This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Why Can?t We Create Brand New Walkable Communities""

A walkable street in Washington, DC. Image © <a href='https://www.flickr.com/photos/dewita-soeharjono/4558849693'>Flickr user dewita-soeharjono</a> licensed under <a href='https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/'>CC BY 2.0</a>

This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Why Can?t We Create Brand New Walkable Communities""I have lived in neighborhoods where you can walk around, to a store, a movie, a restaurant, for 40 years, counting my college days. I grew up in a ranch house with a driveway, but came to adulthood in foot-based parts of cities.Others have also rediscovered the joys and benefits of walkable places. They have done this first in a trickle, then in a flood. While in total numbers it may still be a minority taste, it?s a fashionable taste now, one heralded in movies and TV shows. Fewer people aspire to live in the big house with the three-car garage.Philip Langdon has written a book, Within Walking Distance: Creating Livable Communities For All (Island Press 2017), that bores down into this trend, and puts some markers on the choices involved. Because there are choices. While on a gross level urbanism is back, on the street level someone decides whether it is small stores or chains, bike paths or parking spaces, small entrepreneurs or moneyed corpora...