So nice to bump into you here, Chris. We’re Kelly and Nigel — early retirees slow-traveling the world one month-long Airbnb at a time. We mass transit everywhere we can, but end up missing half the details you always manage to catch. Your line about walking being the only way to really know a city hit home — that’s exactly what slow travel teaches us too.
We’d be terrible city planners though — our only zoning rule is “must be near a pub.” 🍺
The lack of trash cans is partially cultural in its persistence but originally due to the 1995 sarin gas attacks. It's a bit grim, but I do think it adds some important color to the trash can point.
You'll never get any buy in on any kind of community redesign until you get prosecutors and police to do their jobs and prosecute crimes. For better or worse, the USA is a low trust society. As such people with means will always flee cities for safer spaces, which usually means moving to a suburb, where there are physical barriers to criminals doing what they do
I was struck by your provocative bottom line: “human despair is no longer primarily a result of economic destitution; rather it is due to a lack of functional and healthy communities.” I take this to mean that, at least in America and other modern industrialized societies, we have plenty of wealth. What we don’t always have are satisfactory ways of sharing it and of using it to satisfy our basic human need for community. I think this is an illuminating perspective.
One manifestation everywhere, but perhaps more in the US, is that when we do succeed in creating an attractive urban environment, it is very hard to keep it from being taken over by people with money. It gentrifies, becomes too expensive for ordinary people, and turns into a theme park like Manhattan or San Francisco.
Americans have a particular suspicion of planning. One reason is the mixed record of post-war urban planning, which tended to bulldoze poor neighborhoods and build concrete wastelands. This reinforces a view that real, healthy communities grow ‘organically’ without expert design. And this is connected to an ideological preference for markets where millions of individual decisions interact to supposedly produce the best of all possible outcomes. So trying to limit gentrification is swimming upstream—interfering with individual choice, plus thwarting rich powerful real estate interests.
Can you point to examples where this dynamic has been slowed or managed effectively?
Very glad to discover your writing (in today's Free Press, then here--God bless links!).
One comment, something I've ruminated on a lot these past six weeks:
You say "There is no such thing as a human without a community," and you're right, of course. We are meant to live in communities.
But the converse is also true, and instructive:
There is no such thing as a community without people," and therefore it may very well follow that there is no such thing as the "perfect city" without "perfect people" in it. And where do we find them?
A "good city" may not so much be the result of good social structures (top down) as it is the natural result of good people (bottom up).
A good culture is the accumulation of the goodness of its people, not the other way around, no? (The communists and national socialists tried to impose "justice" on the societies they controlled, and manifestly, ignominiously failed).
I've been reflecting, since Pope Leo XIV's election, on Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum" which launched Catholic social teaching, and in turn the Church's pursuit of "social justice" (i.e. your ideal "perfect city.") The question I've posed to some of my priest friends recently, men who were educated in the social justice tradition, is: "135 Years of Catholic Social Teaching and What Do We Have To Show For It?"
We see empty churches, closed churches, declining church attendance, an appalling lack of priests; we've seen two world wars, the worst atrocities in history, divorce, addiction, corruption, joblessness, etc.
These observations prompt a deeper observation, that:
One cannot have "social justice" without just people.
A community of just people will BE a "just society." In the Old Testament, God prophesies a future in which no one will have to be taught the law, because the law "will be written on their hearts." That, indeed, is the ideal community, isn't it? Good people doing good, and good results pervading?
In seeking to "perfect" society writ large, in pursuing the construction of just social structures, organizations, models, and laws, have we simultaneously ignored (in some parts of the world) the cultivation, education, and formation of just individuals? Have our churches and our governments pursued civic-wide "engineering projects" because of a belief that these will result in good people rather than the moral upbringing of good citizens?
This is not to discount all the things you've observed around the world that make a place "work better" and serve its people better. Surely, the U.S. Constitution (as just one example) was the framework for a just society, and yet its framers remarked that it would only work with, by, and for just citizens. Good people will pursue good things, and they will dream of "shining cities on hills," "undimmed by human tears."
But, I suppose what I'm getting at is whether we should put the cart before the horse, or behind?
Maybe it’s more of an exception to your rule, but I find in more 2nd world countries”low trust” places like Mexico, mixed zoning doesn’t exactly mean chaos. It’s the rural communities that are the most blighted by crime. High density urban centers have plenty of more cohesive mixed used neighborhoods, arguably with less scattershot *violent crime then the US. A good public transit system where people of all classes and interests have to criss cross the city for their daily errands is probably safer than a class stratified city, even a less dense one.
When all classes have to live in the same area, there is skin in the game to ensure safety, adequate policing. Washington DC is all but abandoned by police, even in relatively nicer areas, because the real stakeholders live in northern Virginia and suburbs. Less cross class density actually leads to more crime - look at all those dilapidated rust belt towns with crime rates higher than major metros. Distinctly American problem.
I'd be curious what Chris and his readers might think about the new kinds of towns I describe in my book, A Part-time Job in the Country: Notes Toward a New Way of Life in America, which you can read about here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
As a North American living in Buenos Aires , I was inspired by your writings /interviews to take a long walk to a completely different part of town (Almagro) and visit a famous cafe I’d heard about for years. Enjoyed it immensely. Thank you !
When it comes to what can change and what cannot, it's essential to look beyond policy and regulation and consider the impact the land has had on culture. For example, the plow. It pretty much comes down to countries with plow-based ancestry having less female labour force participation, more traditional views about gender, and slower progress toward gender equality. Part of it is because men took more control of agriculture with the plow. There's more to it, but I'm just throwing it out there for everyone in the community here who wants to think about when it comes to cultural change. It's also worth looking into how wheat and rice affect culture. In rice-farming regions of China, people showed more interdependent thinking, while wheat-farming regions showed more independent thinking, similar to Western cognitive styles. Part of this is because rice farming takes more cooperation.
I bring this up because, obviously, people will talk about religion when it comes to what is easily changed and what isn't--observable behaviours are easier to change than beliefs. And I think we gotta bring this beyond the ways religion affects beliefs and ideologies and how our interaction with the land affects them--especially if we're going to think about how city planning can affect culture.
Always appreciate your writing and work, but I most say as a native Dane that I was a bit disappointed when you mentioned your lack of interest in the Nordic countries in your podcast with Tyler Cowen. Even with your fondness for the cold, and especially functionality they should be the obvious subject to study. Comparing with the US even more so as I can never see America can mimic anything from highly collectivist cultures such as Japan or China.
On footnote 3: I've found sports apparel to be a surprisingly good conversation starter. Since I was a kid I've had this wierd fascination with obscure teams and unusual logos, so last year I bought some retro apparel (a Montreal Expos hat, Quebec Nordiques T-shirt, etc.) People stop me quite often to point them out, though ironically assuming I'm from Canada. The Expos still live on for a lot if people!
Did you have a chance to walk through Providence? I'd be interested to hear your impressions. I lived there five years, at a time the waterfront was being completely redeveloped (partly a project of the elites to make the city more like Boston)
¡Viva La Sombrita! For real, density should be allowed to work where it works, and not forced where it won’t. Problem is, most planning boards consist of hall monitors looking for a last chance power drive. Or straight up crooks with cronies in real estate. Like, quit f###ing trying to put mixed used into Chevy Chase (said the nimbyist)!
Anyhow, great writing—it is truly a pleasure reading it, and I sure hope you keep going. Be well!
I struggle with the assumption here that the government should be playing sim city at all and designing spaces top down. Obviously there are design choices embedded in even basic infrastructure, but this zoning centric perspective seems like it could use some justification (compared to letting people just build and do what they want and seeing what emerges organically).
James C Scott writes persuasively for your camp - the bottom up is always better than top down. I'm certainly aware of the limitation of rigid top-down SimCity. Albany is classic example of that, which I linked to. Brazilia even a more persuasive, and larger, example.
I think you need bottom up contribution -- which is what allowing "loser" zoning is about, such as mixed-use.
But having no plan, whatsoever, is even worse, IMO!
You should, if you haven't already, read Seeing like a State, where Dr Scott argues against top down as being all about authoritarian control. LIke it is in China!
Have you read Alain Bertraud's book Order without Design? He makes a case for a more market driven approach while not denying the role of urban planing.
Honestly, just like how the lack of mixed zoning is a self-fulfilling process in USA, introducing mixed zoning can have the same self-fulfilling effect in the other direction. After a few decades. I have seen examples of better zoned suburbs already existing, I hope that will gradually move US culture away from La Sombrita.
So nice to bump into you here, Chris. We’re Kelly and Nigel — early retirees slow-traveling the world one month-long Airbnb at a time. We mass transit everywhere we can, but end up missing half the details you always manage to catch. Your line about walking being the only way to really know a city hit home — that’s exactly what slow travel teaches us too.
We’d be terrible city planners though — our only zoning rule is “must be near a pub.” 🍺
Here’s where our story begins if you’re curious:
https://substack.com/@thebenthalls/post/retired-roaming-and-rooted-welcome?r=5ci1ff
Thank you for this thoughtful look at how cities and cultures are intertwined. Loved it!
The lack of trash cans is partially cultural in its persistence but originally due to the 1995 sarin gas attacks. It's a bit grim, but I do think it adds some important color to the trash can point.
I’m just familiarizing myself with your work, and forgive me if you’ve written about it elsewhere—are you familiar with Christopher Alexander’s work?
You'll never get any buy in on any kind of community redesign until you get prosecutors and police to do their jobs and prosecute crimes. For better or worse, the USA is a low trust society. As such people with means will always flee cities for safer spaces, which usually means moving to a suburb, where there are physical barriers to criminals doing what they do
I was struck by your provocative bottom line: “human despair is no longer primarily a result of economic destitution; rather it is due to a lack of functional and healthy communities.” I take this to mean that, at least in America and other modern industrialized societies, we have plenty of wealth. What we don’t always have are satisfactory ways of sharing it and of using it to satisfy our basic human need for community. I think this is an illuminating perspective.
One manifestation everywhere, but perhaps more in the US, is that when we do succeed in creating an attractive urban environment, it is very hard to keep it from being taken over by people with money. It gentrifies, becomes too expensive for ordinary people, and turns into a theme park like Manhattan or San Francisco.
Americans have a particular suspicion of planning. One reason is the mixed record of post-war urban planning, which tended to bulldoze poor neighborhoods and build concrete wastelands. This reinforces a view that real, healthy communities grow ‘organically’ without expert design. And this is connected to an ideological preference for markets where millions of individual decisions interact to supposedly produce the best of all possible outcomes. So trying to limit gentrification is swimming upstream—interfering with individual choice, plus thwarting rich powerful real estate interests.
Can you point to examples where this dynamic has been slowed or managed effectively?
Very glad to discover your writing (in today's Free Press, then here--God bless links!).
One comment, something I've ruminated on a lot these past six weeks:
You say "There is no such thing as a human without a community," and you're right, of course. We are meant to live in communities.
But the converse is also true, and instructive:
There is no such thing as a community without people," and therefore it may very well follow that there is no such thing as the "perfect city" without "perfect people" in it. And where do we find them?
A "good city" may not so much be the result of good social structures (top down) as it is the natural result of good people (bottom up).
A good culture is the accumulation of the goodness of its people, not the other way around, no? (The communists and national socialists tried to impose "justice" on the societies they controlled, and manifestly, ignominiously failed).
I've been reflecting, since Pope Leo XIV's election, on Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum" which launched Catholic social teaching, and in turn the Church's pursuit of "social justice" (i.e. your ideal "perfect city.") The question I've posed to some of my priest friends recently, men who were educated in the social justice tradition, is: "135 Years of Catholic Social Teaching and What Do We Have To Show For It?"
We see empty churches, closed churches, declining church attendance, an appalling lack of priests; we've seen two world wars, the worst atrocities in history, divorce, addiction, corruption, joblessness, etc.
These observations prompt a deeper observation, that:
One cannot have "social justice" without just people.
A community of just people will BE a "just society." In the Old Testament, God prophesies a future in which no one will have to be taught the law, because the law "will be written on their hearts." That, indeed, is the ideal community, isn't it? Good people doing good, and good results pervading?
In seeking to "perfect" society writ large, in pursuing the construction of just social structures, organizations, models, and laws, have we simultaneously ignored (in some parts of the world) the cultivation, education, and formation of just individuals? Have our churches and our governments pursued civic-wide "engineering projects" because of a belief that these will result in good people rather than the moral upbringing of good citizens?
This is not to discount all the things you've observed around the world that make a place "work better" and serve its people better. Surely, the U.S. Constitution (as just one example) was the framework for a just society, and yet its framers remarked that it would only work with, by, and for just citizens. Good people will pursue good things, and they will dream of "shining cities on hills," "undimmed by human tears."
But, I suppose what I'm getting at is whether we should put the cart before the horse, or behind?
Maybe it’s more of an exception to your rule, but I find in more 2nd world countries”low trust” places like Mexico, mixed zoning doesn’t exactly mean chaos. It’s the rural communities that are the most blighted by crime. High density urban centers have plenty of more cohesive mixed used neighborhoods, arguably with less scattershot *violent crime then the US. A good public transit system where people of all classes and interests have to criss cross the city for their daily errands is probably safer than a class stratified city, even a less dense one.
When all classes have to live in the same area, there is skin in the game to ensure safety, adequate policing. Washington DC is all but abandoned by police, even in relatively nicer areas, because the real stakeholders live in northern Virginia and suburbs. Less cross class density actually leads to more crime - look at all those dilapidated rust belt towns with crime rates higher than major metros. Distinctly American problem.
I'd be curious what Chris and his readers might think about the new kinds of towns I describe in my book, A Part-time Job in the Country: Notes Toward a New Way of Life in America, which you can read about here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
As a North American living in Buenos Aires , I was inspired by your writings /interviews to take a long walk to a completely different part of town (Almagro) and visit a famous cafe I’d heard about for years. Enjoyed it immensely. Thank you !
When it comes to what can change and what cannot, it's essential to look beyond policy and regulation and consider the impact the land has had on culture. For example, the plow. It pretty much comes down to countries with plow-based ancestry having less female labour force participation, more traditional views about gender, and slower progress toward gender equality. Part of it is because men took more control of agriculture with the plow. There's more to it, but I'm just throwing it out there for everyone in the community here who wants to think about when it comes to cultural change. It's also worth looking into how wheat and rice affect culture. In rice-farming regions of China, people showed more interdependent thinking, while wheat-farming regions showed more independent thinking, similar to Western cognitive styles. Part of this is because rice farming takes more cooperation.
I bring this up because, obviously, people will talk about religion when it comes to what is easily changed and what isn't--observable behaviours are easier to change than beliefs. And I think we gotta bring this beyond the ways religion affects beliefs and ideologies and how our interaction with the land affects them--especially if we're going to think about how city planning can affect culture.
Always appreciate your writing and work, but I most say as a native Dane that I was a bit disappointed when you mentioned your lack of interest in the Nordic countries in your podcast with Tyler Cowen. Even with your fondness for the cold, and especially functionality they should be the obvious subject to study. Comparing with the US even more so as I can never see America can mimic anything from highly collectivist cultures such as Japan or China.
On footnote 3: I've found sports apparel to be a surprisingly good conversation starter. Since I was a kid I've had this wierd fascination with obscure teams and unusual logos, so last year I bought some retro apparel (a Montreal Expos hat, Quebec Nordiques T-shirt, etc.) People stop me quite often to point them out, though ironically assuming I'm from Canada. The Expos still live on for a lot if people!
Did you have a chance to walk through Providence? I'd be interested to hear your impressions. I lived there five years, at a time the waterfront was being completely redeveloped (partly a project of the elites to make the city more like Boston)
¡Viva La Sombrita! For real, density should be allowed to work where it works, and not forced where it won’t. Problem is, most planning boards consist of hall monitors looking for a last chance power drive. Or straight up crooks with cronies in real estate. Like, quit f###ing trying to put mixed used into Chevy Chase (said the nimbyist)!
Anyhow, great writing—it is truly a pleasure reading it, and I sure hope you keep going. Be well!
I struggle with the assumption here that the government should be playing sim city at all and designing spaces top down. Obviously there are design choices embedded in even basic infrastructure, but this zoning centric perspective seems like it could use some justification (compared to letting people just build and do what they want and seeing what emerges organically).
James C Scott writes persuasively for your camp - the bottom up is always better than top down. I'm certainly aware of the limitation of rigid top-down SimCity. Albany is classic example of that, which I linked to. Brazilia even a more persuasive, and larger, example.
I think you need bottom up contribution -- which is what allowing "loser" zoning is about, such as mixed-use.
But having no plan, whatsoever, is even worse, IMO!
You should, if you haven't already, read Seeing like a State, where Dr Scott argues against top down as being all about authoritarian control. LIke it is in China!
Have you read Alain Bertraud's book Order without Design? He makes a case for a more market driven approach while not denying the role of urban planing.
Honestly, just like how the lack of mixed zoning is a self-fulfilling process in USA, introducing mixed zoning can have the same self-fulfilling effect in the other direction. After a few decades. I have seen examples of better zoned suburbs already existing, I hope that will gradually move US culture away from La Sombrita.