Catholic Land Use?

Since I’m spending this year outside of the city, I’m experiencing my first real dose of suburban living in several years. My wife and I, who have come to love New York’s public transportation system, are learning to depend on our car for even the most insignificant errands.  Even our dog, who is forced to spend his days alone in our back yard, is missing the sociability of canine urban life. In addition, and more relevant to this blog, I find suburban Catholicism to be a very strange animal. 

In my opinion, there appears to be a certain incompatibility between Catholicism and the suburban lifestyle. With its emphasis on collective worship, public engagement, and the social dimension of justice, Catholicism has always seemed to me to be most at home in the dense urban neighborhood or perhaps the small town or village. In particular, suburbanism’s elevation of the nuclear family and the private realm seem to me to be in deep tension with Catholicism’s more broadly communitarian impulse. 

There’s a large and influential body of architectural and planning literature concerning the ways in which land use decisions can facilitate or hinder the development of community.  The New Urbanists, in particular, have argued that suburban sprawl has a tendency to cut people off from one another, isolating us within our cars and inward-turned homes.  The culture of suburbia has always struck me as far more in tune with the individualized, inward-turned theology of evangelical Christianity, with its emphasis on developing a personal relationship with Christ.  This is a spiritual goal that it is perfectly possible to achieve within one’s own living room, perhaps in the loving glow of the televised evangelist.  It is at least arguable, then, that suburban sprawl is in some way harmful to Catholicism in its tendency to water down the communal bonds on which Catholic spirituality feeds. 

Assuming some affinity between Catholic culture and particular patterns of development, perhaps the Church should begin to address questions of land use in its social teaching.  After all, the Church has forcefully argued that certain systems of production (e.g., socialism, laissez faire capitalism) are incompatible with Catholic views on human flourishing.  Is it so far-fetched to think that certain ways of spatially organizing human communities might be similarly incompatible, or at least unhelpful?