Actor Jeff Daniels said it well in on HBO’s short-lived series, The Newsroom, that America isn’t actually the greatest country in the world. And maybe that’s the truth no one wants to admit. Because there’s a real pride in the American dream, in building our own homes, paving our own roads, driving our own cars. In my expat adventures over the last five years, I haven’t owned a car, and likely never will again.

Let’s be real here, America—did we really build cities, or did we just assemble a network of highways, suburbs, and shopping centers that made us feel in control while cutting us off from each other? In the rush to be independent, to feel autonomous, we created urban spaces that divide instead of connect, that separate rather than sustain.

Look at a city like Nashville or Knoxville, places that could have built on a human scale, that didn’t have to spiral into the soulless sprawl of a micro-version of Los Angeles or Atlanta. But somewhere along the line, these cities, too, adopted the American obsession with space—space to drive, space to park, space to sit in our own fenced-off worlds. They grew outward, and in doing so, they left behind the idea of a shared public life. Sure, you might find a square here, a park there, but they’re token gestures, almost reminders of what they could have been. Knoxville has Market Square, a nice enough spot that took far too long to redevelop because many Knoxvillains (not a typo), failed to see its value, but it’s still surrounded by highways and parking lots. Market Square is merely a place to stop by, not a place to live your life in at city-scale. It is, for the 2,000+ wealthy loft and condo denizens, but not for the everyperson. Even locals are tourists now on Market Square. Compare this aesthetic to Palermo or San Telmo in Buenos Aires, where every day—not just weekends—the parks are filled with families, friends, couples, street performers who live, love and fuck nearby—a city that actually opens its arms and welcomes you in and lets you live in it.

Alright, let’s dig a little deeper into it, at risk of me never being able to show my face in my old hometown of Knoxville.

Knoxville’s urban greenways program is a well-intentioned step toward reclaiming public space and integrating nature back into the urban landscape. There’s no question that the city planners aimed to reconnect neighborhoods, provide safe spaces for biking and walking, and inject a bit of greenery into a city that’s historically been dominated by roads and parking lots. The problem, though? For all the good intentions, Knoxville’s greenways fall short—because they don’t truly integrate with the heart of the city or the way people actually live.

What Knoxville’s program has created is a patchwork of pathways that feel disconnected and piecemeal, more a suburban amenity than an urban necessity. These greenways wind through parks, suburban developments, and the edges of neighborhoods, but they rarely venture deep into the city’s core or bridge the divides that actually separate communities. It’s green space by design, but without the true urban grit or cohesion that makes greenways in other cities—think Boston’s Emerald Necklace or even Chattanooga’s riverfront—feel like the pulse of the city.

Here’s the kicker: Knoxville’s greenways make nature feel accessible, but only on the edges, as though it’s something we can step into when convenient and retreat from when we’re done. It’s nature and community on our own terms, which, if we’re honest, is the American way of doing things. We get to feel like we’re part of something bigger, but in a way that doesn’t disrupt the car-dependent lifestyle that cities like Knoxville have long embraced. You can park, walk a nice stretch, then get right back in your car and drive to the Cheesecake Factory, PF Changs, wherever you need to go, without really engaging with the city itself or with each other.

What Knoxville needs is a network that doesn’t just skirt the edges but dives right into the heart of the city. Greenways that connect downtown to East and West Knoxville, that transform these numerous gray corridors into active, green veins pulsing through the city. Instead of feeling like an add-on, these greenways should be an essential part of Knoxville’s urban identity, places that draw in residents from all walks of life, day and night.

Make no mistake: for now, Knoxville’s greenways are a good start. But until the city fully commits to integrating these spaces into the lived, urban fabric—making them more than scenic detours—Knoxville will remain a city that skirts the idea of connection rather than embracing it. It’s a step in the right direction, sure, but only if it’s willing to take the leap and recognize that green space isn’t a luxury or an accessory; it’s the backbone of a city that cares about its people and its future.

But this isn’t about shaming anyone, least of all the average American. If anything, we’ve been sold a lie, one that told us that the car, the house with the yard, the isolated space was the ultimate achievement. That was the American dream, wasn’t it? Independence, the power to forge your own path. But the dream was shallow, a veneer of freedom that left us feeling more isolated than ever. We bought the myth wholesale and cut ourselves off, all in the name of autonomy. And maybe that’s the crux of it—we weren’t just building cities, we were building walls. Every suburban subdivision, every freeway overpass, every strip mall, each one was another brick in the wall that separates us from one another.

When you walk through San Telmo or Recoleta, you feel something that’s hard to put into words: a pulse, a heartbeat that resonates with the lives around you. There’s a real sense of history, of people who came before and people who are here now, sharing the same spaces. Buenos Aires has held onto a sense of togetherness that we’ve abandoned, that we traded away for the sterile convenience of parking lots and fenced yards. And for what? To sit in traffic on a six-lane highway, sipping drive-thru coffee, separated from our neighbors by a pane of glass and a layer of exhaust?

We need to confront the fact that this wasn’t an accident. America didn’t just stumble into sprawl; we sprinted toward it, hungry for a kind of freedom that in the end has become our cage. We’ve woven a sprawling, disconnected landscape that chokes out any chance for public life. In Buenos Aires, parks are woven into the very fabric of the city—Bosques de Palermo stretches on and on, a place where people gather naturally, where there’s no sense of intrusion, no awkwardness in sharing space. In America, even our parks and greenways feel fragmented, compartmentalized, like afterthoughts. In LA or Nashville, green spaces are “managed,” parceled out between highways, sanitized and disconnected from the flow of life around them.

And maybe the saddest part is the realization that we’re starting to wake up to it. There’s this slow, dawning awareness—this metaconscious realization—that we’re trapped in a maze of our own making. More and more, we feel it every profoundly lonely day, even if we don’t always know how to articulate it: a sense of dislocation, of lives that don’t intersect, of communities that are more theory than reality. We see cities like Buenos Aires and feel a pang, a flicker of something lost, something we didn’t even know we needed until we saw it elsewhere. The parks, the plazas, the public spaces—they’re not just there for beauty. They’re there for life.

America wanted to be the land of opportunity, a place where you could set your own course, live out your own story. And there’s a nobility in that, I won’t deny it. But somewhere along the line, we forgot that a story doesn’t mean much if it’s isolated, if it’s detached from everyone else’s. We sacrificed shared space for private space, and in doing so, we lost the thread of what makes a city—what makes life—worth living. We built places designed not to bring us together but to keep us apart, and now we’re starting to feel the weight of those walls pressing in.

In Buenos Aires, you can see what we gave up—public life, shared moments, a city that moves with you instead of pushing you away. It’s a place where autonomy doesn’t come at the cost of connection, where people gather in parks that stretch as far as the eye can see. Recoleta, San Telmo, Palermo—they’re reminders of what cities could be if we chose to build for people, not just for logistics. And maybe it’s time to face the hard truth: we need more than highways and cul-de-sacs. We need places where life is shared, not parceled out and fenced off. Because, as it turns out, the greatest freedom comes not in isolating ourselves, but in finding each other again.