Zoned Out

Last night I inadvertently reenacted the old Soviet joke about going to the wrong apartment in the wrong building in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong city because they all look exactly the same. Mine was a suburban version—though what does one even call the strip-mall sprawl outside small towns, where there’s little -urb to be sub- to? Anyhow, I missed my exit and had to turn around in the Lowes parking lot to get to the Whole Foods parking lot. Yep.

These non-places do not happen by accident. They are not mistakes. They are the result of laws that allow almost no possibility of deviation from specified lane widths, numbers of parking spaces, building set-backs from highways, drainage capacities, height restrictions. It would be illegal in most places—or require special permits and favors—to build a traditional New England small town, or, God forbid, for a town to develop into a city.

What is it doing to us to spend the time we do in such non-places, the weird between-ness of parking lots and intersections, sitting in traffic, eyes skipping over headlights and windshields, iTuned in to our own soundtrack, on the way to somewhere else?