As an architecture professor at UVU, I witnessed how a recent campus shooting created waves of distress in our community. A couple of weeks later, another attack in a Michigan church affected me even more personally as I pictured my own family in those pews.
These events are symptoms of a broader sickness as political discourse collapses into hostility. Extremist rhetoric fills our public square, and hate groups are increasingly comfortable expressing their views. Increasingly polarized elected officials deepen divisions by deflecting blame instead of reflecting on their own words and policies.
Commentators often cite gun control and social media as causes of our fractured civic life. These are critical issues that deserve careful deliberation, but there is a deeper structural issue that rarely enters the conversation: the way we’ve built our cities.
For the past century, the American landscape has been shaped by the ideals of modernist architecture and planning. After World War II, architects and planners embraced a vision of the “modern city.” Le Corbusier, a leading figure of the movement, promoted the strict separation of living, working, shopping and recreation, envisioning: “The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction … my secretary will live 30 miles away, in the other direction ... We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline.”
The United States embraced this vision with zeal. Postwar suburban development, reinforced by zoning laws and government incentives, remade our cities into autocentric landscapes. Walkable streets gave way to highways, parking lots and strip malls. Generations of inherited knowledge about human-scale building and traditional neighborhood design was abandoned in favor of what was celebrated as “progress.” But decades later, the costs are painfully clear. Our built environment is resource-intensive, environmentally destructive and socially isolating.
Consider the daily life of the average American. We wake up, drive to work and return home with little interaction outside our immediate circle. Our neighborhoods are often segregated by income, race and age, physically entrenching us in communities where our neighbors tend to look, think and vote like us.
Investment has shifted from public to private space. We pour money into highways and homes while parks, plazas and civic buildings deteriorate. Each generation raised in single-family subdivisions grows more accustomed to solitude as the spaces where empathy could grow disappear.
Contrast this with an architecture of community. In traditional neighborhoods built before modernist planning, homes stood within walking distance of markets, schools and places of worship. Blocks included mixed housing types: mansions and apartments, row houses and cottages, all in close proximity. Such neighborhoods naturally fostered economic and cultural diversity, which in turn breeds empathy. It is harder to demonize a group of people you encounter daily at the bakery, on the sidewalk or in church.
Walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods may not single-handedly eliminate violence or polarization, but they create conditions for empathy, understanding and civic responsibility to grow. They counteract the loneliness and alienation that have become commonplace in our sprawling suburbs.
The connection between urban design and civic life is not speculative. By building cities around cars rather than people, we’ve engineered isolation. We’ve replaced civic life with private life and diversity with homogeneity. We should not be surprised that this has fed political polarization and made violence feel like a constant reality.
We need a new civic vision. Developers and governments must be held accountable for how they create communities. Zoning codes need reform to allow and prioritize walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. And as individuals, we must lobby for walkability and invest in the public realm, including the parks, squares and sidewalks that bind us together.
We must physically build the civility we want to see in our politics. When we live alongside people different from us, maybe then we will share spaces that require cooperation and mutual respect, where empathy may follow. Maybe then we will elect leaders less interested in division and more committed to unity.
Only then will violence slow and schools and churches will feel safe again. Only then can our children grow up in a society that is less fractured, less fearful and more humane.