I always find it amusing when mature suburbs suddenly begin lamenting their lack of urban character. The Seattle Times wrote about a few such suburbs yesterday. Now that these towns are all grown up, the residents don’t have a sense of place and no one can tell them apart. The city fathers seem oddly surprised that a community founded and populated by car dependent people who fled neighborhoods that actually had character doesn’t look like Greenwich Village. So now these edge communities want real downtowns, as if they can be conjured up as an afterthought. The ironies abound, but what’s striking is that there are actually city managers who believe that downtowns can be created from scratch. Best of luck – the most vibrant downtowns in the world evolved over hundreds of years.

And then there are the developers and architects of these cookie cutter communities. The Wall Street Journal ran a feature (subscription required) on the most prominent production architects in the country. These are the architects responsible for the millions of mass-produced homes constructed every year, and they are increasingly responsible for the appearance of our residential communities. According to the Journal, nearly 80% of the 1.7 million new homes constructed last year were production homes, which means that very few original homes are being constructed anymore. I plan to post my thoughts on the impact of the car culture on architecture soon, but the short version is this: our obsession with the car has dumbed down residential architecture over the past 60 years, and in most cases, the garage is now the centerpiece of our streetscape. Like the communities around Seattle that are trying desperately to find a soul, these architects are now reaching into the past to find design features that lessen the homogenous feel of these homes. What they will find is that borrowing from the past will only get you so far; houses constructed in dehumanized, car-centric communities are inherently isolating and lacking in character.

Edge communities are not just dehumanizing and aesthetically inferior, they’re downright dangerous for pedestrians. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, nearly 4,900 pedestrians died in 2005 crossing the street, or walking to school, work or some other destination, an increase of over 200 deaths from 2004. The Surface Transportation Policy Project actually studies this phenomenon, and reports that the pedestrian death rate is increasing in more than half of the largest 50 metropolitan areas. Orlando, Florida tops the list as the most dangerous area for pedestrians, and a range of other Sun Belt cities make up the top ten. These statistics are sad but not surprising given the number of harried drivers barreling down the road in oversized SUVs. Kudos to cities like Salt Lake City, Portland, Austin, New Orleans and Los Angeles, which have all seen declines in pedestrian deaths. These cities all cite improvements in pedestrian safety, such as more crosswalks, better speed enforcement and use of traffic calming devices, for the reduction in the death rate.