| by Richard Louv | San Diego Union
Tribune
On a recent trip to New York, I spent five hours walking
and talking with my older son, Jason, who is doing a summer
internship before his final year in college.
We wound along the lush paths of Central Park, across its
great lawns at dusk, past paper lanterns and deep woods. We
stood for a while on an arched bridge over one of the ponds
and watched a man with a gray ponytail and a fishing rod make
graceful casts, and to our surprise saw him snap his rod back
as a bass tail-danced across the water.
Jason described his love for New York, for walking in its
parks and along its streets. That is what you do in New York.
You walk.
During his journeys through the older neighborhoods, he is
spellbound by the organic quality of the old buildings and
by the evidence of decades of urban evolution. These buildings,
so unlike the ones in the polished suburb in which he spent
his teen years, offer human faces in brick and stone. As he
walks, he forgets time.
"Dad, I get the same feeling walking along these streets
as I did when I was little, hiking in the canyon behind our
house," he said.
Before we moved to the suburbs, we lived in an older San
Diego neighborhood that was neither polished nor suburban.
The old neighborhood was eminently walkable; most of the houses
there had front porches and visible human faces. Our home,
though urban, was located at the edge of a canyon. Informal
walking trails wound down into the canyon, and most weekends
you could see parents and children inspecting wildflowers
as Fred and Ethel, the resident redtail hawks, circled above.
Then we moved to the suburban neighborhood, which had different
charms. In the newer community, I noticed that people did
walk, but their walks tended to be shorter and less frequent.
Rather than being part of daily life, walking was just one
of many exercise options. Apparently, there's a crucial difference.
Last week, the results from major studies, from such sources
as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, linked
suburban sprawl to what many health officials consider an
epidemic of obesity.
Among the findings: Americans who live in the nation's most
sprawling counties tend to weigh 6 pounds more than people
who live in the densest urban areas - such as New York. One
study of 8,000 Atlanta residents found obesity in white men
significantly declines as the density of their neighborhoods
increase.
Moreover, whether they lived in suburban subdivisions or
the dense urban neighborhoods, people of similar income and
educational background were equally likely to be "recreational
exercisers." Yet, the ones living in the suburbs were
more likely be obese.
What was different about the dense urban areas? People walked
more ¾ not so much as a form of exercise, but as a
way of life.
Increasing the walkability of our neighborhoods could have
enormous public health benefits. Over the past quarter century,
the percentage of American adults who were overweight or obese
jumped from 47 percent to 61 percent; worse, for children
and teenagers, the percentage nearly doubled. Oddly, the growth
of obesity coincided with a huge increase in children's organized
sports. Soccer helps, but it doesn't replace natural movement
¾ walking, running, physical play.
Critics of the studies linking obesity to sprawl reasonably
point to other influences that exist no matter where we live
¾ those 700 cable channels, countless video games,
and all that fast food.
But all of these elements are part of a larger phenomenon,
a withdrawal from physical reality.
Recently, a friend noticed a curious thing while teaching
his teen-age daughter to drive. "She just doesn't get
the concept of steering," he said." What came so
naturally to me, is a mystery to her and to some of her friends,
too." During one white-knuckled driving lesson it occurred
to him that his daughter had spent very little time riding
bicycles. She and her friends had spent thousands of hours
developing the kind of hand-eye coordination demanded by video
games, but had skipped the physical experience of steering
a bike on a real road with honest curves.
His observation is unscientific, but it does suggest the
strange nature of spatial reality in 2003. Today, we spend
far more time surfing through cyberspace than walking or biking
in the neighborhood, and the trend seems to be increasing.
Could San Diego offer an alternative?
Here we are, living in a region with the best weather in
the nation, and therefore more walkable days. Yet, by most
urban planning measures, the San Diego region isn't very walkable.
"In San Diego, we interpret 'within walking distance'
as a 'short drive,'" says Larry Hinman, a USD philosophy
professor. That is what we do in Southern California. We drive.
In their current design, Sun Belt cities are defined largely
by their physical barriers to walking: start-and-stop sidewalks,
streets that don't connect, freeway ramps impossible to cross
safely; and too few practical reasons to walk. Walking doesn't
make much sense when there's no corner market or public gathering
place to walk to.
Now that Starbucks is infiltrating even the most residential
neighborhoods (a new one opened up in my spare bedroom last
month) we may see a few more morning walkers out there. This
could be a good thing, as long as we go light on the mocha
coconut frappuccinos.
RICHARD LOUV
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