Neo-traditional neighborhoods

In Pittsburgh there's an urban neighborhood called Squirrel Hill, a little Jewish community with a gridded street layout and a mix of residential and commercial ... you can walk a block and pick up a carton of milk or eggs without getting in a car. And there is a little old-fashioned hardware store there. I don't recall the name of the store but I remember its slogan: "if we don't have it, you don't need it."

I lived there as a grad student and enjoyed the combination of people and shops and pretty-good public transportation. Other than that I've lived in suburbs, so I could really appreciate the differences in character between them and the places I visited in both China and Japan.

Things seem to "work" in both places, but with fewer professional obligations in Japan I had more opportunities there to explore cities and towns of all shapes and sizes, urban and rural ... Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, Seto, Fujigaoka, Nagaoka, Bunsui, Washima, Izumozaki. And regardless of the size each felt safe, clean, and neat, and with uniformly good public transportation and a high quality of living. The socio-economic "band" in all places seemed narrow, i.e., the gap between the best-off and the worst-off.

What I found most surprising was the smaller towns in Japan. The word that comes to mind is "vibrant." Do these self-sufficient, full-of-life little communities still exist in the US? I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on cultural, social, political, or other pressures that have gotten us to where we are, but isn't there a growing consensus that many of our communities are alienating and isolating? Urban and regional planners have used the term "neo-traditional" to describe alternative, mixed-use communities that are more compact and that better support bicycling and walking and human interaction ... a sense of community.

This is what I saw in Japan. I was so impressed by the little town of Bunsui with a population of 16,000. I had an opportunity to visit one of the smaller elementary schools there and to talk with its principal, meet and interact with some of its students, and watch them rehearse on their traditional Japanese drums for an upcoming festival. I have no idea how they perform academically or on standardized tests, but I'll bet they excel. The kids, the teachers and the principal, the parents, the surrounding community ... all seem engaged and invested in these and other activities.

Every culture and community has its issues to work through and things to improve upon, and I'm sure Bunsui and these other cities and towns have theirs. But from at least a cursory look, there are a lot of very positive things happening there.