But the city being in Brazil, the people who live there have been imposing their ideas of living onto the sterile framework, with kiosks and street vendors bringing life to empty sidewalks, and desire lines of pedestrian paths cutting thru vast open spaces designed to be left empty — it’s much like new vegetation breaking thru old concrete. And the outlying districts and suburbs, beyond the original city plan, are dense and lively.

So I find it amusing that you blame the tendency to separate and segregate housing from other community functions on some anti-corporatism among the left. Because then how do you account for it in places like Texas where there is no left to speak of, but there’s plenty of segregated and separated suburban housing?

That’s one of the big reasons Nissan bailed on its California HQ. (A lot had to do with the South transplanting its way into prosperity, and Nissan did not have as many good years as did its former neighbors Honda and Toyota.)

Yet, the fascinating thing is that Nissan chose to replicate its big, desolate California HQ and make an enormous, desolate HQ in Tennessee.

I looked at Smyrna, TN in Bing’s bird’s-eye view, and that campus of Nissan’s has several housing subdivisions near it. I can’t say for sure whether those predated Nissan, but even if you were a worker that lived next door to the campus, you’d still need a car to cross the perimeter.

Maybe Nissan is hard-up about corporate espionage. Honda and Toyota are also paranoid at their respective campuses. Yet that Nissan would embrace its desolation and grow it on a massive scale shows a reflection of its values and how it treats its employees and the community.

Here’s a link to the aerial view of Nissan’s former Gardena HQ:
http://tinyurl.com/ydaxht4

Interestingly, Nissan’s neighbors include Metro’s Division 18 bus yard immediately to the southeast, and the Goodyear Blimp launching area to the southeast of that.

Now for Smyrna:
http://tinyurl.com/ye2hjwl

I couldn’t even use Bird’s Eye at its most far out to capture the enormity of the Tennessee plant. You could fit whole college campuses on some of the larger parking lots there.

Nissan forced Smyrna, Tennessee to zone the land it was going to build its factory on as industrial-only, on the grounds that commercial development would distract its workers.

It’s repeating the same behavior when Nissan was headquarted in Southern California. (It didn’t have an auto plant, though).

Japan’s Big 3 automakers were within 3.5 miles of one another in the South Bay of Los Angeles.

Honda and Toyota are practically next-door neighbors. Honda, though, has its headquarters across the street from Old Torrance, a streetcar-era walkable Main Street historic district. It’s more of a drive for Toyota workers, though.

Nissan, on the other hand, was on the other side of the 110 freeway with nothing but a parking lot surrounding it. When Nissan vacated the space, the office real estate agent struggled to find a buyer because of the desolation of the HQ building.

It’s not anti-corporatism – the people who believed in this view were often patrician Progressives. In fact, in a recent example of separate-use zoning, Nissan forced Smyrna, Tennessee to zone the land it was going to build its factory on as industrial-only, on the grounds that commercial development would distract its workers.

A second effect of this desire is the removal and segregation of commerce (the latter effect is no doubt aided and abetted by a “commerce is ugly, if not evil” ethic in some parts of the population)–many people seem to hold the view that living in proximity to business is inappropriate or substandard. I’m not sure where this view comes from–it seems to be a mixture of Victorian standards of propriety, and anti-corporatiism among some parts of the left–but it’s there.