fix buffalo today, archive

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Hip cities without a soul

It's easy for anyone interested in cities, suburbs and what architects call "the built environment" to think only in terms of recent history and the world that we know. There are big cities with their towering downtowns, trendy neighborhoods and run-down ghettos and then the endless suburban sprawl in which most middle-class people reside.

Hence, planners, architects and developers debate philosophies such as Smart Growth and New Urbanism, which are designed to stem the supposed destruction of open space and replace dispersed development patterns with urbanized living. Many of my discussions of this matter have devolved into angry debates between those who think that suburbia is evil and those of us who find it to be a grand advancement of living standards for the majority.

Joel Kotkin, an author who specializes in urban affairs, has published a new book that promises a broader outlook. "The City" is an ambitious and dense effort despite its mere 218 pages. It looks at cities not just in terms of modern America and the European model, but in full historical perspective. The first chapter starts with the evolution of urban life 40,000 years ago (!) and proceeds to describe life in Mesopotamia, ancient Rome, Constantinople and then onward to modern Los Angeles.

"The City" offers fascinating insight into the ideologies that have created different city designs, and into the natural human desire to gather together to live and for commerce. He reminds us that the ancient Romans created a vast system of infrastructure, including the aqueducts, but that after Rome's fall, it collapsed into a tiny echo of its former glory. He provides a quick tour of city development in the Middle Kingdom, the Middle East and even Middle America.

Perhaps the most fascinating insight: Cities need a sense of moral purpose to survive and flourish. It's not enough, he argues, for them to serve merely as a center of commerce. It's that idea that helps me the most as I continue my critique of the modern planning movements.

In a recent interview, Kotkin complained to me that New Urbanists and others who want to recreate urban living as a rebuke to suburbanization tend to miss this almost-spiritual side to city planning. The hip, vital cities modern planners are most enamored of, such as Portland, Ore., are geared almost exclusively toward "young people and the nomadic rich and trustafarians," those childless trust-fund elites who are seeking high culture but eschew child-bearing and religion.

In Europe, he said, all the major cities are mostly devoid of children. Yet planners refuse to acknowledge that "the evolution of suburbia is part of the continuum of urban history." He calls the people who run cities the worst enemies of them, as their hamfisted regulations, the destruction of schools and the bloated bureaucracies are unfriendly toward average middle-income families.

He derides the emphasis on hipness rather than on traditional city planning that focuses on good infrastructure, good schools, safe neighborhoods. Unfortunately, people come out of the planning schools with the same ideas, he said. So those who don't fit this narrow demographic move to the suburbs, where they are criticized by the urban elites who accuse them of selfishly promoting sprawl. In the book, Kotkin makes the case by comparing the new planning ideas to the lessons of the past. "Broader demographic trends also pose severe long-term questions for these cities," he wrote. "The decline in the urban middle-class family - a pattern seen in both the late Roman Empire and eighteenth-century Venice - deprives urban areas of a critical source for economic and social vitality."

"The City" provides necessary historical context for modern debates, and to that end serves a valuable purpose.