Man about Towns - Dan Burden promotes Walk-able communities

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Tony Hiss

Dan Burden helps communities find their hearts.

The spring night is dark; sudden rain lashes the windshield of the car; dense fog comes and goes, swirling trickily up from nowhere. For almost an hour it is hard to see if. the slick, twisty mountain road ahead has any plan to its wanderings, any destination at all. At the wheel, Dan Burden--whom one of his clients calls "the Johnny Appleseed of livable communities"-drives forward as confidently as if he were entering his own neighborhood, and talks about his work and his vision of the slowly emerging, post-sprawl America.

Burden's enthusiasm for the 21st-century landscape ahead is strong and steadfast. He seems already a resident of a future that, for many, still only occasionally flickers into sight. People's optimism about improving their communities often wavers when they talk about the clutter, confusion, and congestion they see through their windshields. It falters again when they reach inside themselves to describe the absences sprawl imposes on their lives: It steals time, choice, and proximity to others--not just open space. We are not only farther away from schools and shops, from friends and neighbors, from fields and woods; more and more of each day is given over to a tense, effortful, unnourishing, and for now unavoidable in-between-ness. This townless, countryless, road-bound running around stretches us thin; our bodies are in motion-but what is there around us to anchor our hearts and minds?

In the Atlanta area, for instance--cited in a recent study by urban planners at Detroit's Wayne State University as the most grievously sprawled region in the country--many suburban commuters now spend more than three hours in traffic each weekday. Once home, they can't stop, except to switch hats, becoming family taxi drivers--fetching children and running errands. As Dan Burden often reminds people, the average American family, in Atlanta and nationally, makes 14 car trips a day

More and more time in the car, which at first seemed a small price to pay for pleasant suburban homes, becomes almost intolerable when it occupies up to 30 hours and requires some 90 drives each week. People are no longer driving, they're driven. More open space--25,000 square miles--got converted to urban uses between 1993 and 1997 than in the entire decade of the 1980s.

Under these circumstances, it's hard to stay focused on the genuine awakening that has paralleled this worsening of America. In the 1990s, new and newly rediscovered ways of building non-sprawl neighborhoods began to get more attention. They go by many names: smart growth, sustainable development, community building, town building, place-based conservation, community-based planning, livable communities, and the new urbanism.

Burden is part of the suddenly arrived profession that promotes these new kinds of communities. Perhaps half a dozen groups of itinerant designers and facilitators are now crisscrossing the country conducting workshops with local residents. They're exploring the possibilities of changing streets and buildings in ways that would add pleasure and reassurance to towns, making it easier for people to meet up with one another and stay in touch with each other's lives.

Four years ago, Burden set up a nonprofit called Walk-able Communities with his wife, Lys, who answers the phones at their home/office in Florida. Since then, he has worked with almost a thousand communities across 41 states, from small towns like Stevensville, Montana (population 1,000), to neighbor hoods in Honolulu, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, and Orlando.

Does a city become more lovable as it becomes more livable? Can we find a balance between cars and people? What about the even trickier balance between land and cars and people? Can developers and local officials move from blueprints to "greenprints," so that a town's growth plans add green space to people's lives, instead of taking it away? These are a few of the many questions that Burden tackles with his clients to help them fight sprawl from within.

These days the road is probably the only place where it's possible to have a long, contemplative chat with Burden. On his way to a town meeting in central California, we speak about the excitement of people who are ready to work together for change, and how a spark first ignited in him. After college and four years in the Navy, Burden, Lys (who'd been his high school sweetheart), and another couple spent three years bicycling from Alaska to Argentina. "The long trip south was when I first began to feel connected to life, and life processes," Burden says. "The big surprise was that, in every place we passed through, danger was always perceived as being elsewhere. Close by, but elsewhere. No matter what kind of community or what part of the countryside we landed in for the night--it could be prosperous and smiling, or desperately impoverished--kindly people, always aghast, invariably asked us the same two questions about where we'd come from and where we were headed: `You came through there? You're going there?'"