They got my idea of including me, I gather, from reading The Walkable City. For more information, contact Bruce Baugh at TRU: bbaugh@tru.ca Here's what I told them I'd be talking about:
Baby Needs New Pair of Shoes: the Gamble Necessary on the Road to Walkability
The idea that a city might not be walkable would never have occurred to anyone who lived before 1800. Walking was the way everyone but a few gentry and soldiers got around, but the Industrial Revolution changed that, as it changed so many other things. The private automobile pushed walkability only further into the background in the 20th century.
Why should that bother us? We’ve got our cars and our patch of green outside the center of the city: we’re pretty well set, aren’t we? Perhaps, as long as we don’t put much value on the time we need for commuting, for what we’re doing to our planet as we guzzle petroleum products, or for the kind of social interaction and convenience that living where walking reigns can bring.
Is there any exit from this highway along which we’re racing toward social and environmental crisis? That is a question that will occupy us increasingly in the 21st century. We are going to have to take some chances, and make some gambles about the way we live in the very short term if we are to survive in the long term.
