Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school of design in Germany, built this house – now a museum – at 68 Baker Bridge Road in Lincoln in 1938.

36,000 people will be guests in Boston later this month when the Hub hosts the Democratic National Convention, July 26-29 at the FleetCenter. But a much greater number of area residents will not only be missing an important example of democracy in action, they won’t even be reporting to work in the city on those days. These are residents who, because of how and where they live, imagine it will be physically impossible to get to work in Boston during the convention. They may be right. It is a design problem, pure and simple.

Getting in to work in Boston is a design problem familiar to all of us. On a regular workday, even without the once-in-a-lifetime convention in our midst, Boston plays host to a couple hundred thousand guests from its surrounding suburbs, from the central part of the state and from neighboring states like New Hampshire and Rhode Island. These guests make up much of the city’s workforce but they don’t actually live anywhere near their work. Pursuit of the American dream of conventional single-family homeownership has taken these guest workers miles beyond the boundaries of Boston, and sometimes even beyond the sphere of Greater Boston.

Back in the city, for reasons that include the tax value of commercial vs. residential property and the reelection chances of local politicians if their districts were to suddenly fill up with strangers, planners have failed to notice something is amiss. The DNC may provide a wake-up call to remind us that traveling all these miles to urban jobs requires transportation. But in a country where we have a kind of personal mobility unimagined nearly anywhere else in the world, transportation design is conventional. So, in Boston, (despite the efforts of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) transportation means cars. And it doesn’t only mean trying to drive them; it also means trying to park them in a city that is short nearly 100,000 parking spaces.

Here is an example of the type of problem that arises from faulty urban and transportation design: The search committee of an area college, the kind of institution that is the backbone of the region’s economy, tries to hire a professor from out of state. This happens countless times each year. Matching the teacher’s salary to the cost of housing in Boston is a nearly impossible task. Selling her family house in, say, Seattle, and buying its equivalent in Boston, is improbable. The alternative is to shape job requirements to the time it takes to commute from a home some distance outside the city. This is a thankless task for those trying to attract talent to Boston.

We are not designing enough housing for ourselves in Boston. We also have failed to design a real system of transportation. We are still searching for a way to integrate movement with stillness in the city, to connect the place where we are going with the method used to get there. The best and brightest of our transportation designers, after running through $15 billion in federal tax money, have only been able to provide us with a warren of new, inelegant tunnels through which to channel and separate our motive energy from the city itself. And even these will be closed during the evenings of the convention.

An announcement for a current exhibition of intelligent car concepts by the Smart Cities Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory (http://cities.media.mit.edu) alleges, “The automobile and the 20th century city have co-evolved, each adapting itself to the other.” If only that were true.

Instead we retain an anti-urban ideal, which the car – and cheap oil – supports, and which we misconstrue as a democratic ideal. It is the design of a pastoral existence, just a little independent from neighbors and authority. Of course, in 2004 this notion requires many of us to sit in traffic a couple of hours each day, unable to move and unable to park. It is expensive, individually and collectively. Yet it has been the American dream and we tend to idolize those who have achieved it.

Cities and Suburbs

Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school of design in Germany, achieved that dream. His Gropius House, built in 1938 at 68 Baker Bridge Road in Lincoln, is a museum now, visited by thousands of people each year. An immigrant fleeing from Hitler’s Germany just before World War II, he came to America as the new head of Harvard’s Architecture School. He was quickly taken under the influence of Helen Storrow, whose husband James, a Boston banker for whom Storrow Drive is named, had once been head of General Motors. Mrs. Storrow provided four acres of Lincoln farmland and $20,000 for Gropius to build his house. It is a delightful building, and those who visit come away admiring how it abstracts the conventional center-entry Colonial house. Many of those visitors long for a copy of an actual center-entry Colonial house, though, Those who can often build one, in fact, so often that it is the most prolific house type in the United States.

There were fewer than 5 billion people on the planet when Gropius built his house and drove his car the 30-mile round trip daily into work in Cambridge and back. Now there are nearly 7 billion people. Gropius also designed some remarkable multifamily housing. Perhaps we will one day revere his urban projects as much as we do his little house in Lincoln.

Democracy, a notion on the minds of people both here and around the world currently, doesn’t just imply leaders and the people who vote for them. Democracy requires citizenship, and in the case of Boston it requires design citizenship. Come November, neither presidential candidate is going to make the design of our city work better for you and me. That is up to us. It depends on what we value and how we manifest those values. It is discouraging that so many Bostonians will miss the DNC, a truly remarkable coming together of citizens in our city. But we haven’t designed for ourselves a city or a region that will allow many of us to participate. After the convention delegates all go home to their own cities, perhaps we can do something unconventional. Perhaps we can work on this.