Life and Death of Great

¶ … life and death of great American cities" by Jane Jacobs

Reading Response: Outside Lies Magic

Much has been written about how we are suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder as a nation, held hostage to our laptops and cell phones. But what about ODD -- outside deficit disorder? According to John Stilgoe, because Americans have become so bound to following the rules, coloring in-between the lines since kindergarten, and moving in an orderly path down roads, enclosed in railroad cars, automobiles, and planes, we have forgotten the discursive pleasures of being outdoors and wandering. We must learn to deviate from conventional paths to regain our innate sense of exploration and wonder.

As a professor at Harvard, Stilgoe feels that the regimentation of our age, exemplified the way we organize our spaces in and out of doors is such that it explains his students' resistance to his refusal to give them a schedule, a timetable for his class on exploration. The students resist what once came naturally to our ancestors, namely to wander in mind and body. However, once his students overcome their fears of taking a course on exploration, they learn to incorporate observation and mindful exploration into their daily lives, and some have even made careers by minutely observing spatial, human existence and behavior.

In his book, Stilgoe chronicles his encounters with the modern landscape, as he has explored ordinary suburban and urban life. He catalogues his observations and provides an overview of how electricity changed the landscape of trees and houses in the 20th century. Trees were cut away to make way for power lines, planning grew more organized as the streets and foliage had to conform to the need for the ever-expanding network of wires to be free from entanglements. But as power lines hung free, we became more entangled and regimented on our modern lives. He examines how the U.S. Postal Services made the nation smaller, slowly, finally eliminating the discrimination between rural and urban areas in information transmission. However, the post office in a way "instead of becoming more urban, more willing to open picket-fence gates and climb front stoops," also "grows daily more and more rural in its outlook," preferring that its carriers not only drive vehicles but stay in their vehicles," and it is unheard of that a mailperson would come in for a slice of apple pie near the fire on a cold day, as might be the case may years ago (68). Information transmission is anonymous, and like everything else, takes place in enclosures of automobiles and post office boxes. The things that seem to keep us connected actually keeps us apart, like the post-World War II Interstate highway system, modeled on the German Autobahn made up of mazes of roads that fence in cities and housing developments as often as it links them together.