Tinkering w/ a Wrong Strategy

http://www.azcentral.com/community/swvalley/articles/2012/02/18/20120218arizona-homes-verrado-development.html

In the above article, the writer suggests DMB has rethought its approach to development & fixed it by putting jobs before houses, but I posit that it's still wrongheaded in trying to be overambitious from the start in an effort to build big commercial/industrial projects to drive sales for expensive homes (plus the fact that its new Eastmark development is partly centered around a failing company, First Solar, as a potential employer).

Urban redevelopment needs to reorient toward the way urbanization used to happen centuries ago (which requires patience but I believe pays off in monetary, aesthetic, & health ways in the long run). Farmers would pool their defensive resources in order to fend off marauders & thieves, & this would often involve building their homes close together in villages. Eventually as their farms became more successful & they built up their wealth, they could improve their homes & even build defensive walls around their villages -- the start of small cities. Gradual improvement further required the addition of roads & other infrastructure such as water & wastewater distribution systems.

Urban planners & developers could incorporate some of this in fixing our cities by trying to implant more bucolic environs in the desolate empty lots & barren developments that blight our recession-fraught cities. Some of this is already happening with the urban gardening movement. But it could be improved on a larger scale, I believe, if planners rezoned failed developments for agricultural use & the developers were willing to give up their failed development models & start thinking in a more traditional way (by traditional I don't mean early 20th century but thinking more 19th & further back where possible). Amerindians could be employed in teaching urbanites how they herd sheep & farm corn (not GMO corn, of course). If this is done in a slower way, not trying to achieve economies of scale which merely look at the short-term unit costs of food but also considering the severe longterm medical costs of farming in a more industrial way which produces unhealthy food & more pollution, society would benefit greatly. I also think urbanites would enjoy learning a slower way of life which tears them away from their nerve-wracking addiction to 24-7 wireless connectivity to a demanding commercial world & revisits the more patient days of yore.