Traversing the Kingdom of God on Foot: Pedestrian Shed and Parish

Traversing the Kingdom of God on Foot: pedestrian shed and parish By the Rev. Dr. Jason A. Fout Rossiter Lecture October 3, 2012

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[X1]What I’d like to do today is to give you an overview of one area of my research, having to do with

the built environment. It’s just a broad overview, but I hope to give you a glimpse of why I think that it

can be a meaningful part of the church’s thinking about mission in the communities in which we find

ourselves. In one way, urbanism and urban design can seem pretty far from theology; indeed, there are

rather few people who pursue this activity from a theological perspective. But it has always appealed to

me as a discipline; it actually seems quite implicitly theological: from thinking about what the human

person is for; to considering the importance of our being embodied and living in particular places and

times, formed and affected by our built environment; to thinking about the context in which we might

love our neighbor, or our enemy; to contemplating the conditions of possibility for how God is glorified.

All of these questions are intrinsically theological and also implicit engagements with the built

environment. And although I don’t pursue these theological questions explicitly in what follows, they are

never far from the surface.

Back in the summer of 1998, I was leading a short term missions trip in Honduras and while there I met

an Anglican priest. We chatted for a little bit, and I saw that he was getting ready to walk home from the

church. He said to me that he was always very intentional about walking in the neighborhood, and

wearing his clergy collar when he did. It helped him to be familiar with the people he was called to

serve, and just as importantly, it helped them to be able to identify him. He became a known figure in

the neighborhood, even a fixture of sorts, someone people could approach. At the time, it seemed to

me just intuitively like some genuine pastoral wisdom, and I resolved, as much as I could, to do the same

sort of thing.

We returned to the U.S. and the autumn I began seminary at Seabury-Western. We lived off campus, we

had a house just outside the southern edge of Chicago; door-to-door my commute was 31 miles. If I

drove it (and I often did), it took me about an hour and a half to drive that 31 miles; an average speed of

20 miles per hour in stop and go traffic. I had returned from my experience in Honduras and re-

immersed myself in car culture.

Fast forward three years, and I’ve graduated Seabury-Western, been ordained, and am serving as a

curate in a parish in Saint Joseph, Michigan. I hadn’t forgotten the wisdom of that priest in Honduras,

not quite anyway, and so we bought a house about three and a half blocks from church, on the theory

that being that close I could walk or bicycle to work, get to know the neighborhood and become a

known presence there. Only, as is so often the case, despite good intentions it simply didn’t work out.

Most days it was simply easiest to jump in my car and roll into work. There were any number of reasons

I could give, some more legitimate than others: I had pastoral calls to make later that day; I was running

late for a meeting at church; I had to pick up my daughter at school later that day; an emergency might

come up and I might be needed somewhere else on short notice; I wanted to go out for lunch

somewhere. I was able to rationalize it all. But mostly, it was simply the inertia of deeply ingrained habit.

Not that I didn’t try once or twice. I remember once I walked to church those three and a half blocks.

Sure enough, someone pulled their car over and asked me if I was alright and if I needed a lift. When I

got to church and people saw I didn’t have my car with me, they asked sympathetically if it was in the


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shop. It became very clear very quickly that driving was the default and any deviation from it needed

explanation.

What was true of Saint Joseph in particular was true of the state of Michigan as a whole, and is very

much the case in the vast majority of the US: we are a car-centered culture. We have made many very

specific decisions, particularly following World War II to be a primarily car-centered country. This has

had many effects, on housing, education, commerce, you name it, and most of the effects have been

deleterious. But it is absolutely inscribed on our self-understanding as Americans: We drive across the

country, we drive across the city, we drive across the street. Indeed, very often we can do little else.

As a nation, we have over the last sixty years designed our built environment to be car-centered. We see

that in the relative diffusion of population away from cities into suburbs and exurbs. It became

customary to live quite some distance from work, school, church, family, shopping, recreational

activities – because we were able to drive. The relative ease of driving distorts actual distances. It might

be easier to drive a few miles out of your way to get somewhere if it means being on a highway instead

of a surface or local road. [X2]For example, there’s a restaurant we sometimes go to in Reynoldsburg, on

Main Street. It’s a straight shot, five and a half miles. But we don’t take Main Street to get there. We

gladly go three miles out of our way in order to take Interstate 70 out to Interstate 270, since the

restaurant is located near the highway exit. In fact if you ask one of the online map programs for

directions, this is the route that it will give you. Without even thinking about it, we add over 50% to our

distance so that we can drive faster and miss the stoplights. If we were walking or bicycling, adding an

extra six miles to our 11 mile trip would be unthinkable; but driving, we do it without a second thought.

It’s not just that every place is designed to be convenient to cars; it’s that most places are designed to be

convenient to little else. As EB White said, “in America everything is somewhere else and you get there

in a car.”1 Part of the reason for this is our zoning decisions. [X3]The sort of zoning we’ve embraced is

alternatively called ‘Euclidean zoning’, single-use zoning, or pod developments, but the upshot is the

same: different types of land use are distant from each other. Now originally, this was for the relatively

good reason that people didn’t want a slaughterhouse or a rendering plant moving in next door to their

home. Fair enough. But this separation of uses has become a totalizing aesthetic for us: housing,

schools, offices, places of worship, municipal buildings, shopping and so forth are now built at some

distance from each other. It has become illegal to build neighborhoods like we used to – it is now

virtually guaranteed that they are car-centered. And so we have what we’ve come to call [x4] sprawl. It

is now becoming abundantly clear to us just what that the environmental, social and public health costs

are of this unsustainable pattern of development. [x5] It’s also a very poor way to plan a city, as the

architect Leon Krier helps us to see in his sketch – using the metaphor of a pizza, he shows us that

single-use pods make for a very unappetizing city.

What’s more, if you have a society that is exclusively car-oriented, you instantly move to the margins a

great many people: the young, the elderly, those with medical conditions which preclude them driving,

those who cannot afford a car, not to mention those who simply don’t care to spend so much of their

1 One Man’s Meat


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lives behind a wheel. All of these people are seen and treated in our society, in most places, as less than

fully mature citizens.

But single-use zoning has not just served to enshrine the automobile as the sine qua non of American life

by putting everything driving distance from everything else: it has also been one of the greatest factors

in the ever-increasing segregation of our population. Now, we’re used to thinking of segregation

specifically in terms of racial segregation, and that’s a critical part of the postwar history of

development. National decisions such as the American government's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956

aided and abetted white flight from cities, as middle class white families moved to newer suburban

developments. This white flight was fuelled by the glowing embers of racial fears of the African

American other, who had been delivered from the practices of redlining and exclusion; this racial fear

was fanned into flame in northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland by an influx of African

Americans from the south, arriving to look for work and a better life for their families; this flame grew to

become an inferno as realtors’ wicked practices of blockbusting, which preyed on white residents’ fears,

undermined any dim hopes of integrated and peaceful neighborhoods. We must be clear that our

decisions about the built environment aided and abetted this dynamic – while they did not directly

cause it, they certainly created the conditions of possibility for the racial segregation which we see in

America today.

But our patterns of development have also, in a more direct and intentional way, created segregation

along other lines as well. [X6] Single-use zoning segregates the population by age and income groups.

Subdivisions and other single-use developments are now zoned, developed and marketed according to

socio-economic standing, from the very wealthy to lower income populations. This is achieved, in part,

by segregating housing types from each other: and so you will have pods of apartments, townhomes,

condominiums, duplexes, and single-family homes, with further division of single-family homes

according to price point. Of course, this means that it is virtually impossible for individuals or families to

remain in a single community for any length of time as they move from being single to being a young

couple to having children to being empty nesters to being elderly and possibly in need of care. And so

you have segregation according to wealth, age and family status, as well as race.

This was the sort of area that I grew up in, and the sort of cultural reality that I encountered in St.

Joseph. But it was also while I was there in St. Joe that I became familiar with The New Urbanism as a

movement in urban planning and architecture. It is a movement that is working to restore traditional

neighborhood design to planners’ portfolios. They champion desirable, vital, livable places over the ways

that we have become accustomed to living.

[X7]But those who are only familiar with The New Urbanism through the development in Florida of the

Seaside community (where the Truman Show was filmed) or, also in Florida, the Disney-funded

Celebration community, might think that The New Urbanism is an exercise in nostalgia, of retro design,

intended for the wealthy who might like to manufacture a bit of community, within safe bounds. If that

were all that it is, it would not be morally serious, and it would be a target for our criticism. But I’m

suggesting here today that there are actually very good reasons why the church might profitably attend

to this discourse. The core insights of the movement come from earlier wisdom about the shape of


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towns and cities, and found a particularly important precursor in the grass roots, organic, neighborhood

organizing work of Jane Jacobs in New York in the 1960s. (I even have a sign on my office door: WWJJD?

What would Jane Jacobs do?)

[X8] The first thing worth mentioning is that The New Urbanism, or urbanism generally, is about form,

not style: there are reasons why older styles might be more livable, sustainable and energy efficient –

more so than, say, Brutalist architecture. But good urbanist form can be achieved with postmodern

architecture as well. It’s not about cute nostalgic escape. The key is making the built environment

hospitable for people, rather than being fit primarily for cars; that’s a matter of form, not style.

There are ten principles of The New Urbanism2; I’d like to introduce each one briefly and then suggest

one particular way of seeing that it suggests for the church in its engagement with the built

environment.

1) Walkability [X9]

a) Most things are within a 10-minute walk from home and work (density); this is the

pedestrian shed – those elements of life which can be accessed in a relatively brief walk,

rather than having to drive. (It’s a shed in a way analogous to a watershed.)

b) A community which features pedestrian friendly street design, including having buildings

close to the street; the fronts of houses having windows, doors and porches; garages and

parking lots hidden or at the rear of the house; and narrow, slower-speed streets.)

c) They even have a diagnostic tool available online at walkscore.com: put in your address and

it will give you a number out of 100 to gauge how walkable your neighborhood is. Where we

sit right now scores an 86. Where I grew up scored a 6. Where I served in Saint Joseph was a

55.

2) Connectivity [X10]

a) Interconnected street grid network that disperses traffic and eases walking (as opposed to

pods and arterial streets)

b) a hierarchy of boulevards, narrower streets and alleys

c) a high quality pedestrian network and public realm makes walking desirable.

3) Mixed-use & diverse [X11]

a) Neighborhoods should feature a mix of shops, offices, apartments and homes nearby to

each other – within blocks, and even within buildings.

b) Neighborhoods should also be such that they can be used and enjoyed by a diversity of

people, across ages, income levels, cultures and races.

4) Mixed housing

a) A good neighborhood should feature a range of types, sizes, and prices in closer proximity to

each other than is currently the case.

5) Quality architecture and urban design [X12]

a) The New Urbanism places an emphasis on aesthetics, human comfort, and creating a sense

of place; Special placement of civic uses and sites within community is important.

2 From newurbanism.org


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b) Human scale architecture & beautiful surroundings nourish the human spirit.

6) Traditional neighborhood structure

a) Discernable center and edge b) Public space at center c) Importance of quality public realm; public open space designed as civic art d) Contains a range of uses and densities within 10-minute walk e) Transect planning: A transect is a cut or a path through part of the natural environment

showing a range of different habitats. Biologists and ecologists use transects to study the many symbiotic elements that contribute to habitats where certain plants and animals thrive. Using the natural transect as an analogy, urbanists have begun to see healthy patterns of human settlement in terms of a transect too. Highest densities at town center; progressively less dense towards the edge. The transect is an analytical system that conceptualizes mutually reinforcing elements, creating a series of specific natural habitats and/or urban lifestyle settings. The Transect integrates environmental methodology for habitat assessment with zoning methodology for community design. The professional boundary between the natural and man-made disappears, enabling environmentalists to assess the design of the human habitat and the urbanists to support the viability of nature. This urban-to-rural transect hierarchy has appropriate building and street types for each area along the continuum.

7) Increased density [X13]

a) More buildings, residences, shops, and services closer together for ease of walking, to

enable a more efficient use of services and resources, and to create a more convenient,

enjoyable place to live.

b) New Urbanism design principles are applied at the full range of densities from small towns,

to large cities

8) Smart transportation

a) A network of high-quality trains connecting cities, towns, and neighborhoods together

b) Pedestrian-friendly design that encourages a greater use of bicycles, rollerblades, scooters,

and walking as daily transportation

9) Sustainability

a) Minimal environmental impact of development and its operations

b) -Eco-friendly technologies, respect for ecology and value of natural systems

c) -Energy efficiency

d) -Less use of finite fuels

e) -More local production

f) -More walking, less driving

g) BTW, what is the greenest community in America? Anyone care to take a guess? It is New

York City – far and away. On a per capita basis, particularly when it comes to burning fossil

fuels (i.e. gasoline), New Yorkers use far less than other Americans. Average New Yorker

generates 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases every year, while the average American

generates 24.5. (David Owen, Green Metropolis, 2009)


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10) Quality of life

Taken together these add up to a high quality of life well worth living, and create places that

enrich, uplift, and inspire the human spirit.

Questions of walkability and livability are broad-based issues, applicable to people across communities.

And so, in what follows, I’d like to focus these ten principles on one particular issue that that priest in

Honduras raised for me, that is, walking in the neighborhood, and in the process show how this is a

valuable resource to the church in thinking about the built environment. This is a question of quality of

life for people, not least those folks who cannot or will not drive, and yet who are every bit a part of our

world and worthy of dignity and respect.

Walkability is, of course, predicated on pedestrian safety. First, we need to be clear just how dangerous

it is to be a pedestrian in much of the United States. And that danger is by and large a matter of design,

as we have designed our built environment around cars, to allow them to travel unimpeded at high

speeds, and have not designed them to be particularly appealing or safe for pedestrians.

Not that it’s particularly safe to be driving, either. Let’s also be clear just how unsafe driving is: over the

past 25 years, more people have been killed in auto accidents in America than American soldiers have

been killed in combat since 1775: that’s roughly 850,000 people, a little larger than the population of

Indianapolis. Chew on that for a while.

And yet in terms of the rate of casualties, it is far more dangerous to be a pedestrian: when you

compare apples-to-apples, on a strict per capita basis, you are far more likely to be killed as a pedestrian

than driving in a car. (The way they calculate this to put the two on a par is to calculate the rate of

death per 100 million trips.) And the deaths are considerable. From the ten years 1994-2003, 51,989

pedestrians have died on U.S. streets.3 There continue to be roughly 4000 to 4500 pedestrian fatalities

every year; senior citizens, African-Americans and Latinos are routinely disproportionately represented

in these numbers. We can put that number of fatalities in perspective by noticing that, in 2010,

residential fires killed roughly 2600 people – and yet we work strenuously to improve fire safety.

So how do we work towards pedestrian safety? There are any number of pedestrian-oriented

interventions which we can make: don’t cross in the middle of the street, don’t cross against the light,

look both ways, and so forth. But the principles of the New Urbanism help us to see that our greatest

interventions need to be at the level of design and the built environment, to allow walking to be a safe

and appealing option for people.

So what are the design elements of pedestrian safety?

[X15] First, automobile speed is critical. As you can see, if a vehicle going 20 miles an hour strikes a

pedestrian, there is a 5% chance of death; but if you double that speed, the chance of fatality goes up to

around 85%. It is an exponential increase. And so keeping vehicle speeds down in areas with pedestrians

is critical – and this is very much a design issue.

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[X16] Charles Marohn is an urban planner and he talks about the differences between a street and a

road. A road, according to Marohn, is an efficient way to connect two places. It’s direct, it’s high speed,

it’s limited-access: it’s safe for cars. The interstate is an excellent example of a road. It gets you from A

to B.

[X17] Streets, on the other hand, are the shared connective tissue of a place; they are the paved spaces

between structures which knit them all together. They are shared among cars, pedestrians, bicyclists

and so forth. Streets form a network for getting around within a place. Marohn also calls it a “platform

for capturing value” – what he means is that a street is a desirable place to be located near to, and it

brings more value to the area than is actually invested in the infrastructure. Main Street right out here in

front of where we sit is a good example of a street.

[X18] The difficulty is that we have forgotten this distinction. Most of our development in the last 60

years has given us not streets or roads but stroads. A stroad is a street/road hybrid. Marohn calls it the

“futon of transportation alternatives.” “Where a futon is an uncomfortable couch that also serves as an

uncomfortable bed, a stroad is an auto corridor that does not move cars efficiently while simultaneously

providing little in the way of value capture.” He says that “anytime you are driving between 30 and 50

miles an hour, you are most likely on a stroad.” It’s become our default. He criticizes it in large part

because it is financially wasteful and unsustainable, but it is also certainly problematic from a safety

perspective too.

[X19] We can see some of these differences by looking not too far from where we sit. Main Street right

here is a street; but when it leaves Bexley and enters the Eastmoor neighborhood of Columbus, it

becomes a stroad. This is seen clearly in a number of features. For one, the speed limit changes from 25

miles per hour to 35.

[X20] On street parking is a valuable element of pedestrian safety both physically and psychologically. It

provides the safety of a buffer between the pedestrian and the moving traffic. Bexley has on street

parking on Main Street, except during rush hours. Eastmoor has no on street parking on Main.

What’s more, because there is no on street parking, that means that Main suddenly becomes a four lane

road with a turning lane in the middle. A wider road, especially with multiple lanes, is a psychological

and visual cue to people that they can drive faster. The converse is also true: narrower streets cause

people to drive more slowly. Especially in residential areas, this is crucial. As architect and New Urbanist

Peter Calthorpe puts it, by focusing entirely on fast efficient movement of automobiles, we have

changed streets into a “utility for cars”, rather than (as I would put it) the shared connective tissue of a

place. And this single minded focus on speed and efficiency is dangerous.

But the cue for faster speed is found in more than just the wider street, the more lanes, the speed limit:

it is found also in how the buildings and street features occupy the space as well. As you go further east

on Main, you find the tress are much smaller. The size of the trees out in front here and all along Main in

Bexley provide almost a tunnel effect: they provide visual edges to the street, causing it to seem better

defined and narrower. Further east in Eastmoor, there are trees but they are uniformly much smaller,

much less noticeable, provide far less of a cue that there is a sharp edge to the street. On top of that, as


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you go further east buildings are set farther and farther back from the street to allow parking in front,

and there are more gaps to allow parking alongside buildings, and so you lose a continuous streetwall to

provide a visual definition to the street – with, again, the effect of making the streets seem wider and

faster.

[X21] Another element of pedestrian safety is curb turning radius. The curb radius is found by measuring

the curve of the sidewalk as one segment of a circle. If you were to complete the circle and then find the

radius, you would have the curb radius. Put briefly, the smaller the radius, the more a car is forced to

slow down to make a turn. Most residential curb radii are about eight feet. You pull up, come to a stop,

and then make a turn. By contrast, in more recent development curb radii of around 25 feet and larger

have become fairly standard. The purpose of a large curb radius is to allow cars to make a turn without

having to slow down as much. This is doubly dangerous for pedestrians: it means cars travelling faster,

but it also means that streets are wider, there is more street to cross. A two lane street with an eight

foot curb radius gives a forty-two foot pedestrian crossing; a two lane street with a 25 foot turning

radius creates a crossing distance of around 66 feet. Streets with multiple lanes create an even wider

crossing distance.4

[X22] One final crucial factor in pedestrian safety, related to automobile speed, is the presence of

stoplights and the length of blocks. Having more stoplights means not only that cars will be stopping

more frequently and as a result, getting ready to stop more frequently, it also means that you have

more crosswalks, more dedicated places where pedestrians can get from one side of the street to

another. As pedestrians, our desire is to move fairly efficiently. Walking a reasonable distance to a

crosswalk is no problem, but when the crosswalks are at a great distance to each other, we’ll tend to

want to cross in the middle of the street, which is terribly unsafe, putting vulnerable walkers amid fast-

moving vehicles. And we need to be clear this is more a matter of poor design than it is simply

pedestrians carelessly flouting rules.

To give an example, a couple of years ago in Cobb County Georgia, Raquel Nelson and her three children

were taking the bus home to their apartment from a shopping trip to Wal-Mart. [X23] The bus stop was

just outside their apartment complex, but across four lanes of traffic and a turning lane. They could

easily see their home from the bus stop. But in order to use the cross walk, she would have had to walk

3/10 of a mile in one direction, cross, and walk back the same 3/10 of a mile. It had been a long day. It

was late. And so just like most of the rest of the bus riders who had been dropped off, she and her

children crossed in the middle of the road, trying to get home. They had crossed halfway and were

waiting in the median strip of the highway, when two of her kids sensed an opening in traffic and started

to run. But there was a van they didn’t see which ended up hitting her four year old son, A.J. He later

died of his injuries in the hospital.

I might just say that in the event, the driver was found and arrested. He admitted to having been

drinking and using prescription pain killers earlier that day. He was sentenced to six months in prison.

Raquel Nelson, the mother, was brought to court too. She was convicted of reckless conduct, improperly

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crossing a roadway, and second-degree vehicular homicide. She was sentenced to thirty six months in

prison. That’s right: 36 months in prison for what is essentially the crime of being a pedestrian. And

although she was eventually given probation, we need to be clear that this tragedy was primarily the

fault of very bad design of the built environment.

Yet we find the same situation here along Main Street in Eastmoor. Where in Bexley there are ten sets

of stoplights and crosswalks, over a comparable stretch of Main Street in Eastmoor, there are only four.

And yet you have no lack of pedestrians in Eastmoor, from people who take the bus to work, to children

walking to school, to people socializing near one of the shops or convenience stores. Naturally they’ll

have to cross the street, and this often means needing to time the traffic and cross between lights

rather than walking to a distant crosswalk. Given that it is a more working class and working poor

neighborhood, you have relatively more people who walk not as an option but simply out of necessity.

But they are measurably, statistically less safe walking on those streets.

Now, I admit these sorts of facts and figures might not seem centrally important for theological

educators and Christian leaders – this sort of thing has never been a fixed part of any curriculum I know

of. But I look at a turning radius or a crosswalk and I see the reality of human vulnerability in the face of

our efforts to master our environment. We have enshrined in concrete a good bit of the tragic nature of

our existence, and yet we can’t help missing that one segment of the population inevitably ends up

paying a disproportionate price.

[X24] I’d like to leave us with one hauntingly bad example of design, not far from here. This is the

parking lot of a typical big box discount retailer, east of us on Main Street, in the town of Whitehall. This

is a very busy store, with both groceries and general items for sale. The clientele mirrors the area the

store is found in: largely working class and working poor; shoppers are black, white, some Latino. There

is a bus stop out on Main Street, which is well used. There is a mostly adequate cross walk to get from

one side of the street to the other. But compared with other big box stores in other neighborhoods,

there is a disproportionately large percentage of customers here who take the bus. Now if we look

closely at this overview, we will see that the bus stops are here. Looking at it, you would most naturally

think that the best way to walk from the bus stop to the store is simply along this route, here, to just

walk along the curb line. Indeed, the sidewalk almost seems to suggest as much – but then it stops

abruptly. Note the very wide curb radius here – traffic doesn’t need to slow down much if it is making a

right turn into the parking lot. The actual way to get from the bus stop to the entrance to the store is by

walking back the way you have come and crossing another street. The traffic entering here on this street

does not need to stop as it comes in except to yield to people walking on the sidewalk. So you walk

along here to get to the store, and then you arrive at: another street to cross. Here again, notice the

very large curb radius – this is meant to be taken at a good speed. Add to that the fact that incoming

traffic from Main Street does not need to stop, there’s no stop sign here, and you’ve got a fairly

dangerous situation. So walkers scurry across these lanes, cut across the median strip here, cross this

next lane in the parking lot, and then they finally arrive at a sidewalk that cuts through the rest of the

parking lot to get to the entrance to the store. Now, it turns out that whoever designed this site thought

of pedestrians as basically like cars – that is, a little extra distance is no big deal. And so it moves walkers

in a very unrealistic way towards the store. Even when you arrive at the front of the store, you need to


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walk back east to get to the actual entrance. So it is commonly the case that pedestrians will actually

just walk the much more direct route from the bus stop to the store rather than taking the sidewalk

which is provided, and this very often involves walking on the access street, sometimes with children

and full shopping carts. This is a thoughtlessly designed and unsafe site, but is not wholly different than

how we have designed and executed most of the built environment in recent years. We have privileged

cars and drivers over pedestrians, and we have decreased livability and sustainability overall.

[X25] So let me close by drawing together the concepts of parish and pedestrian shed by suggesting that

familiarity with urbanism can be one valuable tool for church leaders. It can help us to see our

neighborhoods with different eyes, attuned to the shape of the built environment; it can help us to see

the place we’re planted and called to love and serve. We can help others to see, analyze and value their

built environment in this way. We can advocate for better neighborhoods, whether our own immediate

neighborhood or others nearby; this can give us a valuable tool for getting involved in our communities

in a different way, too, and have informed input on municipal conversations. Plus, as Bill Sachs and I

were discussing on Monday, this also gives us tools for understanding issues that matter to a broader

community – atheists, agnostics, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and so forth can come together to

address design matters in the built environment, particularly those related to safety. To be able to

analyze the built environment in this way and to see alternatives can also help you to see the challenges

for creating genuine community in your neighborhood. Furthermore, in congregational life, to have

familiarity with these concepts and access to specialists in this area can help leaders to make good

decisions about facilities, both in their present form and if it comes time to develop a new site.

So, finally, I would just leave you with this: You can’t love people without caring about the built

environment. As Christians, we have a fairly well-elaborated account of what the human is for – moreso

than property developers considered as a class, for example – and so this sort of focused attention to

the built environment (which is every bit a part of God’s creation as a tree or a mountain) is a fitting way

of working out this love along very concrete lines (if you’ll pardon the pun). And so it is a matter, in the

end, of attending to the ecology of the human creature, and how it helps her attend to God and her

neighbor.

Traversing the Kingdom of God on Foot: Pedestrian Shed and Parish

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