Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus
The current city doesn&#x27;t work anyway. A lot of our development patterns were born of seeds planted in the 1950s during an era when the nuclear family -- with a male breadwinner, female homemaker and 2.5 kids -- was the assumed standard basic &quot;economic unit&quot; and one male breadwinner provided adequate money, healthcare benefits, etc for multiple other people.<p>Suburbs grew out of the idea of a separation of the public and private spheres. Please note the assumption there is that it separates them for the male breadwinner.<p>The female homemaker de facto worked at home. Most <i>women&#x27;s work</i> -- cooking, cleaning, raising kids -- is done at home and is generally not assumed to be anything like paid work that needs to be regulated as a profession. Yet it is essential work, critical to the health, welfare and productivity of the world.<p>With people living longer, marrying later, having fewer children, living many years after the kids grow up and move out, etc. this model breaks down. As the world has generally moved more towards two-earner couples, a house in the suburbs has gradually turned into a nightmare we don&#x27;t know how to escape because, at least in the US, it&#x27;s our default assumption for a good home looks like and most of our financing and tax benefits etc are aimed at that type of home, so it is a large share of our good housing stock. Attempts to find alternatives, such the Tiny House movement, have largely not worked all that well.<p>We need to re-envision our social fabric. This baked-in, unstated assumption that most people are part of a nuclear family with multiple children and one partner doesn&#x27;t need a full-time paid job is very much out of date. It&#x27;s mostly no longer true and, unsurprisingly, the built environment we created to accommodate that lifestyle works rather poorly for all too many people today.<p>So that&#x27;s where we need to start. And it is very much bound up with car ownership and car use because the single family detached house in the suburbs assumes you have a car and assumes a family of five only needs one car.<p>When mom and dad both work and the neighborhood has a dearth of children for your only child to play with, the social fabric that lived when I was a child in a neighborhood full of kids cease to exist and the road are congested and people are both time stressed and financially stressed.<p>This is the crux of a lot of the problems with the world today. We built a world for the parents of the Baby Boomers, in essence, and we haven&#x27;t updated it. Demographics have changed, yet we continue to try to force-fit this shoe and wonder why it pinches so very badly, to the point of being crippling for many people.