One of the big complaints of living in the suburbs is the mind-numbing sameness and lack of diversity in architecture. Built with economies of scale in mind, and maximization of profits for the developers, simplicity of both design and materials was the rule. While this arguably made a modern lifestyle affordable for millions of people, it comes with a cost of existing in a kind of artificial conformity that seems less than truly divine. What is Creator’s perspective on this “cookie-cutter” approach to everyday living?

As we indicated, the planning of a suburban housing tract is inherently a compromise in providing mass housing that is affordable to the masses while allowing the dwellings to be spread out enough to give people a sense of having their own little domain and relative privacy from the neighbors that is more difficult to achieve in high-rise buildings in the dense urban setting. This does not mean it is ideal. The ideal human lifestyle is living off of the land where people are dispersed as family units and extended family units living together, but dispersed in a way that each has a large tract of land that can be used to cultivate crops and raise livestock to provide for their own food so there is less need for outside goods and services. This lifestyle of self-containment and self-sufficiency is tried and true and has been done for many, many thousands of years by groups of people all over the world. Modern living is still an ongoing experiment and was inspired by the interlopers to draw people into dense urban centers for reasons of power and control more so than for an actual benefit, let alone an improvement in the living environment per se. City living can be exciting, especially for the young; it provides opportunities to meet many others, for example; it provides a nexus of wage earners and thus will support a high density of goods and services being close at hand, particularly if most people rely on public transportation. There will need to be many shops, restaurants, and service centers of many kinds within walking distance. The large population also can support cultural institutions quite handily; even if these must be subsidized to some extent through taxes, the population as a whole is sufficient to pay for such luxuries so there can be a high quality of life from a variety of standpoints. This comes at a cost of being more disconnected from nature, which is a major liability, and it also reduces privacy and safety, both, in terms of being around so many potential troublemakers who may use the anonymity of city living and its high density to great advantage in carrying out lives of crime.