Unhealthy Streets Cause Social Isolation and Community Disintegration

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. According to this definition, we have one final diagnosis to make. We know that when streets are made bigger and faster in the middle of a community, local residents no longer can comfortably and safely get to shops, schools, parks, and other places in their social network. As traffic volumes increase, social contact, and inevitably, social networks, crumble. A significant amount of research substantiates the connection between the deterioration of social support networks and the development of a range of physical and psychological diseases and illnesses.

While streets serve to help us travel to where we need to go, more and more they have become barriers within our communities. The community of Oak Park, for instance, currently struggles to reconnect communities severed from one another by the construction of the Eisenhower Expressway. Parents fear allowing their children to walk or bike across the streets that intersect the expressway because of narrow sidewalks and traffic speeding on and off the ramps. So the children are driven or take the bus where once they might have walked or ridden their bicycles.

In addition, people tend to stay on their own side of the barrier, and the community suffers. It is not just expressways that have this effect, either. Every community in Chicagoland has high-speed, high-traffic streets that act as barriers to healthy social interaction. Furthermore, many new developments feature cul-de-sacs or dead-end streets, which force people to drive to destinations a mere half-mile away.

Unhealthy streets clogged with traffic reduce the use of residential streets as play areas for children. Unhealthy streets replace lively, pleasant, walkable, human-scaled communities with low-density, sprawled-out environments designed for getting elsewhere as fast as possible. With wide streets devoted to car traffic and vast seas of asphalt devoted to parking, our daily destinations are placed increasingly out of reach of our feet. Space for social interaction is dispersed, inhibiting the informal social contacts that bind us all together.