Hunched Beneath the Airport Flight Path: Terrible Places to Work, Even Worse to Get To

This one is dedicated to all of you who have ever worked in a crappy business park by the airport. 

If you don’t know immediately what I mean, it’s one of those places in a semi-industrial area often shaped like a shoebox. Chances are, it’s open during some very strange hours and hunches over beneath the airport flight path, as if cowering from the noise. 

It has an intense industrial, almost futuristic feeling not unlike the liminal spaces my colleague Shina Shayesteh describes in her brilliant post about creepy, half-empty North American suburban spaces. 

There might even be a sense of mystery around what is happening inside these weird buildings, mostly due to a lack of windows. But it’s more than that. There is usually a parking lot (never quite full), and most telling and spooky of all, there is little to no sign of human activity. 

It might be a lonely and convoluted experience to try and get there on a bus or bicycle. It might be even more depressing once you do get there, since the job may have been located in the park exclusively for tight budget reasons. (Not very inspiring for you, the employee!) You might find yourself in a devastatingly horrible place to be outside of a car. 

Let’s design places for people, not cars.

Learn how through our Academy course, “Urban Design Principles for a Strong Town.”

If so, then you have a lot in common with Jason Slaughter, a good friend of Strong Towns who produces Not Just Bikes, his popular YouTube channel. Slaughter worked at a “crappy business park by the airport” in Toronto, Canada, when he was a younger tech worker. A recent visit to a business park in the Netherlands, where he lives now, prompted a comparison between auto-centric North America and the human-centered design of his new home. 

Something about the sparse business park ethic really brought out the design divergence in the two cultures for Slaughter and his viewers, who were even more animated than usual in their comments on the channel. Slaughter found himself noticeably angry about the years he “wasted” spending too much time traveling on circuitous bus routes in Toronto and then walking for miles next to loud, polluted six-lane stroads on his commute. 

Recalling how his old colleagues admonished him to just “buy a car,” which he couldn’t afford, Slaughter says in his voiceover: “It’s disgraceful how public transportation users are treated in North America… You are absolutely not welcome here if you are not driving.” 

The way we build in North America is garbage, and we deserve better, he says.

“I am so sick of car-dependency apologists who predictably trot out the same tired, old, disproven excuses and myths to resist building better urban places,” he writes in the top of the comments. “If you've watched this whole video all the way through and you still don't ‘get it,’ then just stop watching. Because if this didn't convince you, then no video I ever make will ever convince you. Go watch something else.”

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