Picked up a book from the library the other day called The Joy Experiments: Reimagining Mid-Sized Cities to Heal our Divided Society. Early on, one of the authors has this interesting bit on Danish culture:

"In Denmark, there’s a belief that there should be a healthy balance between private spending and public good. In other words, an acknowledgment that life is played out in the public spaces of cities as well as in private homes, and the things that give us joy should be in both realms... Without questions, their taxes are high, but the people I spoke to felt they got satisfaction from this form of allocation of their Joy budget. They saw joy as part of their habitat."

This feels like a direct contrast to the values that I see here in my area of Canada. Here, the protection of the private realm is prioritized above all else, even at the cost of the public good. We can see this in the way that public resources are underfunded in favour of private alternatives (healthcare, education, leisure services). It is also revealed in the way our private experiences of shared spaces have become cultural battlegrounds.

Perhaps the major difference is the way in which people in Denmark still see themselves as sharing in the benefits of the public realm. Here in Canada, it increasingly feels like the public-private divide is becoming a class war and those with the means to fund public services are taking their ball and going home, so-to-speak. Advocates for public goods need to make sure that they are drawing their lines of division in ways that include the most amount of people possible.

Reading an article this morning that talks about how turning the struggle for safe streets into a culture war is a lose-lose situation. The author's point is that you won't get anywhere by demonizing the large majority of people who drive. He instead argues that the goal should be drawing the circle of empathy big enough for as many people as possible.

"Every parent has fear that their teenage kids won't make it home alive. Every parent fears putting their baby into the car seat in the back of the car. Everyone with elderly parents fears finding out that they have been involved in some kind of traumatic crash while behind the wheel...

Everyone wants the street in front of their own home to be safe. Start with that. Here are all the ways your street is designed to kill people. When you show people, they get it—and they get their part in it."

I remember reading a similar idea around activism that suggested drawing your 'line of division' in such a way that gives you the most allies as possible. This is something that progressive causes just do not seem to understand, often pushing for full agreement on an issue before collaboration. We need to draw a larger circle.

This seems especially true when dealing with multisolving opportunities in which we are trying to rally multiple issues around a shared solution. Not everyone is going to be aligned on every aspect of all of those issues, rather we must paint a picture of a better future that the most amount of people can agree with. Embracing a new spirit of collaboration across our differences will be the defining value of the coming decades.

I hope.

"For decades, society tolerated — even encouraged — public smoking. But then a growing awareness around public health risks associated with secondhand smoke, combined with harsher government regulations, led to a shift in public perception. The same could eventually hold true for driving."

From a 2023 article that provides a bit of a scientific basis for the notion of car-brain, or 'motonormativity' as it is referred to in the study referenced. The core idea here is that people are less tolerant of bad behaviour that doesn't involve a car. The challenge, according to the article, is that we don't currently look at driving through a public health lens. However, this seems to be changing, albeit slowly.

It's something I think about often as I walk my kids past all the idling vehicles in the school kiss-and-ride. The very narrow sidewalk runs parallel with the car entrance with no buffer and a property fence on the other side. So we are forced to breathe in all the exhaust fumes and tire particles. Imagine us being okay with an equivalent line of people smoking cigarettes in front of a school every day. We simply wouldn't. And that's the key point because despite immense lobbying and money, society can and does change.

A study from Happy Cities found that the lifestyle benefits that come from well-designed density show a strong correlation with happiness.

"Living in walkable neighborhoods, spending less time driving and commuting, and having access to third places like coffee shops and parks are associated with better well-being and social connectedness."

We know that density is necessary to stop sprawl; but if we want people to embrace it, we need to ensure that these benefits come with it. This will likely involve some changes to our zoning and parking requirements. But let's plan for a better future, not continue doing it in a way that perpetuates the problems associated with car dependency.

Also noted is that people are willing to pay more to live in areas like this. I'm not saying that's a good thing, walkability shouldn't be a luxury. But it does show us that people want to live in dense, walkable neighbourhoods.

How much do you trust your neighbours? How about the wider community in which you live? I've come across a few things over the last little while on the decline of social trust and the importance of it, especially when it comes to surviving disasters. This seems to be one of the consequences of our increasingly online world, the loss of the day-today encounters with the people we live closest to. Many of the daily interactions we once had with neighbours and other community members are being replaced with online checkouts, AI support chats, and faceless deliveries.

The thing is, this loss of trust also erodes empathy. Humans are naturally tribal, it's how we've survived. Yet, we've shifted so much of that into online communities with people we don't actually know and do not share geographic proximity with. This leaves us more likely to extend empathy to @username10128 than the family living across the street.

What I want to note here is that as our world continues to move into crisis after crisis we need to reclaim the art of working together for a shared public good. Cooperation might be the most needed skill of the 21st century. And it begins at a neighbourhood level.

As Bill McKiben writes,

"We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for [North] Americans will be hard."