thoughts on Klotkin's Urban Legends: Why Suburbs, Not Dense Cities, are the Future
If you're interested in community and social capital go and read this piece from Joel Klotkin over here.
OK. So it's interesting, right?
A few thoughts. First w/r/t:
But grandiose theorists, with their focus on footloose elites and telecommuting technogeniuses, have no practical answers for the real problems that plague places like Mumbai, let alone Cairo, Jakarta, Manila, Nairobi, or any other 21st-century megacity: rampant crime, crushing poverty, choking pollution. It's time for a completely different approach, one that abandons the long-held assumption that scale and growth go hand in hand.
I think this is a great point but a tiny bit confusing. For example, while I'm a far cry from a grandiose theorist i do spend a lot of time and energy tackling the problem of how automobile-centric neighborhoods reduce the number (and value) of relationships between neighbors. So while I try to implement solutions that encourage walking and biking through Red Bank I don't at all expect my solutions to be applicable to favelas. To argue that the today's digital nomads, telecommuting to jobs from remote locations aren't a practical response to some of the challenges and opportunities that we face in the US in 2010 simply because they are not solving the scale and growth problems of Mumbai doesn't make sense.
Which leads us to Klotkin's thesis:
The goal of urban planners should not be to fulfill their own grandiose visions of megacities on a hill, but to meet the needs of the people living in them, particularly those people suffering from overcrowding, environmental misery, and social inequality.
Another great point but I think it confuses a few different issues here. Sure, one of the goals of urban planning should be to alleviate the suffering that is created by how and where some people live. But another goal should be to help people flourish where they live, too. It reminds me of the current split in psychology: historically, psychologists have worked on alleviating illness and depression but a recent trend towards "positive psychology" concerns itself less with alleviating illness and instead focusses instead on moving the fairly happy person's needle a few notches closer to the very happy (or flourishing) end of the scale. Both of these efforts are needed.
So, absolutely, urban planners should find ways to alleviate suffering, but they should also spend some time finding ways to take communities that are not suffering and help them to flourish.
This diversity of efforts is necessary and helps more than if we just had one or the other. Perhaps it would be better restated as one of the goals of urban planners should be. . .
Which leads us to:
The most advantaged city of the future could well turn out to be a much smaller one.
To which I say, hell yes! Think Providence, RI for example which may be just about the most advantaged city in the US for a whole lot of reasons but its scale is definitely one of its best attributes. Or even a place as small as Red Bank. Dense enough to have mass transit, a walkable downtown and neighbors who know you. Completely the opposite of NYC where everyone's anonymous but also completely the opposite of many suburbs where people stare out from the window of their heinously large mock-Tuscan Villas and wonder about the strangers next door.
Anyway, I came across Klotkin's piece randomly through a link on instapaper this AM and was really glad to have had the opportunity to read it.
