Choosing Our Own Future
I find my thoughts drawn to the future of America.
The reluctance of some liberal voters to support Biden reminds me that having something you’re against is often not enough — you need something to be for.
While Biden probably won’t usher in an era of change as many liberals might wish, his win can give the nation a chance to undo some of the ill wrought by the current administration — and to dream of what comes next.
What future do you dream of for America?
Dream big and small, along different time scales.
What would an American utopia look like, for you? What societal changes would you like to see come out of the pandemic? What is your vision for how society changes in the next five, ten, twenty years?
My wish for post-pandemic America is that we will reinvest in small neighborhood centers, recentering the geography of our daily lives on a more local scale. Hour-long commutes are replaced with telecommuting and small neighborhood centers we can reach on foot or by bike with coffee shops, coworking spaces, and lunch spots. Service workers are able to earn a living in their own communities instead of commuting to city centers, by working in local centers at the restaurants and shops serving people working from home.
Developers transition from building high-rise office buildings to mixed-use buildings with ground-level businesses serving residents living upstairs. Housing becomes more affordable as housing stock increases and demand for city centers decreases, and people still get to live in livable communities centered on the many small neighborhood centers that arise from the increased demand of people staying local.
Spending more time in our own neighborhoods, we get to know the people who live near us better, strengthening our community bonds. Driving significantly less, emissions from personal transportation drop, helping the effort for climate mitigation. We reclaim our neighborhoods for people, prioritizing people walking and biking over cars.
There are many, many places for this vision to go wrong. When people can live anywhere, they might choose to buy larger estates that contribute to urban sprawl and habitat fragmentation instead of living close to walkable neighborhood centers. When employers can hire from anywhere, they may look to workers in states with lower costs of living, or only offer to pay salaries that will cover low-cost areas, forcing workers currently living in cities to relocate to cheaper locales, which could cause gentrification. People may have gotten so used to shopping online that they’ll continue that instead of supporting local shops, crippling the formation of new, small neighborhood centers.
But anticipating these challenges can help us try to avoid them. We can invite good businesses to become partners in our communities. We can develop zoning and building codes to encourage developers to build the type of buildings we want in our community. We can form local co-ops for all kinds of work. If we build a shared community vision, we can push back against capitalism’s people-last, community-last tendencies to build a future of our own choosing.
Further Reading
- Our Covid Future: the Long Crisis Scenarios from Local Trust in the UK
- Kim Stanley Robinson on Inventing Plausible Utopias from Eliot Peper
- Creative Futures from the Ford Foundation
- Do You Live in a Fifteen-Minute Neighborhood? from Streetsblog
Adapted from newsletter originally sent 10/23/2020. Sign up for newsletters from the Bureau of Conformity.
