Sprawling Apathy
There are many well-documented advantages to living in a city. There’s more to do, for one, as compared to a small town that has nothing but a bar and a handful of strip malls. It’s easier to stay physically active when you live in a walkable neighborhood, which has all sorts of health benefits. It’s even considered more ecologically friendly to live in a city, in large part because the increased density of an urban area reduces emissions from transportation.
Conversely, suburbs and rural areas hold many well-documented disadvantages. There tend to be fewer “third places” at which people can gather. A “pub crawl”, or a night at a single bar, is less enjoyable when somebody needs to be the designated driver and that person cannot drink. (In theory, of course - I am a teetotaler.) Car dependency and urban sprawl is bad for the environment considering that 28 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, as of 2024, come from personal vehicles.
All of these pros and cons are widely known and frequently talked about in any discourse on city planning. I don’t mean to minimize any of these issues, but a recent Reddit post on r/SuburbanHell felt topical and worth looking into.
Simply put: It’s a lot harder to organize a protest in car-dependent areas.
A Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels, Belgium from 2020. Image taken from the Global Times website.
Take a look at the picture above. It’s from the racial justice protests of 2020, during which some of the demonstrators in Belgium called for statues of King Leopold II to be taken down. This effort was successful, by the way. That’s Exhibit #547 in why protests are far more effective in other countries besides the United States. But have you ever stopped to wonder why that is?
It’s easy enough to blame the American system of government, and you’re not wrong to think that. This is the same government, after all, that did not pass gun control even after the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And now, while Donald Trump and Elon Musk are robbing the place blind, many people from elsewhere in the world have been expressing their shock that Americans are not in the streets like the French would be.
To be clear, there have been protests. You could argue (and I would agree) that the protests are not nearly so massive as would be warranted given the current situation. But they exist, even if the mainstream media won’t cover them. Political apathy certainly exists here, but I would argue that’s not the only factor leading to the relatively small scale of these demonstrations.
Going back to the example of Belgium, their cities are far more compact and walkable - at least, major cities like Antwerp and Brussels. Even in times when people aren’t protesting, it’s a lot easier to meet up with friends when nobody has to drive. It’s a lot easier to bring lots of people together in one space at one time. Therefore, it is far more feasible to hold a massive protest.
Meanwhile, let’s look at the States. I live in Greater Boston, a city that is relatively walkable but still has plenty of cars. If I were to attend a demonstration at Boston Common today, I could take the MBTA subway downtown to Arlington Station and get off there, then join the crowd. But the T’s so damn slow that it’d take 45 minutes to get there.
Stock image of urban sprawl in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas, USA. Most people here don’t interact very much. Image taken from Dreamstime.
If you’re driving to the protest, that’s another story entirely. You need everyone to be able to park their car nearby, and yet most parking garages have only hundreds of spaces. To get the sort of crowd that might actually be noticed by those in power (which is, you know, the whole point of a protest), you’d need thousands of people in the streets, and not all of them live within walking or transit distance. This makes it far more difficult to hold a protest of sufficient size, especially given that most US cities are not like Boston.
This infrastructure-induced atomization is not an accident, either. Rather, there’s plenty of evidence, if you know where to look, that car dependency leads to a lack of societal solidarity and greater atomization, and that this was an intentional decision.
We’re constantly told that the United States is polarized along racial lines, and that systemic racism is present in many areas of public policy. This is true. But in some of America’s most segregated cities, even the infrastructure is a reflection of this systemic racism.
Consider the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It collapsed last year, killing six people. To be clear, that was a tragic disaster that should have been avoided. However, as Common Dreams wrote at the time, the bridge was built along the Interstate Highway system so that people would not need to drive through the city of Baltimore. Additionally, other infrastructural investments could have better served Baltimore’s lower-income residents (a group that is predominantly African-American).
Take this screenshot from Google Maps. It’s out of date, of course, given that the bridge is no more. But you can clearly see that the road containing the bridge skips the city limits entirely, when it should have been just as easy for people to simply drive through Baltimore. In that case, the $141 million (nominal money in 1977 terms) spent to build the bridge could have been saved.
Google Maps screenshot of Baltimore, showing the Francis Scott Key Bridge selected. The bridge clearly goes around the city, avoiding it very intentionally.
This is hardly the only example of systemic racism in Baltimore, or even the most egregious. The Common Dreams article linked above states, for example, that there’s a twenty-year gap in life expectancy among the residents of the city’s poorest neighborhood and its richest. The latter neighborhood, Roland Park, is a well-known “streetcar suburb” often associated with white flight. I don’t have time to discuss its history in great detail; many scholars have studied this topic more than me. For these purposes, just know that it’s a major issue.
Baltimore is only one example, however. All over the United States, there exist cities zoned specifically so that African-Americans and white people rarely saw each other. Look up redlining - it’s a thing.
It’s been said to death before, but ignorance is one of the most dangerous forces in this world. It was a lot harder for white people to empathize with African-Americans if they didn’t live alongside the latter group. And indeed, Baltimore (and many other major US cities) were designed so that white people did not have to live alongside African-Americans.
So if you’re reading this from somewhere other than the United States, and you’re going to claim that Americans don’t protest because we’re fat and lazy, or apathetic, or that lots of us support what’s going on…well, you’re partially right. Individual choices are at fault, at least to some extent.
But to blame it solely on one of these factors misses the bigger picture. It misses the way cities were built for the car (or rather, bulldozed for the car), making it more difficult for people to gather in large enough numbers for a protest. It also misses the way our cities were designed in the first place to reduce solidarity between different racial groups.
We do not, of course, need to accept that the past is destiny. But to discount the past as a reason for the woes of the present is equally foolish.
