the policy comes after that.

Sleepdrive. Huh. Maybe I’ll expand on that.

In the paragraph before the one I just blockquoted here, I was explaining how there’s a huge difference even between the fast food hellscape and the old suburbia that the author of the piece remembered, before one of these massive drive-thru fast food properties paved it all over—the run-down strip malls full of ethnic food and random, quirky business, filling out old commercial strips with little humble ranch houses or capes in the narrow streets behind. That old suburban pattern, worse for wear but also having undergone many decades of incremental and organic evolution, is interesting. It’s something to appreciate, as a thing of its own.

And I thought about how despite being designed for cars, for the most part, these landscapes look like so much grey and dark and rust and wear behind the windshield, yet when you stop and look, so much texture and detail comes into view. That’s sleepdriving—passing through a place, not seeing it, not knowing where you are or where you’ve been.

That’s what much of Maryland’s closer-in D.C. suburbs look like, the first relatively dense place I ever lived. They have all their chain stores too, of course—but there are also lots of vacated chain stores now home to local businesses. These cookie-cutter, middle-class, built-to-a-finished-state-to-never-change suburban communities may look worse, after 50, 60, 70 years of physical wear. But they’re more.

So there are two things I’m making a point of here: one is that old point I make all the time here, that we should appreciate these ordinary places we drive through, learn not to judge a building by its exterior, and look for the real spirit of a place, no matter what it looks like. See as much in a place as there is; or, maybe something not quite the same: there’s as much in a place as you’re willing to see.

The other thought here is how the car strips away so much of that detail and texture; how it works against our human interest and takes us out of the human scale. I wrote once about an intersection by our old condo, where a walking trail crossed a two-lane road. I both walked and drove across there many times.