The disappearance of small town scale

There is an interesting article in the Arizona Daily Sun called "Building tensions: New stories show up in town - or over it." It's about over-development in Flagstaff, AZ. 

The writer Peter Friederici describes the greed of over-development and the destruction of quality of life in small towns. It's happening all over the United States. I read an article recently of how in Brooklyn and Long Island, the waterfront is being transformed and in that transformation, all of the history is being destroyed. Where factories and history covered the waterfront, there are endless new high rises and parks now, leaving no remnants of the history that built this country and New York.

In the Flagstaff article, Peter describes how certain heights of buildings take away from the scale of a town.  And he explains that the developers of these buildings are from far away places like Chicago and Georgia, they don't have to live in the world they have built and the world they have taken away from locals, those left to deal with the changes.

He talks about a book he is reading this summer called "A Pattern Language", by the architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues. It explains how to make architecture "humane."

From the book: “At three or four stories, one can still walk comfortably down to the street, and from a window you can still feel part of the street scene: you can see details in the street—the people, their faces, foliage, shops. From three stories you can yell out, and catch the attention of someone below. Above four stories these connections break down.”

I found the article interesting and the book sounds very interesting. There are no real solutions here, but it shows we are not alone when even the Desert Southwest is being over-built.