Architecture critic Paul Goldberger is a walker. “There’s something very natural about walking through a dense downtown and going to a baseball game,” Goldberger told
KCUR radio, National Public Radio’s Kansas City affiliate.
Like most ambitious cities, Kansas City caters to the genus “walker.” You know the type: young, fit, newly urban, and self-involved. We’ve given them light rail, bicycle lanes, entertainment zones, soccer stadiums and, soon enough, unless common sense prevails, their own ballpark. The walkers prosper at the expense of the suburban genus “driver.”
Goldberger doesn’t understand the latter type. Walking through bustling streets, he tells us, “is very different from the sort of more suburban experience of coming in a car and parking and walking across acres of asphalt to go into something.” Watching the urban genus “walker” over the years, I am reminded more than a little of the “walkers” in the hit TV show The Walking Dead. Our zombies, like theirs, lack minds of their own, follow where led, make a lot of noise and are much too eager to infect others.
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