THE WALKING HOME-RANGE

The Problem is the Driving Home-Range  -  The Answer is the Walking Home-Range: VillageTown

 
The world faces many problems today that were unknown a century ago. These problems are becoming global in magnitude, related to pollution, wasteful consumption of limited resources, alienation of the young, a desperate future for elders, rising crime, substance abuse, sharp increases in diseases and poorer health, economic instability, concern for food and water supplies and much more.

If we look at all these social, environmental, economic, cultural and medical problems, we find a single common denominator: the human Home Range.

The term home range was coined by Zoologist William Henry Burt who in 1943 mapped the outside boundary of an animal's movement during the course of its everyday activities.

If we apply this same concept to the home range of human beings who adopted the American model of mobility – an unsustainable model developed after World War II to provide markets for the industrial winners of the war (General Motors, Standard Oil, Dupont, etc) – we find that the home range of the average American involves driving a car over 35 miles every day. For a 10,000 population community, this means over a quarter million miles of driving every day. It also means people become separated, and this social separation creates many new problems. Now this American model is being adopted worldwide. In a nutshell, that's the problem.

What we find remarkable about this obvious statement is its absence in any conversation or vocabulary of any mainstream planner in the profession today. New urbanism seeks to make the home range smaller, but still keep the car as a part of it. Smart growth and transit oriented development pushes for more walkability, but still looks to keep a home range with trains, trolleys and busses. When one asks the top mobility planners in the USA for public statistics on the Home Range of suburbanites, one first has to explain the concept. They know how many miles people drive, but they make no distinction between the routine, everyday activity driving and other driving. Going to work is home range.  Going to a meeting with a customer or client is not. That difference is important because so much of the driving today is home range driving. In the planning profession, the car, truck and highway is seen as the problem, to be solved by putting commuters into more efficient means of transport. But is the problem the car, or how we use the car?

If we were able to redesign everyone's home range so everything a community of 10,000 would need was within a 10-minute walk, almost all major challenges of today would scale back to a manageable level. We could still keep all our cars, trucks and roads, but they would be used for business, special trips, farming and rural life and the Sunday drive - no commuters, no driving the kids to school or recreation, no driving to the supermarket or mall to shop. As soon as we could shift most people's home range to walking distance, petroleum wars would end and all the worry about pollution end with it. More importantly, people would not be so isolated. Community would rebound. The young and old would have a place, not needing to drive because their home range would be about walking. Crime would drop because small, tight communities have a very low tolerance for crime - it's hard to hide. People would come out of their locked, alarmed homes and begin to socialize in person, not needing Facebook, cell phones, Twitter or Skype.

If we then take this concept of a local home range further, using it to build not only a strong community, but a strong local economy, we would find it possible to eliminate poverty, unemployment and other ills that plague modern society. This, in essence, is the VillageTown. At its core, what we do is to change the home range so it takes people out of cars and back into community. 

Eastern Missouri is the perfect place to build a Village Town. We need to begin with one village.  Write me.