Thoughts from a strip-mall lunch

I, for better or worse, work in suburbia. Right in the heart of it too, flanked on all sides by highways, a number of strip malls, two "real" malls, and a handful of office towers, condo complexes and post WWII-era neighborhoods with no sidewalks. On my lunch break I like to walk across the street and get a sandwich, which is about as close to experiencing the landscape first hand as one can get here.

As I walked across the street (although first cutting through the lawn since there's no good way to walk away from the office unless you favor walking down the street), across a baren, slowly-dying median, and finally across a few hundred yards of parking lot, it ocurred to me just how sad this whole place is. It's an environment completely designed for the car. There is no sense at all of human scale. Nothing is anywhere near feeling "life sized". We've traded in any sense of place in exchange for easy access and free parking. It's pretty sad.

Moments like this always make me wonder who agreed to this in the first place. When did we all decide that the model for a good city should be one in which it's only practical to experience it from the car?