With Donald Trump's presidency looming, Aaron Betsky's latest Opinion column stresses the need for architecture that will bring America's isolated communities together, and not just benefit the world of pick-up-truck drivers.

We live in a pick-up nation, and we have elected a president who represents that particular mobile bubble. Those of us who live in virtual bubbles, isolated from reality and work in our connected and conditioned world, never imagined that the political disaster of the last election could befall us.
On Facebook and around our neighbourhoods, everything looked blue. I should have known better: travelling across the country this fall, Trump-Pence stickers on pick-up trucks and on suburban lawns far outnumbered those discreet and so well-designed Hillary ads that Pentagram's Michael Bierut designed. But in the cities, everything seemed to be about standing together. Now we will have to live with the revenge of the Pick-Up Nation cruising on our federally subsidised roads, burning fossil fuels (as all of us do) and shrugging their shoulders at any investment in public transportation or infrastructure while their chosen overlords relax in their own condo cocoons and business-class bubbles. Meanwhile, people like me (my Facebook friends, my colleagues, my associates) will have the privilege of pretending reality does not exist as we retreat into our own bubbles.
Pick-up trucks keep becoming a more important part of our national landscape. Almost all of the g...