WHY should every American town and city look alikeugly?

WHY should every American town and city look alikeugly? Why should the entrance to every community be a hideous hodgepodge of garish lights, oversized billboards, tacky “franchise”, operations (which seek corporate identity not only by the sameness of their signs and electronic advertising, but by their very architecture), and asphalt deserts, also known as parking lots? Why should every town and city be an eyesore, a pocket of pollution, a noisy, traffic-clogged mess from which the residents flee at every opportunity?

The answer ought to be an obvious “they shouldn’t”—but then why are the things described so commonplace? Why is a place like Williamsburg possible only as a sealed-off historic capsule, and not as a living community? Why do we worry about the pleasant towns left in Virginia’s Piedmont, fearing that their future is also a neon-lit, gaudy, motorized nightmare of sameness?

Americans ought to ask themselves such questions every time they step outside of their doors. They ought to be so painfully aware of the ugliness, the jumble, the chaos that they are determined that it should be done away with.

BUT there are many citizens among us who neither see the visual devastation around them, nor care much if they do. They don’t know the difference: Hasn’t it always been this way?

As Robert Stipe of the University of North Carolina noted at a recent town planning conference held in Leesburg* there are indications that more and more Americans