The Urban Experiment
This article is a counterpoint to the suburban experiment, looking at the urban experiment. These are two iterations of a similar bad idea, which amounts to a loss of diversity and thus resilience.
As I've said before, humans are always changing, and cities are just collections of humans.
This makes sense.
At a certain point, you have to roll with change, or you'll make yourself miserable.
To some extent, this is true. But you have to keep an eye on that human tendency to mimic others nearby, because it leads to some truly heinous places. Sometimes people do wrong things on a very wide scale, like slavery or Nazism. Remember your ethics, and when everyone else is going in a different direction, decide whether or not you choose to go with them.
Right now, humanity is making a lot of decisions that I just can't condone; they're heading places I'm unwilling and unable to go. My ethics have always prevented me from fitting in, but the gaps are a lot worse now than they used to be. I prefer not fitting in to behaving abominably. Then again, I like the company of nature more than I like most humans, so it could be said that I'm still emulating people, they just aren't human peers.
Of course, it was also built around the automobile, but that's probably as much coincidence as anything. All human settlements are organized around the dominant mode of transportation at the time. The post-war boom era just happened to coincide with the car.
This is an insightful observation. It's not that earlier cities were built around people and later ones around cars; it's that the common mode of travel shifted from human-scale to much larger.
*chuckle* But I've seen that before, when people discovered horses. It absolutely changed the scale of settlements, because a horse can go farther, faster, carrying more than a person can. Boy howdy did the farms ever get bigger!
But in retrospect, the most important change was this idea that the growth of our cities could be successfully planned like a massive military operation. All negative outcomes could be accounted for, collateral damage could be minimized and we could undertake it in giant surges.
This isn't actually new either. Some very old cities were set up that way: based on Roman encampments with their grid system. That worked ... tolerably well. Let's say, at least it worked better than the helter-skelter arrangements most other folks were using.
Some of America's early cities, like Philadelphia, were planned pretty deliberately. This includes some pre-invasion examples like Cahokia and some from Mexico and farther south, with clear and practical structure to the layout that probably was planned at least in part. For that matter, multiple Native American tribes had a portable platting system in which everyone's tipi or lodge was placed in exactly the same orientation to the others wherever they went. The clans worked like neighborhoods. Given how big some tribes were, this was necessary.
What's new, and problematic, is that the designs are bigger, more opaque, and less democratic. It's possible to make really big mistakes on a really wide scale, and when something doesn't work, it causes a lot of problems.
Today, we have a new emerging paradigm, which we might as well start calling “the Urban Experiment.” From a process and capital flow standpoint, it's really no different than the Suburban Experiment. Large entities, sometimes international, invest millions of dollars to acquire properties and create "assemblages" of land. They do this hand in hand with local and sometimes State authorities.
The drawbacks of this approach include:
* It reduces local input and decision-making.
* This raises the risk of problems that could have been avoided by listening to people about things like, say, where floodwaters go.
* It puts more power in the hands of rich and influential people. Statistically speaking, these are not the smartest or most responsible people.
* It puts too many eggs in one basket. If you have a block with 25 buildings and one business fails, it's sad but no big deal; someone else can easily move in there and start something else. But if that block is a Texas donut owned by one person, failure takes out the whole block. Worse, very few people can afford to buy a Texas donut, so the chance of a new owner stepping in is lower than for a small building.
* This also takes the bottom rungs off the ladder. The more properties are huge with a high cost of entry, the fewer people have the opportunity to own land and buildings. So that makes it harder for small businesses to start and people to work their way from poverty to prosperity.
The target demographics are the college educated, the upwardly mobile, and the wealthy.
That right there is a problem. Cities need diversity. Creating silos of very similar people is neither democratic, healthy, nor effective. Who's going to clean the toilets? Who's going to watch the kids? Who's going to teach them how to sew on a button? When everyone has the same demographics, they also have the same weaknesses and can't compensate for each other. Plus of course, it's even worse for all the unwanted majority of folks who get shut out and don't have a place to go.
This new urban community has all the amenities desired by today's young and creditworthy. There's the Starbucks on the ground floor, the yoga studios and gyms, the trendy bars and restaurants with $10 beers and clever menus, co-working facilities, "playful" outdoor spaces, and an apartment with a nice view.
The one hopeful note is that, if the bones are good, it's a lot easier to fix problems with who does what and where. There's space for retail, for activities, for work, for living, and some outdoor areas with hopefully some greenery. Those are important things to have, even if they're not in an optimum configuration. It may go haywire, but if it does, they'll be in better shape than a place with only housing or only workspace.
Then again, this is all limited by America's ill-advised 39-year lifecycle for new buildings. This stuff may not stay standing long enough to go through much shift from new and rich to middling and middle-class to crummy and poor. It falls off too sharply at the later stages. We're just starting to see buildings collapsing from planned obsolescence. By the time currently-new buildings become old, people will probably know how dangerous they are and avoid them. I still think if people are going to build that way, they should be billed a deposit for demolition at the end of its planned lifespan. Wasteful as fuck, but preferable having people in the building when it collapses in year 40.
It's not just that it's built upon a mountain of debt, which it is. It's not just that it's targeted to a very narrow demographic, which it is. It's not just that these places feel the same in every city in America, which they do. It's a bit of all of those together.
All of those are problems. Debt will wreck everything, if a place isn't profitable enough to support itself, which is often true now. Narrow demographics are vulnerable as described above. Lack of placemaking and local color mean there's no reason to love or protect a specific place when you can easily get another like it elsewhere.
What happens when this class of people (my people) grows bored of it all, and moves on to the next thing? What will become of these places? Can they evolve easily into something else, or for someone else? The history of large-scale development would generally say “no.”
I think, if the buildings had lifespan, they'd have real hope. Poor people will always move into places as rich people are moving out, and they'll bring their own culture of making-do. I see the key limitations as size (if poor people can't afford a big building and rich people don't want it, then it's just going to stand empty until squatters or raccoons move in) and planned obsolescence (if it's not built to last, there's little opportunity for repurposing anything).
The really uncomfortable truth for all Americans, is the buildings and spaces don’t actually have to be great. They don't have to be timeless, nor do they have to connect to their neighboring areas and create a bigger whole. They just have to have one or two good human spaces, and the target demographics will be happy.
People won't necessarily be happy. They will use what's there for lack of better options. They will deal with whatever problems the environment causes. Like if you don't build neighborhoods safe for kids to walk to school, and you forcibly prevent them from running around, you will have kids who fidget all the time.
The truth is, there's nothing inherently wrong with these places. Twenty or thirty years ago, most urban advocates would have absolutely loved this and given their left arm to see more of it in their city. The real problem is, in our cities today, this is ALL we build, and have been building.
Lack of diversity causes problems in most systems. For example, forest types are often classified based on 2-3 dominant trees and these have a whole bunch more associates that are less common. If a disease or parasite wipes out a main tree, it's bad, but there's still something else left; wiping out a subsidiary tree is much less troublesome. But a tree farm is a monoculture of one species, usually the same age too. A single calamity can take out a whole tree farm. Diverse forests are more productive and resilient.
So in cities, if you have mostly or entirely the same type of building or neighborhood, that's more vulnerable than if you had more types. Hence why I don't recommend applying the same guidelines to all areas, even if it's something neo-urbanist like the removal of parking minimums. If you're experimenting, leave a control!
We've always had large-scale buildings in our cities, in every era. We just also used to have a whole lot of small-scale efforts, as well. Those efforts used to be much more localized and unique to an area. The owners were generally local people who benefited directly from the growth and change of their city.
That's diversity, and it matters a lot.
Today's instant cities only directly benefit very large investors and developers. There's virtually no opportunity for the startup business or small investor to actually own something. Sure, a local business can lease a space, but chances are they can’t actually own the space itself. We have an investor class that is national or global, and everyone else effectively is a renter. Not only does that deprive the local community of potential local wealth, it also makes the whole endeavor more subject to the whims of the renters.
It also leaves them very vulnerable to uprisings, because the nature of the pyramid ensures there are always more on the bottom than on the top. A typical castle can withstand about 10:1 odds. This becomes abruptly useless if 11:1 people outside hate you and are willing to build a ladder of corpses to scale that wall and kill you. And if following the rules doesn't meet people's needs, then they have no incentive to follow the rules and every reason to tear down the system.
As I've said before, humans are always changing, and cities are just collections of humans.
This makes sense.
At a certain point, you have to roll with change, or you'll make yourself miserable.
To some extent, this is true. But you have to keep an eye on that human tendency to mimic others nearby, because it leads to some truly heinous places. Sometimes people do wrong things on a very wide scale, like slavery or Nazism. Remember your ethics, and when everyone else is going in a different direction, decide whether or not you choose to go with them.
Right now, humanity is making a lot of decisions that I just can't condone; they're heading places I'm unwilling and unable to go. My ethics have always prevented me from fitting in, but the gaps are a lot worse now than they used to be. I prefer not fitting in to behaving abominably. Then again, I like the company of nature more than I like most humans, so it could be said that I'm still emulating people, they just aren't human peers.
Of course, it was also built around the automobile, but that's probably as much coincidence as anything. All human settlements are organized around the dominant mode of transportation at the time. The post-war boom era just happened to coincide with the car.
This is an insightful observation. It's not that earlier cities were built around people and later ones around cars; it's that the common mode of travel shifted from human-scale to much larger.
*chuckle* But I've seen that before, when people discovered horses. It absolutely changed the scale of settlements, because a horse can go farther, faster, carrying more than a person can. Boy howdy did the farms ever get bigger!
But in retrospect, the most important change was this idea that the growth of our cities could be successfully planned like a massive military operation. All negative outcomes could be accounted for, collateral damage could be minimized and we could undertake it in giant surges.
This isn't actually new either. Some very old cities were set up that way: based on Roman encampments with their grid system. That worked ... tolerably well. Let's say, at least it worked better than the helter-skelter arrangements most other folks were using.
Some of America's early cities, like Philadelphia, were planned pretty deliberately. This includes some pre-invasion examples like Cahokia and some from Mexico and farther south, with clear and practical structure to the layout that probably was planned at least in part. For that matter, multiple Native American tribes had a portable platting system in which everyone's tipi or lodge was placed in exactly the same orientation to the others wherever they went. The clans worked like neighborhoods. Given how big some tribes were, this was necessary.
What's new, and problematic, is that the designs are bigger, more opaque, and less democratic. It's possible to make really big mistakes on a really wide scale, and when something doesn't work, it causes a lot of problems.
Today, we have a new emerging paradigm, which we might as well start calling “the Urban Experiment.” From a process and capital flow standpoint, it's really no different than the Suburban Experiment. Large entities, sometimes international, invest millions of dollars to acquire properties and create "assemblages" of land. They do this hand in hand with local and sometimes State authorities.
The drawbacks of this approach include:
* It reduces local input and decision-making.
* This raises the risk of problems that could have been avoided by listening to people about things like, say, where floodwaters go.
* It puts more power in the hands of rich and influential people. Statistically speaking, these are not the smartest or most responsible people.
* It puts too many eggs in one basket. If you have a block with 25 buildings and one business fails, it's sad but no big deal; someone else can easily move in there and start something else. But if that block is a Texas donut owned by one person, failure takes out the whole block. Worse, very few people can afford to buy a Texas donut, so the chance of a new owner stepping in is lower than for a small building.
* This also takes the bottom rungs off the ladder. The more properties are huge with a high cost of entry, the fewer people have the opportunity to own land and buildings. So that makes it harder for small businesses to start and people to work their way from poverty to prosperity.
The target demographics are the college educated, the upwardly mobile, and the wealthy.
That right there is a problem. Cities need diversity. Creating silos of very similar people is neither democratic, healthy, nor effective. Who's going to clean the toilets? Who's going to watch the kids? Who's going to teach them how to sew on a button? When everyone has the same demographics, they also have the same weaknesses and can't compensate for each other. Plus of course, it's even worse for all the unwanted majority of folks who get shut out and don't have a place to go.
This new urban community has all the amenities desired by today's young and creditworthy. There's the Starbucks on the ground floor, the yoga studios and gyms, the trendy bars and restaurants with $10 beers and clever menus, co-working facilities, "playful" outdoor spaces, and an apartment with a nice view.
The one hopeful note is that, if the bones are good, it's a lot easier to fix problems with who does what and where. There's space for retail, for activities, for work, for living, and some outdoor areas with hopefully some greenery. Those are important things to have, even if they're not in an optimum configuration. It may go haywire, but if it does, they'll be in better shape than a place with only housing or only workspace.
Then again, this is all limited by America's ill-advised 39-year lifecycle for new buildings. This stuff may not stay standing long enough to go through much shift from new and rich to middling and middle-class to crummy and poor. It falls off too sharply at the later stages. We're just starting to see buildings collapsing from planned obsolescence. By the time currently-new buildings become old, people will probably know how dangerous they are and avoid them. I still think if people are going to build that way, they should be billed a deposit for demolition at the end of its planned lifespan. Wasteful as fuck, but preferable having people in the building when it collapses in year 40.
It's not just that it's built upon a mountain of debt, which it is. It's not just that it's targeted to a very narrow demographic, which it is. It's not just that these places feel the same in every city in America, which they do. It's a bit of all of those together.
All of those are problems. Debt will wreck everything, if a place isn't profitable enough to support itself, which is often true now. Narrow demographics are vulnerable as described above. Lack of placemaking and local color mean there's no reason to love or protect a specific place when you can easily get another like it elsewhere.
What happens when this class of people (my people) grows bored of it all, and moves on to the next thing? What will become of these places? Can they evolve easily into something else, or for someone else? The history of large-scale development would generally say “no.”
I think, if the buildings had lifespan, they'd have real hope. Poor people will always move into places as rich people are moving out, and they'll bring their own culture of making-do. I see the key limitations as size (if poor people can't afford a big building and rich people don't want it, then it's just going to stand empty until squatters or raccoons move in) and planned obsolescence (if it's not built to last, there's little opportunity for repurposing anything).
The really uncomfortable truth for all Americans, is the buildings and spaces don’t actually have to be great. They don't have to be timeless, nor do they have to connect to their neighboring areas and create a bigger whole. They just have to have one or two good human spaces, and the target demographics will be happy.
People won't necessarily be happy. They will use what's there for lack of better options. They will deal with whatever problems the environment causes. Like if you don't build neighborhoods safe for kids to walk to school, and you forcibly prevent them from running around, you will have kids who fidget all the time.
The truth is, there's nothing inherently wrong with these places. Twenty or thirty years ago, most urban advocates would have absolutely loved this and given their left arm to see more of it in their city. The real problem is, in our cities today, this is ALL we build, and have been building.
Lack of diversity causes problems in most systems. For example, forest types are often classified based on 2-3 dominant trees and these have a whole bunch more associates that are less common. If a disease or parasite wipes out a main tree, it's bad, but there's still something else left; wiping out a subsidiary tree is much less troublesome. But a tree farm is a monoculture of one species, usually the same age too. A single calamity can take out a whole tree farm. Diverse forests are more productive and resilient.
So in cities, if you have mostly or entirely the same type of building or neighborhood, that's more vulnerable than if you had more types. Hence why I don't recommend applying the same guidelines to all areas, even if it's something neo-urbanist like the removal of parking minimums. If you're experimenting, leave a control!
We've always had large-scale buildings in our cities, in every era. We just also used to have a whole lot of small-scale efforts, as well. Those efforts used to be much more localized and unique to an area. The owners were generally local people who benefited directly from the growth and change of their city.
That's diversity, and it matters a lot.
Today's instant cities only directly benefit very large investors and developers. There's virtually no opportunity for the startup business or small investor to actually own something. Sure, a local business can lease a space, but chances are they can’t actually own the space itself. We have an investor class that is national or global, and everyone else effectively is a renter. Not only does that deprive the local community of potential local wealth, it also makes the whole endeavor more subject to the whims of the renters.
It also leaves them very vulnerable to uprisings, because the nature of the pyramid ensures there are always more on the bottom than on the top. A typical castle can withstand about 10:1 odds. This becomes abruptly useless if 11:1 people outside hate you and are willing to build a ladder of corpses to scale that wall and kill you. And if following the rules doesn't meet people's needs, then they have no incentive to follow the rules and every reason to tear down the system.