Editor:

Growing up in Fairhope, I walked with my brother, my neighbors, the boy who continually teased me, to and from school everyday. I rode my bicycle to the pier, to town, to the library and made Fairhope my backyard. It fostered my commitment to my neighborhood, to the people who lived there and to the very nature that makes us a community.

What has happened to those “good old days”? The biggest is the automobile. It has taken away that very sense of place and replaced it with the quickest, easiest route to get what we need done. It’s taken away that sense of community that makes us care for our neighbors and our neighborhoods.

Because of this increase in automobile usage, traffic engineers have had to figure out what to do with all the added automobiles on the road; how to move them faster and further as commutes get longer and more congested. Hence the notion of faster, straighter roads and traffic lights to stack and hold traffic. Energy is not going to become less costly anytime in the foreseeable future, and the way in which we build roads, create neighborhoods and design our buildings will have to change.

A city’s planning process needs to be a vision of the future. Historic preservation has certainly made us look at our communities in a more sustainable way and create the New Urbanism movement of the 1980s. How do you plan a community that fosters the “good old days”? How do we want to grow that welcomes pedestrians as well as cars, creates easy accessibility, energy efficiency and buildings that do more than keep the rain off?

We need to change the way we grow, how we plan new subdivisions and the roads that take us there and back.

DesignAlabama is a statewide organization and a partner with the Alabama Sate Council on the Arts that continues to create awareness and value in community design that influences our environment. Our mayor’s Design Summit is a key yearly outreach program that we hope will give mayors some of the tools needed to create community design change.

The GreenCoast 2008 Conference is another avenue to move Alabama in that direction. It is slated for April 9-10 at the Mobile Convention Center. Speakers will include those that take our community’s built environment and health seriously. Residents, developers, elected officials, city planning and building staff can make a difference to the future of our communities. It’s up to us to change the way we vision our future, think and build our present and realize that place does matter.

Chairman, DesignAlabama

Event sponsor