north

In a fantastic rented Dodge Caliber we headed out in the late morning for northern Arizona to maybe see The Grand Canyon. As you drive north from Phoenix on Rte 17 there is an amazing array of planned communities. These are called planned communities by their developers and people holding the bag for thousands of particle board buildings that they are hoping to sell to families getting squeezed out the sides of other cities who need a place to live. Most people would not think of them as planned communities, because the only thing you can plan on is that your house will be colored brown, will be covered by desert dust storms frequently and you will need an oil change in your Honda CR-V once a month because you are driving almost 70 miles round trip to your job in Phoenix. These nests for future humans have their Polo outlets pre-installed across the highway (no you can’t walk or bike to the outlets). It is a tragedy that these towns are being “planned” around services (like buying madras shorts and wainscoting paneling for your shed) that are exclusively offered by national and international corporations. I could be wrong, because you can’t see into the towns from the highway of course, so maybe I’ll go check it out in the next couple days.

Further up the road there’s a different type of plan going on at a place called Arcosanti. It’s a cultish scientific community again off the highway, but I think the overall plan is to have a city of 5000 people in one space that’s entirely mixed use and low-impact. They have done an impressive amount of building in an unimpressive 37 year time-span. Everything that’s there looks cool. We’ll have to take the tour at some point.

There’s an old time town called Jerome that’s home to 450 people and serves as a very cool tourist site by day as it sits about a thousand feet above the Valley Verde below on some very steep mountainsides. There are just a couple of restaurants and art galleries up there now, but I guess it used to be a miner’s town.