Look no farther than the streets of New York, which have been radically redesigned over the past decade to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians with bike lanes and car-free zones. These ideas aren’t new. They were espoused by city planners and activists more than half a century ago, when Robert Moses was crisscrossing the city with expressways, bulldozing neighborhoods in the name of the car’s transformational technology. At the time Jane Jacobs and other advocates of slower, friendlier streets were dismissed as Luddites. It took more than 50 years of evidence, accidents and political courage to realize what a colossal mistake the Moses approach was and to begin to undo that with proven ideas in people-centric urban planning that aim to bring cities back to those who live in them.

When you look at those cities, you’ll also find some of the most innovative solutions to the way we conduct commerce. Not one-hour delivery or meal kits on demand, but the boom in a parallel retail model that is decidedly social and human focused. The past decade has seen impressive nationwide growth in farmers markets, flea markets and independent bookstores, despite all the competition from larger, more efficient organizations online and offline. Even though these places are based on a model that harks back to the roots of human commerce, they are innovative precisely because they propose a valuable community alternative solution to the supermarket or shopping mall that dominates retail. This model has been so effective that Amazon is opening more bookstores and Walmart just announced concept stores that will include food halls, farmers markets, bike rentals and parks — the very things the company siphoned away from American towns.

Perhaps the best examples of rearward innovation are edible. The culinary story of the past several decades is dominated not by the scientific improvements we were promised, but by a return to food and drink’s more delicious past. Traditional cooking, craft beer, heirloom vegetables and grass-fed beef have brought food forward by turning back. We take this as gospel today, but during the 1980s, when pioneering artisan bakers like Nancy Silverton and Jim Lahey were trying to get the world to abandon Wonder bread for traditional sourdough, their ideas were radical and innovative, and ultimately changed the way many of us cook, shop and eat.

This type of reflective innovation requires courage, because it calls into question the assumption that newer is necessarily better. But increasingly, as our worship of Silicon Valley gives way to a growing sense of unease, we are asking those questions and innovating appropriately. Countless schools have restricted technology use to foster better learning. Elections officials in Virginia recently traded computerized voting machines for more secure paper ballots. And while e-reader sales have been tanking, Penguin just announced it would publish tiny printed books, meant to be read on the go. Small books, which have been around since Gutenberg set up his press, are an ideal solution for a market that demands both convenience and physicality.

These innovations aren’t mired in the past. They are solutions firmly focused on the future — not some technocentric version of it, where we invent our way to utopia, but a human-centric future that reflects where we’ve been, what we’ve learned and how we actually want to live. If that means we build more libraries in parks, then we are moving in the right direction.

David Sax is the author of “The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.”

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