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James Lileks, one of my favorite writers and observers of society, turned out an classic column today about civic design and urban renewal.
He's writing a rebuttal to an article by a professor who is spouting all the classic pro-renewal arguments (many of which don't hold up well to scrutiny). The good professor sees everything in terms of problems that only good design can take care of, which Lileks wonders if some of these are solutions in search of problems. Here is my favorite excerpt:
"For much of history, places empowered people. Places were where people found community and a meaningful role." (It's a safe bet that people who use the words empowered, community, and meaningful in close proximity do not produce anything you can hold in your hands.) "But in the 20th century we stopped making places that were meaningful for people."
We did it. We being society, on whose behalf we are apparently speaking, and we stopped. Just like that. No more meaningful places. No more churches, no more schools, no more parks, no more sports centers, no more airports, no more swimming pools, no more shopping centers. We stopped making places that are meaningful for people-empowering. How did we accomplish this remarkable feat?
"Look at the city. We started to separate people from their workplace and impose this dreadful ordeal of commuting back and forth."
We started? Did we finish? The only people who were not separated from their workplace were the ones who lived in a room above the store. And even that wasn't the dominant model. Even Scrooge was separated from his workplace. In the 1920s people commuted to work downtown or in the factories; they either drove - boo, hiss - or more likely took the streetcar system. If you want "a dreadful ordeal," try waiting every day in the rain or snow for a drafty old box that rattles you home at 20 MPH, then drops you off at a corner where you must assemble your daily provisions from a variety of retailers, then walk them home yourself another nine blocks.
No, it's not dreadful; it's what people did, and having lived in a marvelously inconvenient inner city myself, I've done it too. Big deal. But note how we imposed a dreadful ordeal on people. The freeways clouded men's minds, made them want to live far away for no reason, no reason at all that we can see. Their minds besotted by the siren song of the concrete ribbon, they endure a daily commute, unable to consider other options, such as living closer to their place of employment. Imposition is the only explanation, some sort of force that cannot be resisted. Why wouldn't any sensible person want to live in an older house at greater expense in a neighborhood with less safety and smaller personal space?
Personal: there's that funny word again.
The end result of the army of zombie commuters is as bad as you might expect. "We ghettoized ourselves into these ethnically and economically segregated places where everybody was like everybody else."
As opposed to the old pre-freeway city, which never had a Polish district, a Swedish neighborhood, a Black neighborhood, a rich neighborhood, a poor neighborhood. Every year in St. Paul there's a festival in town to celebrate "Rondo," an old Black neighborhood destroyed by the freeway. It's always celebrated for the sense of social cohesion it once provided. It was ethnically monolithic. Now we live in segregated places and now everybody is like everybody else? Now is bad and different? Apparently in the old days the mansions were right next to the shacks, and the plutocrat would wander out on his lawn for a morning smoke and nod to his neighbor, the Chinese fellow who made 40 cents a day selling roosters out of his garage.
The end result of this newfound ghettoizing:
"And we drained from our cities the kind of diversity and exposure to others that created new ideas."
Keep in mind that the primary example of a "new idea" to which the professor referred in the interview was the iPod. (That's actually a telling example: 60,000 melodies, one thumb on the control.) I don't think that came about because Steve Jobs came across a Somali-language newsletter in a Korean restaurant. The most diverse neighborhood in which I ever lived was Adams-Morgan in DC, and it was not exactly a hotbed of New Ideas. I don't think the guy in the bars-on-the-basement-windows brownstone rethought his job as a PR agent for the Chlorine Manufacturers Lobbying Group because the Opera nightclub down the street had a "Hispanics Only" night every weekend.
(read the complete column)
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