Why @walkableV?

While an architectural student ant the University of Utah, I enrolled in an urban planning class taught by a wise adjunct professor, one of a few that changed the way I see the world. My take away was that the most important piece in architecture was the connection between people in our built environment.  How we relate to our community and the people and places that have or should have become a part of the fabric of our life.
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I have been impressed by how important human-scale interaction is in a healthy environment. I love that we can be inspired by architecture, but deeper is the scale of our conviction and inspiration when it is for the stranger, the friend, the family that moves us to be better, more compassionate, more alive and more willing to sacrifice for a greater cause than self. 

What began as an architectural passion for me became a passion in urban planning in the school of traditional neighborhood design.

Thus, Walkable Village was born, the idea that when we begin to walk, bike and take public transit, we make connections, we are fallible, and that vulnerability makes us human and connects us to our community. John McKnight writes “…each historic community is an experiment in well-being. Through stories and relationships, obligations and wisdom, healthful ways are part of everyday life and common knowledge.”
In much of life in the United States we have "given up community to professionals. replacing stories with studies, friends with professionals, obligations with fees and wisdom with technologies."

I believe that we have shrouded ourselves in steel and call it freedom, moved to the suburbs and called it progress, surrounded ourselves in commodities that cannot forever satisfy and burdened ourselves in plastic debt in an attempt to fill our emptiness, to keep up with the Jones who are now an illusion as we lost contact with the real Jones behind the next door.. Our neighbors are now too often strangers who live behind a garage door that closes before anyone has a chance to develop a connection. Worse we may have forgotten how to make messy face to face friendships that take practice and acceptance of fallibility.

Walkable Village is a symbol of connection and @WalkableV is the attempt to provide an archetype compass ( V ) to understand that our choices are connected and that for better or worse we are connected. No man or woman is an island. Our physical, emotional, financial and economic well-being are connected. May we relearn and improve as we live longer and prosper together in an educated, diverse, modern and yet historic village.