How We Restore The American Village With Diane Alisa
Collage image of Diane Alisa, with photos of a bike, walking pedestrian sign, a lemon tree, and red/white/blue stars, the podcast icon for “economies” (a yellow star), and a ring of houses circling Diane’s photo. Text Reads “HOW WE RESTORE THE AMERICAN VILLAGE (WHY SUBURBIA IS FAILING US)” Diane Alisa This is How We Care Season 3
In this episode of This Is How We Care, I’m joined by Diane Alisa, author of “A Love Letter to Suburbia: How to Restore the American Village”, for a conversation that names what so many families feel, but haven’t had language for.
We explore how suburbia, car dependence, and zoning laws have shaped our experience of motherhood, fatherhood, childhood, community, and care itself. If you’ve ever wondered why:
Parenting feels isolating
Community feels hard to access
Children no longer roam and elders live alone
The “stay-at-home vs working parent” debate feels impossible
This episode holds the answers. In it we, discuss:
Why suburbia quietly dismantled the village (and our experience of trust and community)
How car-centric design impacts family life and mental health
The loss of shared wealth, skills, and multigenerational living
Why zoning laws matter more than we think
How neighbors—not corporations or politicians—are the key to rebuilding
community
To connect with Diane Alisa, check out her website, buy a copy of her book, and follow her on instagram.
For mentorship, coaching and strategic support as you rebuild community in your life, check out my 4-month 1:1 Mentorship program, “Revillage Your Life” and The Third Space, an online community of other “Revillagers” putting these ideas into practice, together.
TRANSCRIPT
Emily Race-Newmark (00:10)
Welcome to This Is How We Care, a podcast that imagines what kind of world our children want to inherit, and how we, the village raising them, can embody that world. I’m your host, Emily Race-Newmark.
What if the reason that families are feeling isolated, exhausted, and disconnected isn’t a personal failing, but rather the way that our neighborhoods are designed?
If you found yourself wondering where the village has gone or have dreamt about moving to a different country where the village culture is more intact, listen to this episode.
With Diane Alisa, we are looking at the role of suburban America, suburban design, in stripping away our community and village infrastructure how we can start to bring that back today.
Diane is a writer, a performer, and a community advocate, and the author of this book, “A Love Letter to Suburbia, How to Restore the American Village”.
For those who are watching this video, you can see that I’ve recorded many notes in this book because this is one of those resources that is packed filled with data and information, not only in how we got to the moment that we’re in, but how we move forward.
When I first came across Diane’s work, it was through Instagram and I was really intrigued to check out her book just because of the title itself. from my work in the world, I felt like there must be some overlap. However, I didn’t realize until reading this book how much the suburban infrastructure is at the root of our problems — and that is what Diane breaks down for us today.
Diane draws on her background in theater from Brigham Young University and years of storytelling across stage and page. She brings a clear, compelling voice to the urgent questions of how American communities can rebuild the social fabric that once sustained families.
Her writing blends research, history, and lived experience to illuminate the hidden costs of suburban design and profound human need for walkable, child-centric, multi-generational neighborhoods. Amen to that!
Through her essays, videos, and public engagement, Diane has become a leading voice in the movement to restore meaningful local connection and revive the village as essential infrastructure for modern family life.
I don’t think there’s much more to say here; I would love to just jump right into this conversation and let you hear from Diane herself. Let’s get into it.
Emily Race-Newmark (02:32)
I am beyond excited to introduce Diane and have this conversation. This is just as much as a conversation I want to have as I want to share. So thank you, Diane, for all the work you’re doing and the conversation we’re having today.
Diane Alisa (02:45)
Thank you, I’m super excited to be here.
Emily Race-Newmark (02:48)
I will give a quick shout out throughout this conversation towards a book you wrote that I can tell was truly a love letter because it felt like a pouring of facts, passion, love, I plan to gift this to many people in my life.
Diane Alisa (03:02)
It’s one of those things. I wanted people to have the same epiphany that I did, and that’s why that book exists. So I’m so happy you’re wanting to share it, because that’s exactly how I felt.
Emily Race-Newmark (03:08)
Yes, we will about that. For folks listening, the full title is A Love Letter to Suburbia, How to Restore the American Village. And for listeners who have been following along with me, my whole purpose in life has become revillaging: this idea of how can we bring the village back. What Diane brings into the conversation— there’s a lot of overlap to things that I talk about— but what you bring this additional piece of how we actually design our spaces in ways that make it very, difficult to have a village.
For the listeners who felt like it’s difficult to live in a village paradigm or way, it’s not your fault, right? There’s this larger force.
Diane, talk us through that your journey even of coming to realize that there’s a problem here and wanting to create this book for others.
Diane Alisa (03:52)
So I’ve known this for a long time. I just really didn’t have the language for what I was struggling with.
I knew, for example, I wanted children to be able to kind of roam the streets. And that was confusing to me as to why, over time, children weren’t doing that anymore and why the culture was shifting away from families.
And then the conversation around motherhood, where I had to be a stay-at-home mom or a working mom and how fierce that argument was and how much I wrestled with it personally because... I am an individual with talents and passions, but I also wanted to be a mother.
As I was researching, I found things that really poked holes in the suburban narrative of “stay-at-home mother” and “working mom”, that you had to be one or the other.
And then one of the biggest things is I live in Saratoga Springs in Utah, and it’s kind of like an exurb. There was a small pocket of suburban homes next to the lake. And that was pretty much the only thing in the whole town. And we had a Walmart. And I was like, this is where I kind of want to come back to after I’m done with college and I want to take a part of the American dream.
And about three years into my college degree, the developers came in because we were having a housing crisis in Utah and completely destroyed it and took all the farmland away and replaced it with just tract homes everywhere and we got just an influx of franchises. Almost everything in my downtown is a franchise. And I was super upset about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was like, this place is ruined. I don’t wanna be here anymore.
And then on top of that, the houses that I was planning to come in were at one point, $300,000 and now there were 800,000. And so we were just for a long time wondering how and where we were going to live in the state of Utah. I ended up doing a multi-generational housing situation.
But the reason why this book exists is because I was so bothered by my built environment and I just couldn’t place what the problem was. And I finally figured out after watching a Jason Slaughter video that it was suburbs; that they are really destructive and ugly and take community away from people.
Emily Race-Newmark (06:20)
So let’s just pause there for the folks who are like, “yeah, suburbs are the problem.” And then there’s probably some listeners who are like, “what do you mean the suburbs are the American Dream?”
You really lay that out beautifully in this book for a deeper dive. But if you can kind of touch high level, like why is it that some of us have a different relationship to what the suburbs promise or actually are?
Diane Alisa (06:28)
The suburbs are probably one of the most modern things in American and world history. If you’re talking about the iPhone, suburbs are just as modern as that.
They’re a type of design that relies on the automobile to get you to commercial districts. And essentially the reason why the suburbs are the problem is because they take away your local community and turn you into a complete consumer.
So you could probably live in a suburb neighborhood and not even see your neighbor for years upon years because there is nothing organic within the space that is going to have you interacting with them.
So the suburbs were the American dream after World War II. They didn’t want to live in the city anymore because they were a bit traumatized. So they created this new living space and called it a suburb and said that if you lived in a suburb with a white picket fence and you got the car and you got the family and the job, that you had made the American dream.
And that has been the narrative for the last 70 years, except what I discovered as I started looking into suburbs is that they degenerate. So every generation, the boomers, we talk about the boomers a lot, how they’ve gotten all of the wealth in America. The boomers are where the suburbs started for them. They inherited the suburbs.
as the suburbs go along through every generation, You lose more money, you become less social, you have less desire to know your neighbor and it literally shapes the culture of the American dream and the way we think about the world.
If you’re concerned about how much time Gen Alpha is spending on an iPad, you can pretty much blame that to the suburbs because they impact our behavior and how we raise children. And there’s such a vacuum of community that this is where our children are spending their time in online spaces.
Emily Race-Newmark (08:37)
Mm.
Yeah, I think my entry point in was really from a neighborly perspective, really noticing, “huh, why is it that my neighbors actually just feel like a bunch of homes?” I don’t know the people living in them.
And this deeper dive to get to know my neighbors and noticing how disruptive it felt to the new status quo. But I remember a time when I was younger where that wasn’t the case.
And so maybe what I’m experiencing there is that degeneration as you’re talking about that with time and also with technology and the void that suburbia had created, we’re replacing our need for relationship online because organic relationship is not happening.
And you really break this down— I’m like so against cars now, which is hilarious because you know, I love my car. It gets me from where I need to go. And I don’t have to rely on public transportation, but I would love to slow that down with you, for other people who think public transportation sucks and the car is the ultimate key to freedom. Like what’s actually “not so” about that, or what’s something for us to consider differently.
Diane Alisa (09:38)
Once you figure out car dependence, you come out of the matrix. There’s so much grief related to it, too. Like you can’t unsee it.
Once you see that the entire American structure is built for an engine instead of families.
Like everything. If you were to like recreate the Pixar movie Cars, that’s what we’ve done with America. And we think it’s kind of silly that, you know, how could cars exist ⁓ without hands or anything, but that’s pretty much what we’ve done.
Every single space, every value system, every code is for the benefit of the car and nothing else. And this is why all of our public spaces look like parking lots. Yeah.
Emily Race-Newmark (10:18)
Yeah. To take that idea and blow it out a little bit more: one of the things you were going through in one of the chapters is just visually the impact of that, but environmentally the impact of that, then on our health, there’s all these ripple effects, right?
So we’ll get to kind of some ideas and solutions in a moment, but to really emphasize the problem here: my understanding is car dependence was really purposefully created by the car companies, if I understood that correctly in the timeline.
And so then what we now experience today is all this infrastructure, as you’re saying, built around cars getting from place to place, but in doing so we have to cut down trees, we have billboards that are like inundating us as we drive from place to place, like all the visual cues around us are really car focused.
What else would you say about that?
Diane Alisa (11:03)
Well, I just think that it takes a lot of discipline to live in America because of car-centric design.
There’s nothing about our lives that are just built in naturally. Like, sociality, you have to go to your neighbor and knock on their door and invite them over for dinner. Physical health, you have to buy a gym membership because you’re never walking anywhere. You’re always in a car.
The trees issue, right? The infrastructure required to build for a car is so expensive and it’s so much space. There’s just acres and acres of land that you need for cars that you don’t need for a human being. And so we just cut down trees willy nilly because we need the car to get to a space faster and we’re doing it for the sake of safety. We don’t need that tree anymore because if you’re going a certain speed, you don’t want to get hit by the tree.
And from an engineering perspective in a car centric design, you would say, “yes”, but if you were in a human scale design, you would need that tree because that tree would provide you shade, that tree would provide you beauty and you are outside. And so that’s a legitimate need, trees are a part of infrastructure and they become absolutely obsolete when you are planning for a car.
Emily Race-Newmark (12:25)
It’s interesting because my husband definitely felt a lot of validation as I was sharing with him some of my favorite parts of your book, because in our marriage, the debate we always had was I want to live rurally because I want to live in nature and he wants to he wants to be able to walk to a coffee shop.
We found like a mix of both, which I’m realizing in reading this book is like a real gem of a place. And it took us, we drove across the country for years in our van, like looking for the perfect spot and really seeing what you described, in Saratoga Springs, these communities that were actually, like, soulless because there were so much presence of corporations and not so much presence of like people organically gathering.
⁓ and so it just felt like a needle in haystack to find this kind of perfect place. And now that I’m on this revillaging path, I’m like, my gosh, if it weren’t for walkability, like it would be impossible. It would feel very daunting to build these relationships.
And so I think the reason I’m sharing that is, depending on where our listeners are living and how urban or suburban their environment is, I feel like we could all maybe relate to the pain point of what it is to get your kids in the car seat in the dead of the winter or whatever that additional layer of, oh, I’m going have to struggle to just get from A to B in this more involved way.
What are some of the other stories or the other pieces around car dependency that you just want to emphasize?
Diane Alisa (13:37)
Well, this seems pretty obvious now to me that I’ve discovered car dependence, but we’re always talking about the village for a family and asking where it is.
And I usually just respond with, “you haven’t been building villages. You’ve been building suburbs."
And that’s not how a suburb works. A suburb is an isolated island type of infrastructure where the only thing that matters is your home and your car and Walmart, know, however you’re getting your livelihood.
So if you really want to have the village support and you want children to be running around again and you want this culture and beauty, you know, the mix between infrastructure, buildings, architecture, and also nature, then you have to actually deliberately build that way. And you have to protect these spaces, right? something that is really important in development in small neighborhoods.
“Please don’t cut down this tree.” Let’s make it so it’s really difficult to cut down this tree because I need it if I’m going to be outside.
So the goal that I was trying to do was give a new renaissance of urban design where we are now saying, okay, we’ve gotten all of the convenience we could ever imagine and it’s hurting us and say, let’s build more deliberately.
Let’s build the places that we keep going to the movies to see and actually start living in them because they’re possible. walkability is the core of the human experience. We have been creating this for a very long time, so it’s not utopic, it’s just human.
Emily Race-Newmark (15:29)
On that note, why don’t we kind of shift gears slightly to, touch on what your vision really is for like how we might design the American villages and this pedestrian first idea, what do you dream about there? What would you like to see as the new norm?
Diane Alisa (15:42)
I wanted my message to be one of great hope and empowerment, so I actually started with the suburbs themselves. That’s why it’s called the Love Letter to Suburbia, because although Suburbia has created all of these problems, the suburbs are also the way out of these problems, because these are the spaces that corporations don’t have a large hold on.
It’s kind of the last loophole that people have unless they want to completely abandon society and go to other parts of the United States and build villages from the ground up, which I’m actually sure would happened too if people caught onto this, but the idea that like, don’t have to completely abandon your current neighborhood. You just have to improve it.
You just have to make it functional again and kind of reroute boundaries of what your village is going to be. And then just start building beautiful places again.
And the way to do that is to have mixed use, mixed wealth, mixed house where youare allowing your neighbors to open up the bakeries that they’ve been doing secretly and selling things on Facebook Marketplace. You allow the butchries and the soap shops as you’re working with local government and then you also are incrementally densifying so that families can now start living together, which to me, the suburbs have done one of the most damaging things it could have done, which was separate and destroy families.
And what I want to return to the American people is a multi-generational culture because to an American who’s in a suburban car brain, the single family house is the ultimate gem. It is, if you’ve got the single family house, you’ve made it. And I wanted to say, it’s actually not that great to just have the single family house, because I personally wanted to live next to my mother and my sister and my cousins and.
I can’t do that in the suburban dream. It’s just not really possible. So I took the suburbs and then I disorganized them and they said, let’s have both order and chaos.
Let’s make this place functional. Let’s walk to our businesses again. Let’s create culture. Let’s take libraries that look like a Minecraft block and start putting beautiful architecture on them again.
You know, just like taking the things we already have, and making them functional and beautiful again and planting trees and having this sense of creation again because I don’t think America has had that for a long time.
They’re just not imagining how wonderful their spaces could be because they’ve accepted the status quo. But I’m here to say actually the possibilities are endless of how you could transform your space. And it really is from the bottom up. It’s you. It’s not the president. It’s not the the CEO of Walmart it’s you that is going to start creating these villages, which I think is so empowering.
Emily Race-Newmark (18:26)
I totally am with you on that. I also want to add, I often hear this narrative of escapism of like, “I just want to like move to a different country”. People are like, “I just want to move to Italy or Amsterdam or wherever where it’s better.”
And I get that feeling — but what does it look like to really be rooted where we are? And as you’re saying, make that space better for you and for future generations?
I love that you’re directing us to the power that we actually have right here and right now. And it sounds like the starting point lies in the zoning conversation, which to me was honestly quite new for me to dive into. Maybe you could explain a bit about why zoning is playing such a role in upholding suburbia as it is and why that’s the key to shifting what could be.
Diane Alisa (19:12)
Sure. I think there’s a conglomeration of things that have happened with zoning. We have Euclidean zoning, which makes it so that you have homes and then you have businesses somewhere else. And a village is a place that you live and work in. And Euclidean zoning has made that illegal for the sake of the vehicle. So if you densify an area, like I support family-centric zoning. I want people to fight for that where they’re at.
But you can’t really do that because density comes with cars. So cars are always getting in the way of you having the village that you want because they just take up too much space and nobody wants to live next to them. know, nobody wants to live by these giant parking lots. It’s one of the reasons why condos are so unappealing is because in car centric design condos have nothing beneficiary to them except, that they’re all stacked on top of each other. So they don’t have these public spaces. They don’t have beautiful areas to go to.
And what I was trying to do is pair density with walkability and function. So the denser you get, the more amenities you have, the more beauty you have, the more architecture you have, the better the libraries are, the better the schools are, right? Because people themselves are what are building these cities.
And it just doesn’t exist in car centric design. It’s sometimes really hard for me because if they haven’t read my book and it’s not density that’s the problem for me. And they’re like, “well, I would never ever live in a condo, I would never live in an apartment.”
I was thinking about it. I like the idea of mid density places, right? Where you possibly could have a little yard with chickens or, you know, like shared spaces with other family members.
But I personally would be okay living in a condo if I had all of the amenities that walkability provides and I would absolutely not be okay living in a condo because of car centric design, because my children can’t go anywhere. There’s nothing really available to me unless I drive away.
And so, the village that we’re all hoping for is paired with people.
What you want to do to start your village — and I’m working on this currently is to start creating legislation where you can now change the zoning in the area and allow these businesses to come in so that you can have that fresh bakery. You can have the farmers markets and get all of your essentials where you’re at just to pull cars off the road.
If you were fighting for a gymnastic teacher in your neighborhood and all of the neighborhood kids went to the gymnastics teacher, which I have one just a block away and so many of the kids use it. Like these are the amenities that come with people that are really exciting. And all you have to do is convince your neighbors that this is what they want. They actually do want walkability because right now they don’t think they want it. And that’s what walkability is, taking your kids down the street to take gymnastics class.
Emily Race-Newmark (22:09)
Yes. Okay. So like at the core of this, we are living and working in the same place as opposed to what many of us, and I know there’s like a work from home thing for a lot of like more, I don’t know, digitally nomadic type structures of companies or whatnot. But for the most part, a lot of us are, used to this commuting structure. It’s like I drive to work. Sometimes we’re like sitting in traffic for hours at end. And again, that’s because everything’s like more built for the cars.
And also because there’s like a corporate structure that we become really accustomed to versus in your vision there’s like this localized structure. It’s like we actually know the people behind the businesses because they’re our neighbors. And so what flourishes from there, my experience is like this beautiful trust and relationship that we are feeling the lack of when that’s not present. And I’d love for you to speak more about like your vision for how this local economy would actually benefit us or what could flourish from there.
Diane Alisa (23:08)
The most important thing for village economies is that you are living in this space. Because right now what’s happening is you have a sect of homes and then you drive away. And then as the demand increases and density increases, does so do the cars.
And I talk about this in my book, there are areas where I used to live in Provo that are being completely run over by vehicles and new infrastructure for cars so new roads in front of homes because the demand for commuters to get to Provo is increasing over time and so I know people that were in this quaint nice area and now have basically a freeway in front of their homes.
⁓ So the reason why the home economies are so effective is because if you are living in a space you don’t want them to be destroyed by certain types of businesses and certain types of infrastructure, you’re taking really good care of it. And that’s what makes village economies, that’s what protects them from overconsumption for pure unmitigated capitalism where people are doing things just for greed. Like they know the baker, they know the school teacher, even if they don’t know them closely, like they’re seeing them. They’re having these organic interactions.
And so there’s a social fabric of trust that’s happening just subtly with absolutely no effort, you know, just walking outside of your door is giving you that trust of your neighbors. And then as you elect people for governments that reside over villages, you are closer to these people. you’re not upset that president has gotten elected because he’s so high up the ladder, right? You know, the councilmen that you elected and you trust them and you feel like they’re going to take care of you and your space. And so it’s this ownership, this feeling of ownership and this feeling of shared wealth.
I don’t really talk about this in my book and I wish I did, but this idea of like, have free markets, but as you have a multi-generational culture, you have generations of wealth that are now being replaced by consumerism. So instead of getting a cheap plastic trinket, it’s, it’s actually metal, like a toy metal car. ⁓ It’s not something to be disposed of, it’s something that can be passed down because it actually is a quality piece of material.
The same thing with libraries, like the amount of shared wealth that we could have had in this country if it wasn’t for the suburbs, it’s astounding. Like you could have had libraries where there were just like hundreds of tools for you to sew and for you to do yard work and for you to fix cars, like they would just be there. Craft rooms for children, for education purposes.
There’s so many things that we could have shared as a community that we don’t anymore because we have this very suburban individualistic mindset where I have a lawnmower and every single person on this block also owns a lawnmower.
And even though they’re only using them a couple of times, a week or a month, they’ve still all bought lawnmowers because there’s no community to be like, know, I don’t really need my lawnmower that much. And you’re welcome to use it. know, it’s stuff like that, that when you have a bit of ownership and community, you start to get more benefits from the community itself, from the people itself.
Emily Race-Newmark (26:22)
Mm. Yeah, something I’m really like sitting with what you’re talking about in terms of the wealth piece and like, for me, it’s like this resource sharing. It’s like, we all have actually so much, even if we whether you want to blame capitalism or not, whatever, there’s like a scarcity mindset that kind of is fed through this idea of like, don’t have enough.
And I actually am now realizing, as I say, that it’s probably through suburban living that creates that scarcity more because we’re, we’re severed from our shared spaces. and so in that design problem, it’s like, how do we actually start to break down the walls and connect with each other, share resources.
And then what you’re saying is like share skills as well. Like open up our doors to share the knowledge that we have with the local community to like offer classes or to sell our goods and services locally versus only relying on online. So noticing for yourself how much that is needed, I feel like is a piece of what you’re saying as well, like fusing that back in.
Diane Alisa (27:29)
It just becomes a lot easier. Like if I were to come in with a lot of money, I want my children to grow up in this beautiful world. And so I would be very invested in creating beautiful spaces. Like I would be invested in creating libraries and I’d be invested in creating theaters because I love theater. These are the things that become really exciting when you actually build a place that has a sense of community.
And it’s not that you don’t have free markets, it’s that corporations versus local economies are now balanced. So corporations can compete in a way that they’re creating things to scale in a cheap way, but you also have the buffers of, I love this store, I love the people in it, and I love this coffee shop, I love that it’s beautiful and that my children can hang out in front of it.
And these are the things that keep the free markets from completely collapsing to the point where you are relying upon slave labor, which is, feel what we’re doing right now. I feel like it is almost impossible for me to buy things in this country ethically. And that’s kind of a liberal type of deal, but it’s serious. Okay, this is, we are hurting other people by our consumption. And I don’t even think it’s occurring to people.
I think we’re starting to wake up to it more, but like, don’t know where this jacket came from. You know, I don’t know if like a kid in Bangladesh helped create this jacket and that that’s so terrible to me. And it comes back to the idea of like, what kind of place do you want to live in?
Because if it was your kid having a job where he’s getting paid pennies a day so you guys can live off of just bread, you wouldn’t tolerate that so why are we doing that as Americans bring bring back our economy bring back these local spaces so that I can buy a jacket and be like, yeah my my local seamstress or Clothing store. I know where this came from. I feel good about buying this like I’m supporting people around me
Emily Race-Newmark (29:30)
It’s like returning to the relationship. And as you’re describing this whole vision, I’m like, yeah, it’s like we’re buying more than the object, right? Like you’re buying an entire experience around that.
And what’s happening is like, we’re buying things out of, what’s the most quick or efficient or cheapest, but like we’re not realizing the additional costs of that. Not just, you know, fine on our environment and on like being maybe ethically, but like, I feel like on a soul level, like we, we are contributing to our own, like mental health issues versus the deep relationality of like I this has meaning and purpose and I experienced XYZ and my way to buy this or whatever.
Diane Alisa (30:20)
Yeah, no, it is an experience and it’s not a great experience, honestly, right? Like you get into your car or you don’t even maybe get into your car at this point and you go to buy the thing and it arrives and then that’s it. There’s no connection. There’s no even thought about how it got to you. ⁓ It’s really limited and I’ve just have felt bad about it for a long time.
Like I feel bad about buying milk because I know it’s going to come in plastic and the possibility of that thing landing on some beach somewhere else is really high because it is expensive to support the suburbs. I talk about this in my cost analysis in one of my chapters that the macro cost of car dependence is extraordinarily more expensive than walkability.
So if you’re like, ⁓ it’ll never work. It’s not plausible because we’re always going to go for the cheaper thing. If we understand that it’s not cheaper to live this way, then I think we can start making deliberate choices about how we’re going to design a space.
And there’s just a lot of ways I’d love the culture to change, right?
In the 50s, people used to wear clothing and you had like five or six dresses a year and they were handmade or at least locally made. And that’s how much clothing you had for the year. And there wasn’t this intense obsession that this consumer culture creates where you have to have so much more clothing than you need. And people can kind of get used to the clothing you picked up for the year. And this is what they always see you in the whole year. And it’s fine, right? Like, cause everyone’s doing that.
These are the cultural things that I kind of wanted us to return to where we’re not over consuming because now we have community because we have the beautiful things around us because we’re sharing things that are important to us because we see each other at the library and we know how this jacket was made. And so the cultural things I feel like I had to address in my book because suburban brain has affected the way that we think about the world.
And I had to reverse it in a lot of ways because it has been so destructive of the way that we think the world should work and the way that we think we should buy.
Emily Race-Newmark (32:35)
Hello, it’s Emily here. I just wanted to take a quick break to say that if this conversation is inspiring you, if you’re feeling motivated to start reviving the American village in your neighborhood, but personally want some support in figuring out how to do that, where to begin, how to allocate the capacity and resources that you have right now, we should talk.
In my revillaging support parents and parents-to-be in creating the villages they were meant And a lot of this comes down to community building and strategy. So regardless of whether you consider yourself to actually be a community leader or you’re recognizing that that’s actually a set of skill sets you need to adapt, we all have a role to play here in the Revillaging Movement and finding out what that role is for you.
I support my clients in a deep transformative experience of building community in ways that feel deeply nourishing to them. My clients have been able to create support structures outside of their immediate nuclear family, feel a deeper sense of purpose and belonging where they live, it means to be a community member for their children in ways that nourish them.
Whether you’re someone that already has a reviliging experiment in mind— perhaps you want to create a child care collective or perhaps you want to build more relationships with the elders in your community— or maybe you have no idea where to start. I can meet you wherever you are in service of bringing community in the village
If the one-on-one mentorship is not what you’re looking for right now, I’ve also created an online community called The Third Space. Here we look at different practices like proximity, village economies, purpose, each month in a group setting with the intention of bringing to the forefront what it means to show up as your inner villager in your community. This is a really deeply nourishing place on the internet that’s about feeding your relationships in real life. You can head over to revillagingmama.com/offers to learn more and reach out.
We are at a time of so deeply needing community more than ever, and we all play a part in making that happen.
If you need help finding what your role is, reach out. Okay, thanks for listening. Let’s get back to our conversation with Diane.
Emily Race-Newmark (34:43)
This was like really, I actually haven’t had enough time to process this, so maybe we could do a little bit of this on behalf of our listeners as well. Like you kind of broke down the way suburbia like shaped our understanding of what it means to be a mother and a father. And it really blew my mind because, you you said it at the start too, like this whole conversation around staying at motherhood versus like working mom. And I too really felt like this identity, I was like, not only is there an identity maybe crisis in becoming a mother itself and not really feeling like, how does that fit in now?
But yeah, just feeling like confined that if I stay at home with my kids, that actually subjects me to like a future of complete isolation. And obviously my work now is like to counter that and as is yours too. So it’s like, it’s just interesting how suburbia has infiltrated our understanding of like fatherhood and motherhood. what feels important to share on that?
Diane Alisa (35:21)
I think this is one of the greatest and most important epiphanies of car dependence of how the current feminist narrative has been completely revolving around the suburbs because historically women have always been a part of society and they’ve always been a part of society with their children.
The idea of separating women from their children was just not even possible because they couldn’t keep each other alive. So they were always just adapting. They didn’t have the same types of technology that we did. So they were just using walkability without even realizing it to keep mothers and children together and create these home economies.
So for example, if you and your husband owned a bakery, then you and your children would probably be near that bakery all the time. And you wouldn’t have to go send your children to a nanny or a daycare because your children are with you and have like an environment where they can kind of roam around and also be a part of the economy to at some point, even earlier than we do now, start helping with the family biz. I think that’s one of the reasons why people had a lot of children. It made them wealthier.
And they had a lot of different ideas about children. So the suburbs changed all of that, in a mostly bad way. So the American dream was like, okay, now that we’re done with World War II, we’re going to come and women who had been totally exhausted from holding up the economy. Cause it’s just not built for a woman to hold up the economy. need a lot of support because they have different needs than men do.
And so when they did that and the suburbs came along, it was like, ⁓ wow, we can have this domestic bliss. We can keep mothers at home and they can raise our children. And they wanted to because the whole experience had been really hard. And then as time went on, I still don’t think they realized it, they started commenting on the isolation of the suburbs and instead of thinking that it was built environment they started blaming motherhood and marriage itself the idea was like if you’re a mother then you are going to be enslaved by your children and by your husband.
I wanna be an actress, for example. I can’t really do that in the suburbs. Like can’t have this economy where my children are really close by and I’m like saving a season of life for raising them when they’re really, really little, like baby age. And then having a support system where I can now do a lot of community theater or professional theater because it’s nearby. in my community and people know my children and just the support systems that allow women to have the best of both worlds because what the suburbs do is say you are nothing else but a mother. That’s all you can be unless you drive away and you abandon your children. Yeah.
Women are individuals, they do have passions and I’ve just been wrestling this for a long time. Like how, how is this possible? How, how can I do the things that I love and share my talents and also be a mom? And in the modern world, it’s kind of possible. Like right now, you know, we’re on computers in our homes talking to each other and sharing a great message. And so the modern world helps in that ways, but in the infrastructure itself needs to do that for women.
I feel like this one’s really hard to talk about because so much of it has to do with children, the way that we raise children. And it’s just like a huge paradigm shift and like, what do children need? How can they be autonomous? sooner rather than later so that women can rejoin society. And if she doesn’t want to, how can she have a community, you know, where she wants to just do community service like PTA or read stories at library time. Like how can she be a part of her family so she can carry her children? I there’s so much to talk about.
Emily Race-Newmark (39:28)
Yeah, I mean, I know it’s like we probably have a full podcast just about that one piece or a series, but yeah, I think what I’m taking away from what you’re saying now and also the book is like just almost a sense of relief of like, okay, this tension I have felt within myself is like really more attributed to like the infrastructure design.
And then like, there’s a cultural narrative that goes along with that, that we’ve kind of just got embedded with. for other mothers who are feeling that like, what, are the spaces that can hold all of who I am? It’s kind of like, let’s begin with the village design because there’s a closeness and a proximity that allows us to like tap into different parts of ourself without having to perhaps like make sacrifices that we don’t want to with our children. Or there’s like more trust with who else can show up for our kids.
And I also think in the book you’ve touched on it with fatherhood where we become accustomed to the father leaving the home versus like also playing a pivotal role in child rearing and being there to like model different skills and trades and include children. have a, I want to give a shout out to our friend, Mark, who like takes his son, Cully to work with him. And he, he’s a general contractor. They’re building things and Cully is just four years old and he just loves learning this stuff. And I’m like, you are like preserving this idea that our kids really just need that.
Diane Alisa (40:26)
Yeah, so men and women, work different socially. Men need a lot of like passive propinquity where they’re constantly rubbing shoulders with people. That’s how they make these social connections by doing things with each other. So the suburbs have taken that away from men. Men have to like leave society and you know, the society that we’ve built, which are the suburbs, and then come home and you don’t see men all day unless you are like a child and you have a teacher that’s male.
So we have a crisis, I believe, of masculinity because to me, the suburbs, and this is also quoting Jane Jacobs, are extraordinarily matriarchal. ⁓ This is what the matriarchy kind of looks like when you put women in charge of just one area. Like the burden of child rearing and being an individual and having community is just too much. There’s not enough support.
And so I’m going to bring it back to the... a small local store. If you were a milkman, you know, you worked at ⁓ a milk shop, then your children can like wander around and see you. And they can see the male librarian and they can see the male doctor. They can see the baker. They’re seeing them, the rubbing shoulders with them. They have this really passive, easy communication with each other.
And it’s this form of camaraderie that happens with males where they can actually see the people around them and see men doing things that are important, that are fulfilling, that are taking care of them in their communities.
And so right now we’re seeing an epidemic, I feel, of men of boys, who literally don’t know what they should be doing with themselves. They’re not even allowed to wander around anymore and kind of make trouble and it’s just so, so tragic and they’re just so bored and it’s all being replaced with TV, social media.
Video games is a big way that boys get social interaction and are able to problem solved. and instead I wanted to create an environment where we’re like living and working together again so that boys can kind of ride their bikes around the neighborhood and meet people and joke with people and like watch through the window of how a person’s doing a thing. And this is also very important for girls, right, too.
But just that boys really need those masculine role models and the suburbs don’t provide that for them at all. It’s kind of this abstract idea of like my dad goes to work and I don’t know what he does. And apparently I’m supposed to do that someday. And it just like the transition to adulthood is really, really difficult.
Emily Race-Newmark (43:19)
Yeah, there’s this void.
There’s so many more questions I have, but I think one of the things I want to make sure we touch on before we start to wrap this up is like the kind of rewriting our understanding of public transportation and I think what you were saying in the book, and correct me if I’m wrong, is like, if we begin with trying to solve for public transportation by like adding more buses or like more, you know, train lines or whatever, without solving for this like bigger car centric orientation and also the zoning issues, it’s like we actually are rightly so very frustrated with public transportation and how it’s slower and like just more of a pain and maybe it’s not even clean it’s just like our experience is not great so of course we’re going to opt for what is more convenient clean and easy the car.
And so what is your like proposition or vision around like how public transpiration actually can exist?
Diane Alisa (44:20)
So yeah, this is the last part of the solution sections of how to build a village. You first fix the zoning so that it’s functional again, then you start adding trails and creating walkability for people like slimming roads so that they feel safe walking again and you actually know where they’re going. And then you create public transportation or alternative transportation, whether it’s public or private.
People appreciate public transportation, but they only appreciate it right now with planes. Because when they’re in the sky, there’s not other things competing. There’s not other forces competing for them to get all the way across the United States. They just have air. And right now on the bottom level, we have car centric design and it’s only for cars.
So anytime you add a train or a bus or a tram, it is competing with cars instead of just being placed strategically on top of walkability.
And so I think I was trying to buy something from Facebook market the other day and I was like, well, what if I took public transportation and it was going to take me three and a half hours just to get there. Then the way back, it was going to be six hours. And so I was like, well, I guess I’m driving because it was going to be 40 minutes just driving. It’s this idea of if you kind of localize areas again,
And you make life smaller in a sense, because in this car-centric space, is, the distance required for you to exist in life is really, really far. But if you made life smaller again, and people had these communities again where they didn’t really need to go outside of their spaces that often, ⁓ then you’d be like, well, we have all these trains connecting these villages.
No, we have buses that get you to this place a lot quicker because it’s just in general a lot quicker to get there. This idea of the streetcar suburb where they have streetcars that are like in a fixed space that just go back and forth and back and forth.
And everybody knows where the streetcar is and how fast it gets there. And so they start planning their lives around alternative transportation, whether it’s walking or biking or taking a car. I even come up with a few scenarios where you rent a car and you go to the beach. There’s this false dichotomy of if you don’t have a car-centric design, you’re less free, you’re less mobile. And that’s just not the case.
You only feel that way because we’re in a car dependent design and if you don’t have a car, you’re going to be driving six hours or taking a train six hours to get something from Facebook Marketplace that’s only 40 minutes away by car. So they put you in this mental space where you are terrified if they take away your car because the whole world is so much bigger than it needs to be for the sake of the car.
And so the first step is walkability. It has to be walkable. And then you can add everything under the sun to accommodate you getting to places speedier than a vehicle would.
Emily Race-Newmark (47:20)
Yeah, and there was like a part again, I just keep pointing to the book because there’s such a wealth of information there that we can’t possibly cover in this show. And I just hope that this is like an appetizer to just direct folks to that resource because it’s truly a resource. That’s why I want to gift it to so many people so that we can start like collectively, you know, in your neighborhoods, having these conversations and then working together to shift what has been normalized.
So I think just to point back to the book again, that there is this description you had of like, imagine if for the bus lane, was just like a completely separate road that you’re incentivized to take it because it will actually be quicker than driving in the car or you know that the walking path like brought you to places that you really wanted to walk alongside and would connect you to people you’re stumbling upon these like beautiful spaces that you wouldn’t see you know otherwise so yeah it’s really it’s really back to the design itself because like you said we’re just so accustomed to car first.
Diane Alisa (47:56)
Yeah.
Emily Race-Newmark (48:16)
We covered so much today and I think we started to touch on like what might people do, but if you were to really sum it up with like someone who’s now feeling a passion about this, what’s a starting place aside from buying your book? well, I guess let me start there.
What’s a starting place for people to support the work you’re doing? I’m assuming it’s buying your book, but what else could we do with that?
Diane Alisa (48:18)
Yeah, so right now I’m in the, just the first stage is just advocacy. you can start changing laws and that’s something you can do immediately. Like start talking to city councilmen that you want to be in a village and you don’t want to be in a suburb anymore.
And if they don’t really know what’s going on, they’re going have a really hard time because they’re in suburban brain and they don’t realize how the suburbs are hurting them and they don’t want their home to be kind of taken over and just gathering people to be like, let’s do this. This is better than what we’ve been given and educating people on car dependence. supporting local businesses is really helpful.
Protecting any type of tree infrastructure in your neighborhood, if their developer comes in and they want to tear down a tree, they’ll come with like a thousand different reasons of why they need to tear down trees. Any type of car dependent roads that are being expanded, step in and say, no, please do not add another lane. again, like this is all about education. They’re going to be like, yeah, but we need another lane. There’s too much traffic. You say, no, this is not going to solve our traffic issue. It will increase traffic. It really is all about education.
And, and then people can just run wild with how they’re going to change their communities and I think they’ll start problem solving.
People think that creating a village will take a really long time. And it really won’t if they actually know what’s going on because they’re already kind of in our grasp. Right? We have people that have businesses, at least I do. I have a lot of secret businesses in my neighborhood.
We have a house that’s a daycare and it’s kind of been hidden for a while. The HOA doesn’t really know about it. that’s almost everywhere in the United States where people have these businesses. They’re already providing services. They just need to be legal. pushing back on HOAs.
And I’m not telling anyone to do anything illegal, but to just really kind of put pressure on these institutions that keep preventing us from having family-centric zoning, for example. Like I want to live with my sister and I want to turn this house into a duplex. Let me do that type of thing.
Emily Race-Newmark (50:51)
Right, okay. Yeah, and again, I feel like from the education lens, like my suggestion, just having gone through this book and like the discussion is now opening up in my home and then like with other people in my community, I just feel like you created this resource for a reason. So it really puts it all in one place and maybe start a book club with people and just like use that as an initial group to start taking these ideas into some communal action. yeah, and I guess I just really wanted to touch on this.
I’m so curious what you would say, but like, just really feel like this whole movement is a bipartisan issue. I’m like, I just feel like this is one of those things that like across the board, we could probably agree. Like it’s actually is the solution to the things that we’re all shouting about. And what is your, you said, yes. So like, tell us more, what has you see it that way?
Diane Alisa (51:27)
Yes. I have a lot of people trying to like put me on the political spectrum and I genuinely feel politically homeless right now like this is my this is my political movement it’s it combines almost every issue into one a solution like if you’re like a tree hugger and you’re upset about pollution and climate change getting rid of car dependence is gonna solve that for you
If you’re a family person and you’re like, how are my children going to grow up in America in a safe place? That’s for you as well. it’s incredible how much is solved by just re-imagining your community. And I look at Europe and there are some places in Europe that have like strong walkability and they just don’t have these like extreme political divides because their communities are so much more connected just organically.
And that’s what I’m kind of hoping for the United States so we can stop fighting with each other and kind of realize that we’re being pitted against each other and we’re being almost controlled by a corporate governmental lens that is has nothing but greed. That’s all they care about. And they don’t care about you because they don’t know you. They’re just trying to get the next buck. So if we can rally around walkability,
I think would heal so many hearts. I think would bring families together. I think would make us feel proud to be American again. I really talk about the American dream of feeling like, yeah, this is a good place to be. he’s in New York. I’m a New Yorker. He’s having this shared camaraderie, even if we’re different religions, creeds, races, ethnicities, et cetera.
Emily Race-Newmark (53:13)
Absolutely. I’m so with you and yep, that’s, that’s the focus.
So for those feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world, or you’re feeling like I just I’m like really sectioned off into my group of people and that group of people and like how that feels in your body, right? It doesn’t feel great.
So it’s, yeah, this is about actually finding a new context, a new lens to approach those problems with.
Diane, thank you so much again. I’ll link where people can buy the book in the show notes and any other ways we can support you, maybe bringing you in as a speaker. I’m curious if you do come to other communities to talk or the ways that we could kind of bridge your work to our communities on a larger scale.
Diane Alisa (54:00)
Yeah, so I actually have several speaking engagements this year. People are so excited. The message of the American Village is giving to somebody who’s been starving for this thing, right? This community, this beauty, this creation. And people are so ready to hear it. And so yeah, I have a couple of speaking engagements this year and next year.
So I’m willing to come talk to anybody who wants to hear more about the American Village and my audiobook I think is now on almost every platform. So if you’re not a big reader, you can listen to it on your commute to work and be upset as you’re driving. So, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Emily Race-Newmark (54:34)
I can see it firsthand.
All right, Diane, thank you again so much for your time. Take care.
Diane Alisa (54:45)
Thank you.
Emily Race-Newmark (54:46)
Thank you again to Diane and thank you for listening to this episode. If you want to support her work, you can head over to our show notes where we’ve linked her website, her Instagram and of course a link to purchase her book.
If you’re looking for a little more support, a little more handholding, a sacred container to help you in moving from your current experience of feeling isolated, like you’re parenting on an island, or trying to figure out how to build this village again, I’m here to support you as you step into a role of community builder that feels like it fills up your cup and doesn’t deplete it.
Links to work with me are also in the show notes. I hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time.