What Kevin Costner said

One of my favourite websites is George Monbiot's blog. He is a columnist with the Guardian.

His most recent entry, called Turning Estates into Villages, summarises particularly well the effect that our built environment has on us. He is right of course. You can see it every day. There is a direct relationship between the built environment and how many children you see playing, how many people walk to the shops or to visit their neighbours and also how many people choose to walk or cycle generally. Those places with wide, fast-moving roads have fewer people walking or cycling. This is nothing new of course. Look what happens when Rundle Street is closed during the Fringe.

When people campaign tirelessly to try and calm traffic, to try and have a school built within walking distance of where they live, to try and have roads narrowed and separate bike paths installed, it is not part of a war on motorists and it is not because they are trying to impose their own form of social engineering on everyone else. It is because these things work. They are connected. The taxes you pay can be used to fund any number of education campaigns about fitness and healthy eating but in the end, people are entirely rational and act in a way that makes perfect sense taking into account their surroundings.

As Kevin Costner said, before he went a bit bonkers and grew gills in that strange film with lots of water, "build it and they will come".

Streetfilms has made the point brilliantly (again) in their latest film about Copenhagen. This time they're describing how the city authorities have calmed traffic and made car-free public spaces.