One recessionary sigh of relief Years ago, when a junior and high school student in Calgary, I would often walk through Fish Creek Park - a gorgeous provincial park that used to be the outer limit of the South side of the city. It was my childhood playground, and I saw it in different ways as the years passed. From a magical place filled with snow-covered Narnias to an archeological site to a bike-racing track, a wilderness adventure site, and then a place to party with friends before the age of majority. Eventually, it became a sanctuary for reflection and peace. I would hike up the other side of the river valley, through some smaller trails, and end up at a wooden fence. Behind me, the park and the city. In front, an expanse of prairie skies and farmers' fields, with the mountains in the distance. Many decisions and personal challenges were aided by a sit on that fence and a stare into the openness.

One day, after coming back from living away for a while, I walked up that same hill to the fence. Instead of the open skies, however, I saw a near-finished suburban community. One of those that define the shape of cities all over North America, with the perfectly circular man-made ponds, the six house designs replicated ad nauseum, the large roads and big driveways soon to be filled with SUVs. Instead of blue skies and prairie grasses it was pastel stucco and lawns far too green for an arid climate like Calgary. It was a hundred kinds of bad.

Well, today I drove out to the end of a gravel road that has become the replacement for that fence, half-fearing a repeat of the earlier violation of my luddite-like sentimentality. To my relief, however, Calgary's exploding suburbs have not yet reached this point, and I stood looking over snow-covered fields, smelling the dry grasses and seeing the familiar Rockies in the distance. And, thanks to the recession, I think this view might be safe for a while. An article in the Atlantic takes a geographic view of the recession:

But another crucial aspect of the crisis has been largely overlooked, and it might ultimately prove more important. Because America’s tendency to overconsume and under-save has been intimately intertwined with our postwar spatial fix—that is, with housing and suburbanization—the shape of the economy has been badly distorted, from where people live, to where investment flows, to what’s produced. Unless we make fundamental policy changes to eliminate these distortions, the economy is likely to face worsening handicaps in the years ahead.

Suburbanization—and the sprawling growth it propelled—made sense for a time. The cities of the early and mid-20th century were dirty, sooty, smelly, and crowded, and commuting from the first, close-in suburbs was fast and easy. And as manufacturing became more technologically stable and product lines matured during the postwar boom, suburban growth dovetailed nicely with the pattern of industrial growth. Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. This process brought the Sun Belt economies (which had lagged since the Civil War) into modern times, and sustained a long boom for the United States as a whole.

But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.

  ¶ 5:45 PM