16 Urban Planning
I always hear “It is too expensive to build nice things anymore!” which is getting things the wrong way around: what is actually too expensive is to keep building ugly things, places off no value or no meaning, disposable buildings. Nothing is cheaper in the long run than beauty. ((wrathofgnon?))
Urban design offers countless examples of engineering solutions gone wrong. During the last century, transportation designers responded to traffic congestion by building more roads, bigger roads, smoother roads, freeways, roundabouts, and so forth. This approach led to cities designed for cars and produced greater congestion. The engineering mindset failed to consider the deeper, systemic context.
Cars were a dubious idea in the first place, and the car culture was promoted by profiteers, not by a wise assessment of transportation options. In the 1930s, Standard Oil, General Motors, and Firestone Tire created a U.S. company, National City Lines, that bought public transportation systems and sabotaged them. They literally tore out light rail tracks and lobbied and bribed government officials around the world to build roads at public expense. Much of the world adopted a private car culture because that system benefited a few business elites, who wanted to increase profits. The engineering may have been brilliant, but the fundamental assumptions were wrong, or at least incomplete.
16.1 Public Space
Barcelona
Residences and businesses and roads will get you urbanity, but to make a city requires public spaces — “the public’s living room”. (Salvador Rueda)
The American Lawn
In the dominant American suburban model, wherein everyone lives in their own separate dwelling, there’s no way to maintain vibrant public spaces — everyone’s too spread out — so everyone basically has to recreate the benefits of public spaces in their own private estate.
The promise of the American suburban dream is that we don’t need a public — that the nuclear family can be sufficient unto itself.
The suburban dream of post-war America was that every white man could join the middle class and afford his own mini feudal estate, complete with its own stable (garage), its own compliant staff (wife and kids), and its own ornamental lawn.
We’re trying to compensate for the lack of a public by accumulating more and more private stuff. It doesn’t work.
It’s all so dumb. This is the thing I hate most about suburbia — it makes the people who live in it, myself included, enthusiastic participants in their own alienation.
People need spontaneous mixing. Research shows it is the primary way humans form friendships (which is why so many professional-class Americans make lifelong friends in college, when they are forced into close proximity). The number and depth of social connections is a reliable indicator of physical health, psychological health, and longevity. Loneliness and isolation kill.