More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis — for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.
Having sunk much of our accumulated collective wealth (our capital) in this living arrangement with no future, we are afraid to let go of it, or even reform it substantially. Instead, the fear of facing our gigantic losses prompts a retreat into denial and wishful thinking.
The object of this way of life was not to grow surplus crops for market, but to achieve a sort of drowsing medieval stability based on self-sufficiency and a dour preoccupation with getting to heaven. The church, or meeting house as they called it, was the center of civic as well as spiritual life, the adhesive that held the town together.
the commercial transfer of property would become the basis of American land-use planning,
Our laws gave the individual clear title to make his own decisions, but they also deprived him of the support of community and custom and of the presence of sacred places.
In carving Savannah out of the Georgia pine woods, James Oglethorpe designed a city based on a grid of twenty-four public squares surrounded by blocks of building lots. Each parklike square was to serve as the focus of a neighborhood. The scheme worked so well that twenty of the twenty-four public squares still stand in the old part of the city, just as Oglethorpe laid them out in 1733.
Love Savannah
The great cities of Europe, long abuilding, were at once centers of political, commercial, ecclesiastical, and military power, and they showed it not just in their finely grained urban fabrics—their plazas, forecourts, esplanades, and galleries—but in the overarching civic consciousness with which buildings and spaces were tied together as an organic whole, reflecting the idea of civilization as a spiritual enterprise.
So the squalor of the industrial city was not exactly a new thing, but the scale and intensity of it was: the roar of furnaces, the clank of machinery, the shrill steam whistles, the speed of locomotives, the coal smoke and the soot that fell like black snow everywhere, the frightening new size of new buildings, and the mushrooming population which strained the physical boundaries of cities everywhere.
In America, with its superabundance of cheap land, simple property laws, social mobility, mania for profit, zest for practical invention, and Bible-drunk sense of history, the yearning to escape industrialism expressed itself as a renewed search for Eden.
With no trees arching over the excessively wide streets, and no focal points to direct the eye, and cars whizzing by at potentially lethal speeds, the modern suburban street is a bleak, inhospitable, and hazardous environment for the pedestrian.
The house itself became a kind of factory for the production of comfort.
What this scheme of growth did have in common with today’s pattern of development was that it consumed open land like crazy, and included almost nothing in the way of civic features—no town centers, squares, artful groupings of buildings to some social purpose, and little consideration of the public realm, except as a conduit for vehicles.
Modernism did its immense damage in these ways: by divorcing the practice of building from the history and traditional meanings of building; by promoting a species of urbanism that destroyed age-old social arrangements and, with them, urban life as a general proposition; and by creating a physical setting for man that failed to respect the limits of scale, growth, and the consumption of natural resources, or to respect the lives of other living things. The result of Modernism, especially in America, is a crisis of the human habitat: cities ruined by corporate gigantism and abstract renewal
...more
Worshiping the machine and industrial methods as ends in themselves, they became the servants of an economy that plundered the future in order to power the engines of production and consumption for the present.
In fact, mechanized farming lent itself to monoculture, the growing of single crops on an ever-larger scale. Consequently, the supply of staple grains soared while the demand stayed relatively constant, and so prices plummeted. Catastrophically, the bottom fell out of American agriculture.
Meanwhile, the farmer was introduced to another new accessory: the mortgage. He suddenly needed to borrow cash each spring to buy the fertilizer that he formerly got for free, to buy pesticides to protect his monoculture crop (which could be wiped out by one kind of bug), and to purchase new mechanical equipment to increase his production to make up for the falling price of his commodities.
By 1940, the percentage of the population on farms fell to 23 percent, and by 1980 it had dwindled to 3 percent. In and of itself, this population shift might not have been a bad thing, but it was accompanied by another terrible cost. A way of life became simply a means of production. Human husbandry gave way to the industrial exploitation of land. Left behind was the knowledge of how to care for land, so plainly evinced in today’s problems of soil erosion and in pollution from chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
Moses liked to ignore the more unpleasant newly discovered facts. Among the most crucial of these was the principle of traffic generation, the mathematical rule that any highway built to alleviate congestion on an earlier existing road, would only succeed in generating a larger aggregate amount of traffic for all roads.
A basic formula of traffic engineering states that one lane of limited-access highway can accommodate 2500 cars per hour, while one lane of light rail can accommodate 40,000 passengers per hour. Cars on Long Island carry an average of 1.1 persons.
jammed into narrow lots on crowded streets, inhabited in some cases by immigrants or, increasingly, African-Americans. Houses like these were losers from the FHA point of view and the agency wouldn’t guarantee mortgages on them. Worse, the evaluation policy tended to disqualify whole neighborhoods, in effect to draw a line around them on the map and say, “Don’t even think of buying here because this part of town is heading down the tubes, and we don’t back losers.” The process came to be called red-lining. It had self-fulfilling consequences.
The houses were spacious compared to city dwellings, and they contained modern conveniences. Air, light, and a modicum of greenery came with the package. The main problem with it was that it dispensed with all the traditional connections and continuities of community life, and replaced them with little more than cars and television.
