I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff?

But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built.

It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the widespread use of the car, and there's a lot of truth to this. (This makes me wonder if self-driving cars will eventually create a similar "pre and post" divide in our built environment.)

However, not everyone sees it this way. I just read an article about how residents in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are vehemently opposed to the construction of sidewalks in areas where there are currently none.

Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention to the suburban sidewalk wars, but this is the first time I've seen this level of opposition. Some people view sidewalks as a feature, and some people view them as a bug. Clearly, there are residents in the Twin Cities who view them as the latter.

Why? Because they interrupt large front lawns:

“I chose my home with the nice big lawn out front,” Edina resident Melissa Cohen told the mayor and City Council at a Dec. 8 hearing about proposed sidewalks for streets in Prospect Knolls. “We are in a quiet neighborhood. This does not require a sidewalk.”

And for some people, they're unsightly:

In 2007, a Golden Valley resident named Charles Upham told the Star Tribune “sidewalk is a four-letter word. U-G-L-Y.”

You could call it a kind of rural ideology, where sidewalks symbolize the opposite: the city. I suppose there are also practical considerations, like the fact that snow removal on sidewalks often becomes the homeowner's responsibility.

But it appears to me that a large part of this opposition stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of pastoral exclusivity, even if we're talking about higher-density suburbs and the opposition is masquerading as an environmental preservationist movement.

Today I came across the following tweet by Brad Tabke. (Brad is the mayor of Shakopee, Minnesota.)

@clmarohn’s version of hell from the top of the Memphis pyramid. pic.twitter.com/XLd5hlNY1I

— Brad Tabke, Mayor (@MayorTabke) May 7, 2015

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

On the left of the image is downtown Memphis. On the right is the Mississippi River. And in the middle is, well, a bunch of elevated highways. 

It’s a powerful image regardless of where you happen to be from. But if you’re from Toronto, you might know why I’m posting it today.

I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff?

But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built.

It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the widespread use of the car, and there's a lot of truth to this. (This makes me wonder if self-driving cars will eventually create a similar "pre and post" divide in our built environment.)

However, not everyone sees it this way. I just read an article about how residents in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are vehemently opposed to the construction of sidewalks in areas where there are currently none.

Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention to the suburban sidewalk wars, but this is the first time I've seen this level of opposition. Some people view sidewalks as a feature, and some people view them as a bug. Clearly, there are residents in the Twin Cities who view them as the latter.

Why? Because they interrupt large front lawns:

“I chose my home with the nice big lawn out front,” Edina resident Melissa Cohen told the mayor and City Council at a Dec. 8 hearing about proposed sidewalks for streets in Prospect Knolls. “We are in a quiet neighborhood. This does not require a sidewalk.”

And for some people, they're unsightly:

In 2007, a Golden Valley resident named Charles Upham told the Star Tribune “sidewalk is a four-letter word. U-G-L-Y.”

You could call it a kind of rural ideology, where sidewalks symbolize the opposite: the city. I suppose there are also practical considerations, like the fact that snow removal on sidewalks often becomes the homeowner's responsibility.

But it appears to me that a large part of this opposition stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of pastoral exclusivity, even if we're talking about higher-density suburbs and the opposition is masquerading as an environmental preservationist movement.

Today I came across the following tweet by Brad Tabke. (Brad is the mayor of Shakopee, Minnesota.)

@clmarohn’s version of hell from the top of the Memphis pyramid. pic.twitter.com/XLd5hlNY1I

— Brad Tabke, Mayor (@MayorTabke) May 7, 2015

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

On the left of the image is downtown Memphis. On the right is the Mississippi River. And in the middle is, well, a bunch of elevated highways. 

It’s a powerful image regardless of where you happen to be from. But if you’re from Toronto, you might know why I’m posting it today.