Today in Foreign Policy: American Interests Demand Walkable Communities

If you’ve had your head stuck inside street design manuals or engineering guides – if you’ve been thinking at the level of the bulb-out or the bollard – I’ve got a present for you.

I wouldn’t have expected to find it in Foreign Policy magazine, but last week, Patrick Doherty of the New America Foundation published in its pages a big-picture, visionary manifesto calling for America to exert global leadership and help the planet "accommodate 3 billion additional middle­class aspirants in two short decades ­­without provoking resource wars, insurgencies, and the devastation of our planet's ecosystem." And Doherty sees walkable communities as a key to achieving America's strategic goals in the years ahead. (Don't tell Glenn Beck.)

Doherty names inequality, economic depression, resource depletion, and natural disasters as “the four horsemen of the coming decades.” A big contributor to those four horsemen was the suburban experiment of the post-war period and its ongoing perpetuation. Doherty asserts that today, "the country's economic engine is misaligned to the threats and opportunities of the 21st century." More highways and subdivisions, in other words, aren't going to make America prosperous and secure.

So walkable communities should be at the center of a redefinition of American economic policy, Doherty writes:

To do all this, the U.S. has to shake up its outdated governing institutions, Doherty writes. “America's domestic departments are designed to support an economic strategy that is now weakening the country.” We’re getting well above my pay grade here, but given what we’ve seen recently out of our current governing institutions, I’d say a change would be quite refreshing, thank you very much. A civilian Office of National Strategy? Works for me, though without some cooperation from Congress, it's going to be awfully tough “to author a bold and uncompromising future that remains prosperous, secure, and sustainable.”