5/6 Initial Thoughts

Never before have I seen the built environment in this light as it is related to sustainability. I found it hilarious when the TED video pointed out the obvious, but unrealized to me, neglecting of building and sustainability. Once again, it's interesting to see that our initial development of city centers incorporating the natural environment and inviting close quarters involving human interaction existed prior to the WWII era and arguably before the term sustainability was coined. Although there was reasoning at the time, whether worthy or not, it seems ridiculous now that we abandoned the more sustainable design in favor or sprawling out and distancing ourselves from one another, putting miles between family homes. Opening up a world of waste and unnecessary production to accommodate and profit from was inevitable with this post WWII design era. It seems that the decisions to take transform existing city center design into urban sprawl were made by few people with majority power, and in hindsight, for reasons of minuscule worth seeing that the feared nuclear attacks never leveled the city centers planners so abruptly aborted.

The "value" that led to this relationship of the built environment seems extremely worthless and not encompassing views and well being of the humans that decisions greatly affected from the 1930's on and are responsible for stimulating the problems we are discussing in this class but rather thrust the views upon the citizens. When looking mainly at the United States, living on earth as a part of nature rather than separate entities seems to have been aborted about the time this new design took full force. The achievement of status symbols such as newer homes, autos, and a "modern" lifestyle replaced the fulfillment of a natural lifestyle when our content and sense of humanity was materialized by the amount and quality of our possessions. The once seemingly equal relationship between the built environment and sustainability now seems more of an inverse, as our motives for building on our environment stem from economic and equity reasons. The social and design changes according to these articles, and I agree, resulting from instilled fear of attack and our dependence on the auto, leading to big box stores plopped on altered seems extremely worthless now looking back on how we got here today. Not to mention, the attacks we refer to surrounding the wars and post-war fears that lead to built environment design were between groups of HUMAN BEINGS that all have the same physical and anatomical make-up and ultimately it will take a collective effort to solve the problems created by the separation and distinction between humans. The entire scenario seems as if it would appear to an alien observer like some bad "I told you so fairytale story" depicting our actions over the past century(ies).