<em>"Long and straight roads that defined cities have bad feng shui."</em>
What do you think of the Feng Shui of the new urbanist communities where we are going back to the traditional neighborhood design with straight streets and regular blocks?
In good new-urbanist community design, there is attention paid to the length of the streets to try to eliminate long, straight streets. The small grids tend to be tilted and joined together at "T" intersections and other techniques to avoid very long straight streets. Woodbury is a good example of this kind of design. If you drive around Woodbury, the streets are all straight, but they are never very long. Nothing ruins a sense of community like a straight street with 100 houses on it.
I have always been sensitive to these elements of good community design. Half of the classes I took to get my degree were urban planning. We studied what makes for good communities, and living in Irvine has been a great case study, but nowhere in the curriculum for urban planning do they give theories as to <em>why </em>these elements make for good communities. Feng sui, for whatever predictive or explanatory power it has, is at least an attempt to explain <em>why </em>certain elements impact us the way they do.