--- In [email protected], "sparaig" <LEnglish5@...> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], turquoiseb <no_reply@> wrote: > > > > No, it's not mental retardation, although that could be a > > factor. It's not walking. > > > > In this interesting article, a theory is proposed that > > living in a town or city that is comfortable to walk around, > > and thus encourages walking, creates a vastly different > > cognitive mapping through which we see the universe than > > does living in a place where you drive everywhere. I have > > certainly seen the truth of this living in Europe, which > > incidentally tends to produce people with more liberal > > views, *except* in the burbs where people live distanced > > from other people and have to drive wherever they're going. > > Interesting theory. > > > > http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article03151301.aspx > > So little towns with low crime-rates should be bastions > of liberalism? > > Yeah, right.
Do you have a reading deficiency? It's not the size, it's whether the towns encourage walking everywhere you need to go, rather than driving. There are very few towns -- large or small -- in America that can make this claim. In the burbs there are no sidewalks, and nowhere to go if there were. In the cities, there is so much crime in many of them that no one walks there, either, even in great walking cities like San Francisco. And it's not "liberalism" per se that walking more, and thus developing more comprehensive cognitive mappings creates, it's not becoming locked into the kind of thinking that postulates single solutions to everything. According to the article, that is. I'm just saying that this makes sense to me. If I decide to walk across town, in my town I can take over 100 paths to get there, and often do, because there is so much to see and so many people to inter- act with as I'm walking. If I were in my car, there would be only two ways to get there, both boring, and I would neither meet nor interact with anyone on the way. By far the worst towns I've ever been in were in the American Midwest. No sidewalks, no community centers, only strip malls that one had to drive to. And, interestingly enough, the highest incidences of people on constant prescriptions for anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications. Then again, I like walking, so I might be biased. Not to mention more thin than those who drive every- where they go.
