The persistent relevance of urbanism in an age of chaos

Discussing plans for west side development, June 2014

A month from the Iowa precinct caucuses that start the long process of voting in the 2020 presidential election, the U.S. announced it had killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force, as well as an Iraqi militia leader, in a drone strike (Marcus 2020). Between this and the imminent start of voting for President, the news is full of impeachment efforts and the frightening effects of global climate change. With all that's going on in the world, city-level issues can seem pretty unimportant. They aren't.

The urbanist project at the local level, step by incremental step, remains the critical response to problems of our common life in the next century.

Urbanism entered our national vocabulary in 1993 with the founding of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Reacting against five decades of suburban development, the CNU charter proclaimed: We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy. "New" Urbanism wasn't new in the sense of never having been thought of, but rather represented a rediscovery of traditional city design that provided for human life as suburban development did not: social connectedness, community identity, individual choice, environmental sustainability, and fiscal sustainability. (See a list of classic urbanist texts below.)

Seems all well and good, but how can we possibly ponder "the restoration of existing urban centers" and "the preservation of our built legacy" when the issues and personalities at the national-international level are so huge?

Source: picgifs.com

In contrast to national politics, where we can watch helplessly as the country stumbles into conflict or the President Tweets out another juvenile nickname for his opponents, local activity offers people the opportunity to make an impact, and to see the impact they make. President Trump is an extreme example, but national politics has long been mostly a spectator sport, like the NFL playoffs except with real-world consequences, which is why the Russians were so easily able to co-opt social media in 2016.

12th Av SE, April 2018

At the local level, you know what (and who) you're dealing with. In Cedar Rapids, the pedestrian infrastructure on 12th Avenue SE grew out of a Better Block project in spring 2018 (pictured above). Anderson Park got playground equipment because of one family's activism, and Redmond Park has been adopted by a group in the Wellington Heights neighborhood. The 1500 block of Park Avenue SE remains one-way, for better or worse, because of neighborhood objections to the city's plan to reconvert it. During my semester in Washington, I saw the creation of the Safe Streets in Hill East group that lobbies for pedestrian and bicycle improvements in the neighborhood where we lived. I could go on. Examples abound.

Win or lose, participate or don't participate, local decisions define the conditions of our daily lives. The residents of the Rompot neighborhood didn't succeed in blocking the expansion of the adjacent train yard, and they will live every day with the consequences. More simply: Do you live with constant noises and noxious smells? Is it easy to meet people? Is there a place to get a quick ingredient you're missing that you can walk to without taking your life into your hands? Do your sewers work? City design matters to people, all the time.

People walk to this grocery store, but it's a battle

Local issues are, in short, about the conditions that people encounter in their daily lives. A one-way-to-two-way street re-conversion can make the difference between a speedway and a neighborhood. A good city park provides space for recreation, relaxation, and meeting. (See Kramer 2019 for a case from Pittsburgh where restored nature was chosen over a casino and/or strip mine.) The conditions of our streets affect how people make their daily way to work, school, and shopping. A city that overspends on infrastructure faces a day of reckoning where its citizens can't count on the bridges, sewers, electric lines and essential services they need (cf. Marohn 2019). Decisions at the local level affect the economic opportunities by which we make our livings, not to mention the quality of social interactions with our fellow residents.

Ellen Shepherd of Community Allies points to the demonstrated advantage of locally-owned businesses

Most importantly, the key issues we face require thinking about how we live our lives, and designing the conditions that make change possible--and that too happens locally. Individuals can resolve to live more ethical or neighborly lives, but the conditions that support those resolutions require conversations. There is no guarantee those local conversations will ever happen, nor that when they do they'll be adequately inclusive, deliberative, or lead to good outcomes. But the locality is the only place where they can happen.

Bike lanes and buses improve individual mobility as well as social connections

Want to address our epidemic of depression? Obesity? Gun violence? Poverty? All are driven by the way we've designed our communities to encourage or (until recently, mostly) discourage community-building. Want to address climate change and other environmental problems? We could use some effective international agreements, to be sure, but the rubber meets the road with individual behavior, and that means cities not designed for car-dependence. Worried about our fiscal future? At both the individual and community level, urbanist design is sustainable as suburban design is not. (See Karlinsey 2019.)

I'm not denying that we live in a global economy and a global climate, and that important decisions about them need to be made at the national and international levels. I'm not denying that a presidential administration that deals in favors and spite, while bidding constantly for attention, needs to be replaced. Some resources can only be moblized at the state or national level, and sometimes valiant local efforts are thwarted by state and national government malice.

I am saying that the drama of world politics should not distract us from building the towns we need to live in. I am also saying that the quality of national-level policy solutions depends in large part on their foundations--social, economic, cultural--in our communities. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne this week quoted Robert F. Kennedy:

When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens, but as enemies — to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. (quoted in Dionne 2020)

A strong citizenry starts with the incidental contacts we have with others, which only happen when the town is designed to encourage them. On that basis everything else--unity, prosperity, quality of life--is built.

Make pancakes not war!

CLASSIC URBANIST TEXTS:
 Calthorpe, Peter, and Fulton, William. The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl. Island, 2001.

 Duany, Andres; Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth; and Speck, Jeff. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. North Point, rev ed, 2010.
 Gehl, Jan. Cities for People. Island Press, 2010.

 Hester, Randolph T. Design for Ecological Democracy. MIT Press, 2006.
 Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961.

 Kelbaugh, Douglas S. Repairing the American Metropolis: Common Place Revisited. University of Washington Press, 2002.
 Kemmis, Daniel. Community and the Politics of Place. University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
 Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. Paragon House, rev. ed., 1999.

SEE ALSO:
"Gleanings from the New Urbanism," 19 April 2013