I saw a great film the other night about how to save small towns. Entitled “Save our Land; Save our Town, the message was kind of ironic because in many ways it said the solution was back to the future.

It showed how some developers in the U.S. were starting to build residential developments modeled after small town America (and Canada) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You know the kind of towns. Big two-storey family homes with expansive porches and verandas in the front, small garages in the back and tree-lined streets or boulevards in front where children played and adults socialized.

This model was no mirage. You can still see remnants of it in the Heritage Hill neighbourhood in Cranbrook and in the older parts of most large Canadian cities. When I lived in the Old Strathcona neighbourhood in Edmonton with my family almost 20 years ago I found out just how wonderful these old neighbourhoods can be.

I used to walk home from work across the High Level Bridge, the kids walked to school and the good wife walked to Safeway just a short block from our modest bungalow. There were upscale restaurants, book stores, pubs and fashion boutiques on Whyte Avenue just a few blocks away and when Bob Dylan played the Jubilee Theatre we walked over to the concert as I did to hear Preston Manning speak at the Butterdome at the U of A campus. And when I wanted to see Wayne Gretzky play I walked over to the University again and caught the subway to the Colliseum. I bet it didn’t take 20 minutes.

City planners have a term for this kind of living. They call it “density,” and trust me it’s good. I’m not ordinarily a city kind of guy, but if Edmonton had mountains I’d still be living there now.

But getting back to Save our Land; Save our Town, the film also chronicled The Great Exodus when city dwellers by the million fled their wonderful old, highly functional neighbourhoods close to the city core for homes made of “ticky tacky,” as Pete Seeger so wonderfully sang of back in the 50’s, a two-car garage and a postage stamp patch of lawn to obsess over on the weekends after they’d washed the car.

As far as quality of life goes, it’s been downhill ever since.

The film interviewed suburbanites and asked them what they didn’t like about their new lifestyles. Universally the answer was the same. In order to do anything from buying a loaf of bread, to attending school to going out for dinner and a drink it was necessary to jump into the car and drive for 20 minutes because suburbia, unlike those cozy neighbourhoods they’d left behind in the dying city core, lacked the civilized necessities of life within easy walking distance of where people lived.

And the suburbs themselves were built on farmland and greenbelts that used to crowd the city boundaries but were now disappearing as rapidly as the more relaxed lifestyle people used to enjoy before they started spending hours of each day fighting traffic in their cars.

Crime poverty and urban blight took over in the old neighbourhoods left behind followed by factory closures, schools closing down, depopulation and entire blocks abandoned as is the case in so many American (and some Canadian) cities today.

Then the proverbial light went on in the minds of a new generation of planners and developers coming to the fore in recent years. They suddenly realized that far from being a bad thing, urban density is good. People like being close to other people if neighbourhoods are secure and crime-free. They like being close to services whether its schools, shopping or entertainment. And efficient public transit beats driving every day to work.

The developers also realized something else – it can be cheaper to build affordable and upscale housing near downtown when the land they’re buying has been abandoned – and therefore relatively cheap – but still has services in place. No more need to chew up farm land and green belts for suburbs an hour’s drive from town.

In other words they reinvented the wheel and it was good. Growth doesn’t always have to be external. It can be internal too and everyone can live happily ever after.

It’s worth thinking about.