The Citistates Group

“We’ve tried to be known, ” said Georgia Tech professor Mike Dobbins, “as the city too busy to hate. Maybe we still shun hate, but with the level of congestion we now face, we sure do have a lot of time on our hands.”

At the curb, a Hummer limo waited for someone. It’s L.A. of course, where many people are defined by their style of transportation. Inside the Pasadena Conference Center, the 2005 version of the Congress of the New Urbanism was under way. Dobbins, a former planning director for Atlanta, was paired with William Fulton of Solimar Research, Ventura, California, in an effort to compare Atlanta and L.A.

Both places are prisoners of gridlocked freeways. The contrast lies in L.A.’s history. It grew up as a collection of small cities with real centers. “Today,” Fulton said, “the region revolves around the freeway system, but underneath it remains the world’s largest arterial grid.” Today both regions rely on their freeways, but in Atlanta there’s no real driving alternative.

Those old cities in the L.A. region offer another advantage, Fulton said. Citing Torrance as an example, Fulton claimed there are huge areas, aging and awaiting infill development. With endangered species laws creating the equivalent of urban growth boundaries, L.A. is out of land. Urban infill is where much of the action is today. Atlanta, by contrast, appears destined to stretch out toward Charlotte, Chattanooga, and Birmingham, according to Dobbins.

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Richard Louv is off on book tours to promote his Last Child in the Woods, the eloquent case for freeing children from electronic gadgets and overprotective mommies and daddies and letting them experience the natural wonders of their world first-hand. But already it’s been recognized by Dan Burden, founder and director of Walkable Communities. Commenting on my recent column that co-featured Louv’s book and Tony Hiss’s new H2O, Burden wrote an intriguing e-mail about “free-range children” in which he describes the bicycle, in the hands of a young person, as a marvelous “learning machine” leading to “distant places never seen by car, foot or any other means.”

He’s right! I’m sure I’m one of millions who remembers childhoods biking far and wide, instinctively “free range.” I got my chance in the 1940s on a sturdy single-speed cycle, exploring the wondrous rolling hills and old stone houses and forest patches of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Unwittingly I was converted to a love of the natural, as well as farm settings, that effectively controls my writing perspectives to this day. And I’ve kept on biking!

How do the next generations get there? Louv’s book is all about that. Parents can do lots to free their own children, he suggests, but adds: “Ultimately, we need an institutional network that would reach across issue boundaries, joining zoos, aquaria, and natural history museums with urban designers, livable cities organizations, the child obesity groups, educational organizations, service groups and environmental organizations, etc., etc.

I suppose Louv’s right about the institutions. But couldn’t we just set the kids free on their two-wheeled, self-propelled, cycle-where-one-will “learning machines”?
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