Happy Earth Day! Reframing the Environmental Movement

by Fred Kent, Project for Public Spaces: http://www.pps.org/blog/happy-earth-day-reframing-the-environmental-movement/

On this day in 1970, thousands of people gathered in New York City’s Union Square Park for the world’s first Earth Day celebration.

Those of us organizing events in cities all across the country were excited about the promise of environmentalism - not only as an effort to curb pollution and save the planet’s natural habitats and wildlife, but also as a powerful citizen’s movement. 
 

Front Page of The New York Times, April 23, 1970

In preparation, we convinced Mayor John Lindsay to shut down Fifth Avenue from Midtown to 14^th Street, and to close off 14^th Street and Union Square. Closed to vehicle traffic, these urban thoroughfares transformed into lively pedestrian avenues as well as stages for street theater and peaceful protest.

The mood that day was energetic and triumphant. Here we were - students, workers, activists of all stripes - together and full of hope, fighting for change in some of the city’s most historic public spaces and streets. 

Still, there was a heaviness looming over the event: the war was still raging in Vietnam, and rumors of its expansion into Cambodia were becoming more and more real (in only a few days, this anger would reach a tragic peak with the fatal protests at Kent State). 

Despite the sun and celebration, this was also a sweeping protest, and environmental activism often went hand in hand with the anti-war, civil rights, and student movements of the time.

We’ve made great strides since that first Earth Day - our air is less polluted, we’ve cleaned up toxic dumpsites, and we’ve overseen the passing of all kinds of environmental legislation - but today’s cities face some even greater challenges. 

While addressing environmental degradation, we also need to confront the increased inequity within our cities; we need think creatively and together about alleviating traffic congestion and unplanned sprawl; and we need to find ways to address growing health disparities and uneven access to public spaces and social resources.

We need a broader movement that can speak to all of these issues - one that can speak to and for every community. In some very exciting ways, the environmentalist movement of the 20th century has given way to a more localized focus on sustainable urban Placemaking in the 21st century.

Placemaking is both a philosophy and a process that works to strengthen the connection between people and the places they share. I was wary at first, when people began to refer to Placemaking as the “new environmentalism” (I’m more concerned with the process and results, rather than any kind of label or re-established “ism”). 

But the term does make some sense if we expand our usual definition of “environment” to include those places we call home - our streets, neighborhoods, communities - the places where our lives unfold every day.

The practice of Placemaking is of course not new, though until recently it’s been a relatively quiet movement. For decades, it has taken shape around citizen-led activism and thousands of grassroots efforts. More recently, in places like Detroit, public and private stakeholders have joined together to effect full-on re-animations of neighborhoods, downtowns, and sometimes even entire cities.

As the movement enters the mainstream, it is essential that every sector of society participates in it. And we need leaders at all levels - from community organizers to CEOs. The funding support we are now seeing for Placemaking shows that foundations and even large corporations are joining the cause, and recognizing the vital role public spaces play in our cities and communities.

Today, nearly half a century after that spring day in Union Square, the desire for transformative change is as strong as ever - though it has taken a new shape.

Let’s continue to do everything we can to address climate change and to protect our vast and troubled wildernesses - but let’s remember that this is just one aspect of saving the Earth. 

Let’s also work to make streets safer, encouraging people to walk and bike more and to drive less. Let’s continue lobbying for accessible and enjoyable public spaces, and for public markets that provide communities with healthy affordable food. Let’s stop building wide streets and sprawling parking lots that exacerbate pollution and global warming. Let’s turn impersonal and outdated strip malls into neighborhood centers that include mixed-income housing, public squares, sidewalk cafes, and convenient transit stops.

The Placemaking movement has emerged as a way to bring environmentalism back home. We all care deeply about the places where we live, and there’s nothing more inspiring than being able to see, and indeed be a part of, immediate change.

Community Resilience: Learn and Tell Toolkit

rand.org

by Vivian Towe, Anita Chandra, Joie Acosta, Ramya Chari, Lori Uscher-Pines, Clarissa Sellers, RAND Corporation: http://www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TL163.html

Download eBook for Free PDF file, 1.3 MB

Abstract

This toolkit is intended to teach people about community resilience so that they can then educate others about resilience and resilience building. It uses a train-the-trainer approach. The LEARN section of the toolkit educates community members or organizations about basic community resilience concepts by providing definitions, stories, and additional resources.

The TELL section provides tips, talking points, games, and exercises about resilience to help users teach others about resilience. In addition to community members, organizations can use this toolkit to communicate with their staff and service populations about resilience.

Reclaiming, Relocalizing, Reconnecting: The Power of Taking Back Local Food Systems - New Report from Friends of the Earth Europe Highlights Five Examples of Communities Reclaiming Their Food Systems

A farmers' market in Prague (Richard Tanton/flickr/cc)

by Andrea Germanos, staff writer, Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/04/16/reclaiming-relocalizing-reconnecting-power-taking-back-local-food-systems

The power of food systems is concentrated in few hands, and this narrow control over seeds, food production, and processing creates a disconnect between consumers and their food with repercussions for maintaining cultural knowledge and skills, local connections, and local economies as well, Friends of the Earth Europe states.

But in places across Europe, communities are coming together to show that another way - a better way - is possible.

"The 'business-as-usual' model can no longer be considered an option for a well-functioning food system in the future."A new report (pdf) by the environmental organization looks at five examples of communities sucessfully taking on the challenge:

• In northern Spain is the Avicultura Campesina, which supports the environment and local economy through its agroecological chicken cooperative. It supports food sovereignty, with three farmers who control the process for raising and processing the chickens in addition to its 31-member cooperative to get the organic chickens to consumers.
• In Italy are purchasing groups, called Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (GAS) which made their choices based on producers' sustainability and help to "re-establish a direct relationship between the consumer and the farmer." The report states: "GAS groups want to contribute to creating a society in which people can find the time to meet and establish relationships with others. As a result, a number of groups are involved in a range of other activities, such as promoting social economy networks and districts. Through civic engagement, they seek to change production, purchasing, and consumption attitudes and behavior, reaching beyond agriculture and food."
• France's La Ruche Qui Dit Oui (French for 'the beehive that says yes') is a web platform for "beehives" of food producers and consumers. The platform allows the small number of producers and dozens of consumers within each beehive to coordinate orders and deliveries with cost savings. "The project contributes to the defense of sustainable agriculture, which puts the food at the center of our concerns. It is part of an emerging ecosystem of neighboring initiatives that complement each other and move in the same direction," states Jérémi Anxionnaz from the Ruche. "So together these values can have a strong political and economic dimension and begin to influence the system at a European level."
• The farmers' markets in the Czech Republic's capital of Prague are providing an example of this alternative paradigm as well. Jana Spilkovà, an Assistant Professor of Social Geography and Regional Development at Prague’s Charles University, called them "the first real example of alternative food networks ... in the Czech Republic. They illustrate the start of a noticeably new consumer and producer culture, created as concerns about food consumption, ethics, social diversity, and urban renewal come together."
• Civil society in Hungary has actively promoted local food, fostering a rise in farmers' markets as well as food festivals, allowing consumers to have "have healthier diets, and increasingly choose local ingredients." The report adds: "The government’s food strategy identified local food systems as being a primary tool of local economic development." Matthew Hayes, member of Open Garden Foundation and researcher at Szent István University in Budapest, states in the report: "As an organic market garden, concentrating on small-scale production for local markets, the ecological footprint of our food is small, whilst the quality is very high, and the environmental and social benefits are great."

The report states that "the examples collected here should inspire policymakers to recognize the multiple benefits of short food supply chains for people and the environment. Locally-produced and affordable agroecological food should be the backbone of a food system that increases our food sovereignty. The 'business-as-usual' model can no longer be considered an option for a well-functioning food system in the future."

It's not just food systems being reclaimed; a separate report released this month by the Transnational Institute highlighted communities worldwide that are taking back control of their water from private companies, and a recent publication by Grain and La Via Campesina looked at how farmers across the globe have been resisting efforts by governments and corporate agribusiness to limit the practice of practice of saving and exchanging seeds.

A More Intelligent Economic Model

Shopping Mall by Charlie Brewer CC BY-SA 2.0

by Challenged Species, Social Rebirth: http://socialrebirth.org/a-more-intelligent-economic-model/

 

Politicians and the business community at large would have us believe that the problems in our economy are a result of poor business confidence and that the resolution to our socio-economic issues would be resolved by boosting confidence in the consumer. 

 

Confidence … what are we actually talking about when we discuss consumer confidence?

 

Shopping, strong consumer confidence indicates to corporations that people will head out and spend their hard earned cash on goods and services in a repetitious fashion, empowering growth and securing job stability in the market. 

 

Nowhere in that equation is there concern or quarter given to biosphere sustainability or the impacts of a throw away consumption model, built around perceived obsolescence, on our children’s and grandchildren’s futures. The term environmental sustainability is not in the lexicon of our business community at large, the focus is on profit projections, consumption trends, cuts to financial costs and marketing to capture repeat custom.

An economy that has its basis in environmental concern, sustainability, equality and the type of freedom that does not require us to be told we are free: That is a direction we can head in as a species. In the direction of what has been termed a Resource Based Economic Model (R.B.E.M.). 

What is a Resource Based Economic Model (R.B.E.M.)

A R.B.E.M. is more than an economic system; it is a way of life, a holistic social and economic system that requires the Earth’s resources be viewed as the common heritage of all the Earth’s inhabitants. That promotes the understanding that the Earth is not something to be divided and owned, but rather is our shared home which requires our collective stewardship.

It makes use of resources, not money and concentrates on equitable distribution in the most humane and efficient manner possible. It provides all goods and services to everyone without the use of money, barter, credits or any other form of debt of servitude. Our current scientific understandings and technological advancement can easily allow us to provide access abundance for all the worlds population and that is the aim of a R.B.E.M.

The implementation of such an economy will require a fundamental values shift. Hoarding, greed and superficial commercially manufactured desires, which are so prevalent in our society today, have no place in such an economy. It is the pervasiveness of this values disorder that can get in the way of understanding or even entering into discourse about this type of economy.

Just as one must be prepared to understand that our monetary economy is not inherently evil, as it was developed in a time of real scarcity, as a mechanism by which to ration as fairly as we knew how, one must also accept that over thousands of years things have changed.

We understand more about our natural world and our technical capabilities have exploded beyond what our rationing system can cope with. It is for this reason that we must accept that questioning our current economy and its fundamental mechanics should not be seen as taboo, but as a part of our natural progression as a social animal on this planet.

As a species we have developed a tendency to mistrust each other. When operating socially from the confines of an economic system that requires us to strive to gain differential advantage over one another in order to elevate our standard of living, this should come as no surprise.

Such permeating mistrust runs the gambit from the rational; having a reluctance to divulge personal information to unknown people over the internet, through to the irrational; being convinced that scientists are working in collusion with government agencies to gain control over us via a climate change conspiracy (article to come).

This propensity to see conspiracy everywhere shows up as soon as we begin to discuss a computerized system of accounting planetary resources, which when looking at something as complex as monitoring resource abundance/scarcity on a global scale is absolutely necessary. 

The Evil All Controlling Economy Supercomputer

Wide-angle view of the ALMA correlator by ESO CC BY 4.0

It is a commonly held misunderstanding that in a resource based economy there will be a centralised supercomputer controlling our lives, dictating what we can and cannot do. While it is true that computers will be needed to collect and store data in relation to resource monitoring systems, the idea that it will be one all seeing, all controlling computer overlord is a misnomer.

What we could expect is that there would be many computers all over the world collecting and monitoring data in relation to regional resources and overall use. This would not include data on individuals, but on overall collective use and regeneration of resources constantly updated to give the most accurate assessment of levels of resource availability. This would not make decisions for us, but rather empower us with the knowledge of current resource availability enabling us to contemplate when, how and what we would use specific resources for.

As a simple example, if we became aware through resource monitoring that at a specific global location water was becoming scarce, we would be able to perhaps choose to have shorter showers, have water imported from another location, or investigate improved ways to put that resource to use in the interest of sustainability. It would be people, the people living in the area, that would make those decisions. Not some computer, the computer would do nothing more than allow us to be aware of impending resource scarcity, how we reacted to that information would be up to us.

Again it must be understood that we are not going to awaken in the morning and suddenly find ourselves living in such an economy, before that can happen there are fundamental things that must change about the way we view our planet and each other.

We must undergo a values shift, which will allow us to see each other as brothers and sisters sharing a small delicate planet - that it is in our interests to nurture as opposed to stripping bare in some vain effort to get ahead of each other. This wont happen overnight, but it has already begun to happen all over our world.

The more time we spend understanding our biosphere and how that relates to the welfare of not only ourselves but every life form we share our home with, the more inclined we will be to question our current systems approach to life on earth.

The interconnected relationships we have with not only each other, but the planet itself will become increasingly apparent and will implore us to reassess our social methods on a continuous basis, keeping us from entering into some utopian stagnation, but instead encouraging us to constantly update our methodology to come into line with up to date understandings and environmental circumstances.

It is when it becomes accepted that a system has failed that emergent ideas can take hold and be allowed to flourish. It is long since past time to acknowledge that our economy as a system is not just failing, but is clearly detrimental to all the systems that have been built up around it. The symptoms of that failure are prevalent in the world around us and to deny their existence or pontificate about superficial reforms could come at severe cost to our entire species.

Feature Image
Money by Andrew Magill CC BY 2.0
Total US Debt to GDP by Fotis Bobolas CC BY SA 2.0

The Next System Project: Can We Imagine a Future Worth Fighting For?

by Community Wealth, Shareable: http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-system-project-can-we-imagine-a-future-worth-fighting-for

We know that we have big problems: the climate situation is dire, inequality is on the rise, democracy’s been captured by corporations, and we have unprecedented numbers of people locked up in prisons and jails. 

When we try to chip away at these problems, what often happens is that we take one step forward and two steps back. 

We try to crack down on predatory mortgage lending with some new regulations and speculative finance decides to just become corporate landlords. 

We try to make the prison system “more fair” and we wind up just making it bigger. We try to build a sharing economy that connects people and reduces the resources we use, but the venture capitalists jump in to inflate another tech bubble that pushes more people into precarious labor instead.

If we’re serious about a future that’s sustainable, equitable, livable, and just, we need to be thinking in terms of getting ahead of these dynamics by actually changing the system. That means thinking seriously about scale, about the big picture, about how the elements of the world we want to live in fit together and can mutually reinforce each other.

It means sorting through all the great ideas and experiments and visions that have emerged in recent years - from peer production to worker cooperatives to basic income to prison abolition - and figuring out how these visions get made real and how these experiments get scaled up.

And it means coming to terms with the magnitude of all of this. We aren’t going to build the system we want to see overnight; it’s going to take decades of work and millions of people to pull it off.
The good news is that this work is happening already, all around the country and the world.

Angela Glover Blackwell, the head of PolicyLink, puts it beautifully: “As systems fail, individual and community creativity explodes [...] the people in this country are solving the problems themselves. They're coming up with new models and strategies, and within those models and strategies are the kernels of a systemic way to move forward.”

The Next System Project, launched last week at the Democracy Collaborative, is a multi-year initiative to build a platform for weaving these new models and strategies together into something bigger.

If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, watch and share our overview video, and visit the Next System Project site to sign on to our statement on the need for systemic solutions to systemic crisis. Here's more on the project by actor and activists Danny Glover:

Together: How Cooperatives Show Resilience to the Crisis - A Documentary Film by CECOP-CICOPA Europe

by Grassroots Economic Organizing: http://www.geo.coop/story/together-how-cooperatives-show-resilience-crisis



The examples filmed include a mineral water factory in Poland founded more than 60 years ago (Muszynianka), a French company in crisis acquired by its workers and transformed into a worker cooperative (Fonderie de l’Aisne), a consortium of social cooperatives in Milan providing labour inclusion to disadvantaged people and social services to thousands of citizens (Consorzio SIS) and an industrial cooperative group which is one of Spain’s main business groups (MONDRAGON Corporation).

Visit the documetary website
Watch more videos from CECOP-CICOPA

Creative Communities Embody a New Kind of Civic Engagement

People’s Puppets of Occupy Wall Street (P Stein/Flickr)

by Anne Harris, Monash University, The Conversation: http://theconversation.com/creative-communities-embody-a-new-kind-of-civic-engagement-37114

In a media environment weary of big events and relentless political and social upheaval, creative activism emotionally re-engages bystanders with the protest movements that - sometimes inspiring, sometimes irritating - can persist for months.

Activists are increasingly using creative strategies for advancing their work in new and surprising ways. Think 2010’s Arab Spring, the global Occupy movement, and most recently Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution.

Emerging forms of hybrid online/ offline creativity and permutations of creative communities are changing the ways activists and social movements do their jobs.

The People’s Puppets are a branch of the Occupy movement that continue to expand their creative reach post-2011 and the disbanding of Zucotti Park. Groups such as the People’s Puppets and Occupy Museums are using a combination of both digital and old-school craft strategies to reach new audiences, maintain communities, promote anti-capitalist values, and work toward tangible social change.

What does this hybrid approach offer creative artists, activists and their publics?

In my current study with Occupy and digital media expert Megan Boler, we focus on the synergies of creativity, pedagogy, and activism.

Our study also considers the socio-spatial aspects of creative activism: from in-the-street actions to web-based communication networks and digital connectivity. Specifically, we celebrate how activists offer DIY strategies to those wishing to become creative activists wherever and whenever they desire by accessing easy-to-use resources such as the Creative Activists’ Tool Kit.

The US-based Center for Creative Activism documents researches these same questions, documenting hybrid coalition-building and serving as a virtual hub for creative protest community-building.

Our study shows that young people today are integrating their civic engagements through community-based and creativity-based collectives and practices. They move easily across and through local/global and online/offline contexts. For the participants of these grass-roots social movements, concerns about capitalism, education, climate, and political engagement cannot be separated.

Invisible labour

Acknowledging the links between art and activism is not new. Feminist and performance studies scholars have long noted the public pedagogical function of creativity, activism and the arts. Yet this new creative activism seeks to define creativity against a backdrop of a “networked creative class” that remains exclusionary to the localised, non-networked, and technology-poor.

Sasha Kimel/Flickr

In the widening gap between the networked and non-networked, what is the social role of creativity? If the pervasive definition of creativity has been flattened toward “innovation” and digitality, can the kind of local craft-based creativity that the Peoples’ Puppeteers deploy be considered “invisible creative labour”?

Enter the need for online/offline hybridity, and what some creative activists call the scalability of an anti-capitalist social movements.

Author and activist Naomi Klein explored these ideas in her recent book This Changes Everything (2014), in which she critiques the “creative capitalism of philanthropist billionaires”.

Klein has long noted the links between capitalism and climate change. As a leader of the massive Peoples’ Climate March in New York City in September 2014, Klein has given voice to the kinds of integrated activism that many young people today see as necessary to affecting lasting structural social change.

Like Klein, much current scholarship notes that digital media is powered by a range of invisible creativities. One powerful example is the Occupy Museums campaign against the building of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, in which the invisible and undervalued local labour of the guest-worker builders are subsumed into global “creative industries” discourses and institutional artworld media campaigns.

Social change is necessarily creative

Rachel Maddow/Flickr

Nearly 80 years ago, in 1936, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin noted that a new form of “reproducibility” (through film and photography) was changing the social function of art in his day.
In 2015, we are seeing similar seismic shifts in the functions and forms of creativity and its social role precipitated by technological change.

Through using handmade puppets to charm and seduce opponents, The People’s Puppeteers make activist labour both more visible and invisible. Unlike traditional activist marchers, the bulk of their time commitment is spent in the DIY making culture to which they belong.

Carrying the puppets in street actions becomes a performance of fun and belonging that causes some outsiders, including cops and children, to want to join these merry bands of pranksters. Our research shows that this public relation is significantly different from earlier waves of direct action, with massively different effects.

The People’s Puppets of Occupy and other similar activist nodes are truly digitally and spatially hybrid communities of practice. The labour of creating social change today is inherently digital, global, local and imaginative. Creative activist communities embody a new kind of civic engagement that has much to offer citizens from all walks of life.

Read other articles in our Creativity series here.


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

What Your Town Can Learn From America's Most Walkable Suburb: It's Got Great Transit, Plenty of Sidewalks, and Values People More Than Cars

Photo by Shutterstock

by Jay Walljasper, Yes! magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/what-your-town-can-learn-from-americas-most-walkable-suburb

Suburban life has always been synonymous with long hours in the car - going to work, school, the grocery store, the mall, soccer practice, and friends’ homes. Some people even drive to take a walk.

That’s changing now, along with the stereotype that suburbs are places where everyone is white, married with children, and plays golf at the country club. From Bethesda, Maryland, to Kirkland, Washington, citizens are reinventing their towns to better accommodate walkers.

Traffic is being tamed on busy streets. New sidewalks and trails are being constructed. Business districts are coming to life thanks to growing foot traffic.

Paving the way are suburban leaders who see their communities’ continuing prosperity and quality of life dependent on creating lively, walkable places that attract young people, families, and businesses wanting to get close to the action.

Walking is gaining popularity across the United States for both transportation and recreation because it improves health, fosters community, and saves money.

The best place to experience the future of suburban living is Arlington County, Virginia, home of the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery, right across the Potomoc River from the District of Columbia.

Built up during the late-1930s through the 1950s - after autos started to dominate American life - it’s a classic suburb full of freestanding homes with driveways and green lawns. Nonetheless, it’s been named one of the 14 best “ Walk Friendly”communities in America by the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center at the University of North Carolina and one of the 25 Best Cities for Walking by Prevention magazine. 

A day in the life of America’s most walkable suburb

In Arlington’s Courthouse/Clarendon district, even on an unseasonably frigid Friday evening, you’ll find folks walking their dogs, pushing baby strollers, toting home groceries, or just out strolling around. One young man clutches a bouquet of flowers as he hurries down the street. Sidewalk traffic is brisk with people heading from office buildings, transit stops, parking lots, and nearby residences to health clubs, shops, restaurants, and movie theaters.

The next morning is windy with snow flurries, but the wide sidewalks of Arlington’s Virginia Square/Ballston district hums with people running errands at the bank, the cleaners, the mall, the tailors, the print shop, and the pharmacy before stopping off at the hair salon, coffee shop, or deli counter. You even see a few intrepid folks on bike.

A lot of shoppers popped over from nearby apartment buildings and townhomes that were once a struggling commercial strip, while others strolled from nearby single-family homes. Walking a couple of blocks in any direction from this town center, you’re transported from the bustling urban milieu of TV shows like How I Met Your Mother to the leafy bucolic setting of The Brady Brunch.

Clarendon/Courthouse and Ballston/Virginia Square are both served by a regional train system, a boost for walkable communities that most American suburbs won’t replicate anytime soon. But pedestrians flourish in Arlington neighborhoods that are distant from train lines too.

The Westover neighborhood sports a typically midcentury design, with parking lots in front of many businesses, but it still offers friendly street life. A trio of middle-schoolers walks home from the grocery with lunch fixings, while neighbors stop for a chat on their way to the hardware store, library, or Lost Dog Café (or Stray Cat café, for that matter).

Arlington is becoming a place where people matter more than cars.

These neighborhoods stretch over 6 miles in the heart of Arlington (which is both a city and a county at the same time), but you can reach them all on foot via pedestrian-friendly city streets or Arlington’s 50-mile trail network. 

 Meanwhile, the brand-new Shirlington community, rising from the ashes of a failed shopping center, feels like a suburban village. A main street that was paved over an old parking lot invites you to take an afternoon stroll browsing a wide selection of shops, ethnic restaurants, a library, a theater company, and a brewpub.

Around the corner stand a full-service grocery and Bus Boys & Poets, a popular bookstore and café named after African-American writer Langston Hughes, who worked as a bus boy in Washington during the 1930s. A few steps away are movie theaters, service businesses like hair salons and yoga studios, office buildings, townhomes, apartments, a bus station, and parking garages. 

Arlington’s path to transformation 

Arlington did not become a pedestrian success story overnight. The sidewalks are lively today thanks to a series of smart decisions carried out over several decades. The story of this suburb’s rise to become one of America’s most walk-friendly communities offers lessons for towns everywhere wanting to thrive in the years to come.

As an early model for the auto-oriented development that popped up all over the country after World War II, Arlington also become one of the first suburbs to experience the inevitable side effects of aging. The county population dropped from 174,000 in 1970 to 152,500 in 1980 as new land to develop became scarce and kids who grew up there moved away.

“In the 1970s, this was a declining inner ring suburb,” notes Chris Zimmerman, who served on the county board for 18 years. “I moved here in 1979 because of the cheap rent. Arlington was a stopover for a lot of people until they could afford to move somewhere else” - a familiar scene today in thousands of suburban communities.

“I walked in those days because I didn’t have a car, but I saw very few other people walking,” he remembers, who left the county board in 2013 to become vice president of economic development for Smart Growth America, which promotes walking as part of its mission to create healthy, economically vital communities.

The first step in Arlington’s revival was improved transit service, including a number of stops on the Washington Metro subway system. That reversed the county’s population decline, as new apartment buildings and shopping rose around the stations.

Walking picked up a bit in the immediate vicinity of Metro stops, but not in other parts of town. That’s because most of the streets were still designed to move cars as quickly as possible with little regard for the impact on pedestrians or surrounding neighborhoods. “When I took office in 1996, traffic was the biggest issue in every neighborhood. People were worried about their kids walking to school,” says Zimmerman.

The county board, spurred on by neighborhood leaders, adopted an “urban village” approach to planning, which, Zimmerman says, “really resonated with people - the idea of comfort and community while still being cosmopolitan. Being both suburban and urban at the same time.”

One strong focus of this plan was to make walking more safe and convenient. Sidewalks were widened while the pedestrian crossing distances at intersections were narrowed.

A task force on traffic calming was launched, and the outdated policy of charging homeowners for the cost of building new sidewalks - still common throughout the U.S. - was eliminated. "Homeowners are not expected to pay for the street in front of their house; why should they be responsible for the pedestrian infrastructure?” Zimmerman asks in a case study about Arlington done by America Walks.

“When I moved here in the 1990s, I would walk to the grocery store or go running, and if you ever saw anyone else, you always said hi because there were so few people on the streets,” remembers Lauren Hassel, outreach and promotions manager for WalkArlington. “Now if you stopped to say hi to everyone you met on the sidewalk, it would take hours to get where you’re going.”

Ninety percent of all residential streets now have sidewalks (up from 73 percent in 1997), and traffic on seven of the county’s nine busiest roads has declined between 5 and 23 percent since 1996. As a result, walking and biking now account for 16.6 percent of all trips around town.

The county’s population has now climbed to 220,000, and it’s attracting many young professionals and families who could afford to live in wealthier suburbs but prefer Arlington’s walkability and sense of community. It is also growing as a regional job center with more than 215,000 people working in the county.

“This could be done anywhere,” says Zimmerman. “It doesn’t depend on big-scale transit - it depends on good urban design.” 

Walking as a way of life

Peter Owen, a lawyer who grew up in nearby McLean, Virginia, chose to live in Arlington after college because he wanted to be close to his family but still enjoy opportunities to walk.

But old habits die hard, he admits. “It took me about four months of living here to stop driving in my car to the grocery store, even though I lived just a few blocks away.” The shift to walking has even improved his eating habits. “I buy a lot less frozen food because it’s easy to just stop at the store on my walk home every day and get fresh food.” Owen still owns a car, but says it stays in the garage most of the time.

When asked why walking is so important to him, Owen has plenty to say: “I value the serendipitous encounters with my neighbors and the sense of connection to this place. You notice lots more things, like kids playing, when you’re living at 5 miles per hour.”

He adds, “Arlington is becoming a place where people matter more than cars. It’s not just possible to walk here; it’s safe and comfortable to walk. There are crosswalks on the corners and shop windows to look at as you pass by - it’s more fun to walk with those kinds of things.” 

How to make any town good for walking

Arlington’s emergence as America’s most walkable suburb grew out of a wide range of community improvements promoted by residents like Peter Owen, who served on the Citizen Transportation Commission for six years, and carried out by elected officials and county staff.

“It’s dramatically different walking here than in the 1990s,” says Dennis Leach, Arlington’s director of transportation, who lived here for years before joining the county staff. “You see all these people in places that used to be nowhere. It shows that if you do the infrastructure and land use right, you can provide people more viable transportation options and good places to walk, which has benefits for social equity, health, and a sense of community.”

Leach calculates that 350,000 pedestrian and bike trips are made by residents, workers, and visitors every workday. Key actions that make Arlington’s streets more walkable include:

• Crosswalks, which are clearly defined so motorists know where to look for walkers
• Bulb-outs, which extend the sidewalk a few feet into an intersection to shorten pedestrians’ crossing distance
• Median islands, which offer pedestrians a midpoint refuge while crossing wide, busy streets
• Landscaping along streets, which inspires motorists to drive slower
• Bike lanes, which not only encourage people to bike instead of drive, but also increase the distance between sidewalks and rushing traffic
• Buffered bike lanes and cycle tracks, modern bike lanes that separate sidewalks even farther from traffic by adding wide swaths of paint on the road or physical barriers from moving auto traffic
• Wider sidewalks, which make people feel more safe and comfortable on foot
• Narrower streets, which slow traffic speeds and free up more space for pedestrians and bicyclists
• Traffic calming, a whole toolkit of additional road innovations, ranging from roundabouts to speed bumps, which remind motorists to look out for walkers and heed the speed limit
• Pro-pedestrian zoning, which enhances the walking experience by requiring buildings along pedestrian routes to have first-floor retail shops or windows, but making sure they don’t crowd out people on foot
• Road diets , a new step for Arlington, in which moderately traveled four-lane roads are reduced to two through-lanes with an alternating left-turn lane in the middle, creating space for bike lanes or wider sidewalks
• Complete Streets, a county policy that all modes of transportation must be considered in street reconstruction projects
• Transportation demand management, a sophisticated strategic plan that looks at traffic issues involved in all development decisions and offers incentives for businesses to locate in walkable places served by transit

On-the-ground efforts to promote walking

Of course, it takes more than crosswalks and sidewalks to get people walking. That’s why nearly everyone I spoke with in Arlington pointed to the work of WalkArlington, a county-sponsored initiative to encourage people to get back on their feet. “We help make people aware of what great opportunities for walking we already have here,” says Outreach and Promotions Manager Lauren Hassel.

WalkArlington developed 25 walking routes known as Walkabouts around the county, highlighting neighborhoods’ history, community resources, and attractions. They also publish a calendar of events, walking tip sheets (with special editions for winter and summer), and a monthly e-newsletter covering walking-related topics.

The WalkArlington Works program helps employers and staff to boost walking in the workplace, both for commuting and breaks during the workday.

WalkArlington is part the county’s Car-Free Diet program, an innovative approach that helps families figure how living without a car or going “car-lite” (using just one private car) would work for them. Arlington’s walk-friendly environment - plus extensive train and bus service, trails, bike lanes, bikeshare, and carshare - make this a viable option for a surprising number of households.

WalkArlington also excites kids about getting around on foot with programs at schools, from coordinating Walk to School Day to promoting “walking school buses” (parents picking up kids at their doors and walking them to school). In the summer, WalkArlington offers walking scavenger hunts at the county fair and collaborates with county-run camps to promote walking.

Arlington’s 22 elementary schools and five middle schools all run Safe Routes to Schools programs, which seek ways for more children to walk and bike to school. “We let families know the advantages of walking to school,” says the school district’s Safe Routes coordinator Tom Norton. “It’s great for fitness, and it improves academic performance.”

These pedestrian education efforts, on top of major improvements to streets and sidewalks, advance Arlington toward fulfilling the dream of many residents, best articulated by longtime resident Charlie Denney, the county’s former bicycle and pedestrian coordinator: “Our goal would be to build a community where every 8-year-old can go all by themselves to buy an ice cream cone.”

See a recent video about Arlington’s success in creating neighborhoods for people all ages here.

Jay Walljasper wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Jay writes, speaks, edits and consults about creating stronger, more vital communities. He is the author of The Great Neighborhood Book and All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. He is also a contributor to Sustainable Happiness: Live Simply, Live Well, Make a Difference, from YES! Magazine. His website: JayWalljasper.com