During my research for the subject of suburban planning and its social isolation I stumble upon a wonderful specimen of poor urban design in the state of Missouri, where the nefarious housing pods hosting cul de sac and twirly roads is the realm for car culture.
The whole looks like any other American suburban community with the freeway skimming residential areas, the collector defining the neighbors, and then smaller roads extending everywhere until they meet all houses.
I wanted to plot an hypothetical visit of one neighbor to the other and this is the result. It’s a three miles trip by car that will take at least 9 minutes because there are no opening in the shape of a road or pedestrian path to connect the two points.
This is how it appears from top-down view with a series of semi-natural and artificial barriers that separates the cul de sac on the right with the curb on the right. Two worlds apart basically because of arcane and mysterious reasons that impelled urban designers to totally exclude any sort of travelling from one side of the neighbor to the other. Picture if the neighbor’s house is on fire and you want to help them escape death; you won’t probably because you either climb over the two fences and the trees, or you drive your car but that’ll take 9 minutes and who knows if people there are still alive by then.
Highlighted in red it’s the whole barrier of fence and trees that separate the neighbor in two distant sides, where socializing can be as difficult as Berlin in the 1950s between West and East.
To avoid your other neighbor doesn’t get the chance to invade you, the developers built an artificial canal (highlighted in blue) to furthermore make sure people don’t get together and come up with crazy ideas like socializing. In yellow the broken connection that might have been existed with a pedestrian path, but better not take any chance.
Here’s the site from another point of view and you can see how the whole portion doesn’t allow for people to walk or drive to the other side, splitting the pod into three areas.
I zoomed as much as I could and you can see it’s not just a road network issue anymore but a lack of safety feature that could help people stay away from danger. After all these are places where families with young kids live.
In yellow I highlighted the dangerous areas where the lack of fence around the power lines and the canal have allow for free access; anybody can go unrestricted near the pylons and the ditch. Unsupervised kids face the most peril especially when it’s right around their backyard. Coloured in magenta it’s what appears to be a narrow bridge but in fact is a floodgate connected by another fence to the little shack on the right.
Notice also the lack of sidewalks everywhere; this tells us a lot about the urban design of housing communities where the pedestrian was left out of the picture in the first place. People going for a walk have to be in the street increasing the risk of being struck by a vehicle, this shows us the very weak UX design home owners are affected, but also emergency vehicles who might get tangled driving streets which have been badly shaped.
What does this mean?- We live among cities that are the result of zoning laws which manufactured landscapes dictate by cars first and people second. In North America there’s nowhere a car couldn’t go from the driveway to the drive-through of your local burger joint; drive in movies for cars, parking lots eating away downtown portions of many cities, and many other issue which gets in the way of creating healthier places to live.
UX design is not only about websites and phone apps, it extend its dominion onto any other experience the user goes through that can be as simple as opening a pickle jar or driving to work. Both these elements engage people into specific and different behaviors which can result in the success of failure of products and services.
