Streets of El Paso

 If you've followed this blog you know I have a problem with the way we North Americans live on our land. We sprawl it, we mall it, we chew it up and move on to the next raw patch, then wreck that too. It's deep in our history, this relationship to the land. It's "property", so we can do whatever we like with it. We recently spent some time in El Paso Texas where the dominant reality is vast sprawl stretching along Interstate 10 for 25 miles, and of course the (even larger) city of Juarez, Chihuahua across the river.
You'd never know it from driving through on I-10 but El Paso once had a handsome downtown. It's still there, most of it. It's not used much. Like other American midsize cities, especially in the West, this is the atrophied core: a Central Business District no longer central to how the city (or Metropolitan Area) really functions.
It seems to me that central cities like this need to be revived, and not just as hipster havens. The sprawl-lands of El Paso echo with concrete sadness and alienation; a ruthless landscape of hucksterism. Sprawl proposes a relationship of people to land where land is the enemy, to be ruthlessly paved and subjected to the indignities of the most simpleminded, short-sighted capitalist practice. The waste, the waste.
I don't care if you're a Cruz Republican, or a Sanders Democrat-- don't you find the actual experience of American sprawl...dispiriting?
Downtown feels human in scale, humane, the possibility of discourse, exchanges, civic life exists here. The architecture and the scale allow you feel your own human dignity. I don't think shopping malls every allow anyone to feel that. Malls reduce us to infantilism. Big babies with credit cards.  In the malls we're just consumers. On the streets of a town or a city, we're citizens.