I drove to the office today. This makes me an Enemy of the People. I don’t feel like a bad person, but evil is rarely self-conscious. It thinks it is doing the right thing. Even the mustache-twirling top-hatted villain in an old silent movie waited until the rent was overdue before he evicted the plucky, desperate heroine. The act of driving is bad enough these days, but driving into the city is becoming even more laden with sin; if I were pure of heart I would have been biking in the unseasonable sleet, buffeted by a perpendicular wind, and perhaps knocked under a bus — which would at least have guaranteed my ascent into heaven, as I had been sanctified in death by a symbol of virtue.

Instead I drove the brief distance, parked on a surface lot next to a pen of bikes, half of which are chained and abandoned like skeletons in a dungeon. Since I’ve obviously chosen the path to perdition, my sins may be compounded tonight: I intend to drive to a suburban shopping center. It’s a strip mall. O Wretched Nation, with your death-strewn seas of asphalt! Cry, Mother Earth, for the easy access to Bed Bath and Beyond!

What have we wrought?

Nothing that can’t be unwrought with a little planning.

A StarTribune article (note: that’s where I work) details the changes intended for Southtown, an unlovely but popular Twin Cities shopping area built in 1960, and while it’s a local story, it’s just one front in the battle to keep you from driving where you want to do what you wish. The Metropolitan Council, which plans the future of our seven-counties metro area to ensure it’s sustainably progressive and progressively sustainable, wants Southtown to be something else. It wants . . . density! More density! City blocks that make the core of a neutron star look like Nerf! The solons of the city of Bloomington, Minn., where Southtown is located, agree. Tall buildings, shops on the ground, housing above. That’s the future of the inner-ring burbs, and they have a plan to provide them. Or encourage them. Or force them. Whatever works.

Mind you, the owner doesn’t have to tear down the shopping center — although it would be peachy if he did — but if he undertakes any “major renovation,” new zoning rules would require more density. Which is like saying you don’t have to build an apartment over your garage, unless you rehab the kitchen and basement. The owner says: “To get to what the city wants, you basically have to tear down Southtown and start over.”

Why, it’s almost as if that’s what they want.

The area has already changed; there’s a big block of apartments where a car dealership once sat, and a weed-strewn lot where another block will rise some day. The development was pitched with the the usual words: vibrant and bustling, like some brightly colored version of the Lower East Side in the 19th century, with pushcarts and peddlers and kids playing stickball. It would be a place where people would walk along the sidewalks and window-shop en route to meeting someone for a glass of wine. This is the highest goal of urbanism, it seems; that’s always how it’s described. Oh, there’s room for diverse lifestyles; you can, if you wish, have your glass of wine first and window-shop later, but basically, you must do what they imagine people in Paris do, except for the smoking. After you are done you can go up to your flat and look out at the sunset like the people in the apartment brochures. They’re usually shown with a glass of wine, too.

I’d drink too, if I had to live there without a car.

The commercial area is dependent on automobiles. The low-slung shops and chain restaurants that populate the area are, you suspect, regarded with horror, and must be done away with somehow.

“What’s not standing the test of time is the late-20th-century strip mall,” said Steve Elkins, who, according to the article, “represents the area on the Metropolitan Council.” By “represents” the author doesn’t mean “was elected by people who agreed with his platform” — Met Council members are appointed by the governor. The Met Council may override local governments if the need arises, which means it has the power to invalidate the actions of elected officials. This is sometimes necessary, when elected officials do not realize that certain things are not standing the test of time. Like a mall with an occupancy rate of 99 percent.

That’s right. The Southtown shopping center is 99 percent leased. Makes you wonder if there’s a three-foot-wide storefront that has gone unrented since Yardstix ‘R’ Us went out of business. If something is that successful, it might be — and bear with me, because I’m riding off the reservation here and heading for the Crazy Hills — because people find it useful, and go there to exchange money for goods and services.

Before anyone thinks I live on a cul-de-sac with three SUVs and stand out in the yard in my bathrobe with a beer and a garden hose, I live in the city of Minneapolis, in a dense area that’s walkable, vibrant, bustling, and has people walking to the café for a glass of wine, pausing to look in windows. Half the year, anyway. When it’s 20 below, you drive the six blocks to the café because the only window you’d want to look in is the travel agency’s. I understand the attraction of density, and will always want to live someplace that isn’t characterized by vast tracts of parking. I also understand the attraction of wind-surfing, but that doesn’t make me want to mandate parasail landing platforms on every downtown office tower’s roof. Making the old suburbs denser, with expanded transit options, is a way to forestall stagnation, and if that’s all this was about, you wouldn’t be suspicious.

No, you’re suspicious because you think the Planners want to make it hard to drive your car anywhere, period. They’d mandate stop-sticks on your driveway and pitch it as a way to encourage walking. It’s not enough to increase other transit options: Cars must suffer. And so they look at a bustling, vibrant shopping center, note the lack of window-gazing en route to Pinot Noir consumption, and say, “There should be a hotel here. With a bike lane. Down the hallway.”

Years ago there was a movie theater at Southtown, an early-Sixties masterpiece of glitz and kitsch. We drove there from our dense, vibrant apartments by the university, because it was showing The Empire Strikes Back. It was a rare outing; at the U, we walked everywhere, took the bus around campus, and stayed in our collegiate world most of the time. To get in your car and drive to the burbs to see Star Wars; to park without paying in a vast lot; to hop in the car afterwards and drive somewhere else to get pie and coffee — why, it felt free.

But that was long, long ago, in a Galaxy 400.

— James Lileks is a columnist for National Review Online.