Happy City by Charles Montgomery

Source of book: I own this – a gift from my brother-in-law

I was born and raised in a Los Angeles suburb - specifically the San Fernando Valley (of Valley Girl and Free Fallin’) on the north side of the city. Southern California is pretty much ground zero for car culture - and traffic. And, in fact, traffic has gotten substantially worse since I left in the early 1990s. And even more than that, sprawl has accelerated, to the point where many are making commutes of two hours or more. Meanwhile, California has a huge housing shortage in the coastal cities, which has caused housing prices to soar out of the reach of most middle class people, let alone working class. Los Angeles is estimated to have between 50,000 and 100,000 homeless. This is, shall we say, not sustainable.

Happy City is a look at urban planning, and what increases, rather than decreases, human happiness in our urban areas. Montgomery looks at cities around the world, and draws some fascinating conclusions. 

It should be no surprise that our current American approach to city planning is terrible. Long commutes, pollution, and traffic are hardly conducive to happiness. But problematic too are the smaller-level issues. With the exception of a few downtown areas (which tend now to gentrify and become unaffordable to most), our cities are not walkable. You either own a car, or you end up isolated, essentially housebound. I can attest to this from my professional experience. Bakersfield is practically one big suburb, with a pathetic bus system which only works if you live and work near a stop AND can hit exact times to get on and off. Or you can easily wait an hour or longer for another. And that is all we have as far as public transportation. And good luck if you want to live in a dense area. We have (by my count), all of two residential buildings of more than three stories - in a metropolitan area with 800,000 people. And those two buildings are a public housing apartment tower, and a senior living complex. Oh, and I think we only have three commercial buildings more than five stories high. Density is not our thing, which is why farmland has disappeared at an alarming rate.

I mention all this to just give a bit of a picture of the problem. Happy City gets much more into the details, of course, and looks at both the root causes of and ways to fix the problem.

To begin with, Montgomery notes that we have seen a massive privatization of public space. For example, roads once were open to everyone, regardless of their method of travel. Now, that space is mostly reserved for private cars. Urban design itself has been remade to favor automobiles: mandated parking, which increases distance between buildings; neighborhoods built around car ownership rather than walkability; segregation of shopping, employment, and housing; gated communities to keep parks private rather than public; and so on. Here in Bakersfield, the results are pretty obvious. It is nearly impossible to function without a car, we have a high pedestrian and bicycle rider fatality and injury rate, we have some of the highest pollution in the nation, and the cost of maintaining our roads means our pavement is crumbling.

The social costs are high too. Compared to my childhood, I really don’t know my neighbors that well, and kids don’t tend to play in the streets. (Obviously, technology and overscheduling are factors, but so is the trend toward front yards being for show, not common use.)  Oh, and commutes don’t help either. When people aren’t home, they can’t really interact.

None other than Adam Smith (whose legacy has been co-opted by Social Darwinist economists) pointed out that our human conscience comes from our social relationships. If you want to understand at least a part of our current hate-filled xenophobic moment, it helps to realize that we don’t really live with each other that much - we live in our cubicles and our cars, and then in front of our televisions. (Or books in my case…) Our cities do not, by and large, foster interaction. The author quotes Aristotle on this point:

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

I very much agree that our social connections are in many ways contracting. The internet has actually worked against the general trend, by giving alternate ways to connect, but the problem itself existed before the internet. It was created in significant part by our design around cars - everyday interactions happen less when you go from garage to garage to parking lot to parking lot.

Montgomery also examines why we ended up with cities carefully segregated. And I don’t mean primarily by race, but by function. Careful separation of the commercial and industrial from the residential. Careful separation of low income tenement housing from the wealthy - can’t have the dirty poor infect you, right? And yes, the use of redlining, zoning, building regulations, and other methods to keep the skin colors separate. (There is a section on this exact issue.) What this has come to mean is that there is really very little freedom when it comes to how cities grow and develop. Things stay the same by the force of law, custom, and habits. The author quotes Georgia Tech professor Ellen Dunham- Jones:

“We have not had a free market in real estate for eighty years. And because it is illegal to build in a different way, it takes an immense amount of time for anyone who wants to do it to get changes in zoning and variance. Time is money for developers, so it rarely happens.”

The result, the author points out, is this:

Together, these rules and habits have ensured that the American city is as separated and static as any Soviet-era housing scheme. They have ensured that first-generation suburbs closer to downtowns do not grow more diverse or dense. They have pushed new development out to the ever-expanding urban frince and beyond...and they have ensured that these new developments will, in turn, resist most efforts to change or adapt them over time.

The factors compound each other too. In one chapter, the author mentions a study that put the ideal commute time at about 16 minutes. Which I agree with, by the way. That number is also my typical commute - for all its sprawl, Bakersfield hasn’t yet developed crippling traffic. I have considered alternatives to my car, but they are not great. Biking in lawyer clothes isn’t feasible, and I don’t have a shower at work. But even during the good weather (we top 105 regularly during the summer), I worry I would get hit by our inattentive drivers. And I already mentioned the sorry state of our transit.

Come to think of it, why IS transit so poor most places in the United States? Again, we have a self-feeding loop. Because transit sucks, the only people who use it are those who have no choice. Which then means low ridership and a stigma in the bargain. And without riders, budgets are low, so the equipment tends to be bare-bones. As the author puts it:

When transit is seen as a handout to the poor, politicians tend not to invest beyond the most basic levels of service.

In contrast, in a city where everyone rides, there is a shared commitment to making transit work well. The one metro area in California where this works at least a bit is the Bay Area, which has sufficient busses, trams, and trains to serve at least the city centers. It is possible to leave one’s car and take transit all day in San Francisco - we have done it often when we visit. Even better are European cities - I have never driven a car in Europe, because the transit is good and the cities are walkable.

Another point by the author that I strongly agree with is that we have become far too fixated on astronomically expensive subways, rather than looking at the obvious: we have plenty of places to run trams, trains, and busses: we just need to remove the cars from them. If I could run the city of Los Angeles, that would be my approach. Shut down a bunch of lanes - and roads - and run transit. Speeds would be far faster than the gridlock they have right now, and cost would be far lower.

The main obstacle to this kind of thinking is, of course, that those entrenched interests who benefit from our current subsidies of car ownership aren’t all that interested in giving way for anyone else. The author ties this into a general problem of the last 50 or so years, where we assume that private wealth has more right to our space than everyone else.

Who should share in the public wealth of the city? Who should have access to parks and beautiful places? Who should have the privilege of easy mobility? The questions are as much political as philosophical.

The author quotes one-time mayor of Bogota and reformer Penalosa as advocating for a radical vision of fairness.

“One of the requirements for happiness is equality. Maybe not equality of income, but equality of quality of life and, more than that, an environment where people don’t feel inferior, where people don’t feel excluded….We’re telling people, ‘You are important - not because you’re rich, but because you are human.’”

This is so very true. And, given our national history of obsession with making people feel their inferiority, it is easy to see why reform has been so difficult.

I also loved Montgomery’s recognition of who suffers most from these inequalities. The elderly and children lose safe mobility. Minority neighborhoods tend to lack sidewalks, crosswalks, and signals, making them more dangerous. He notes that this has led to a much higher pedestrian fatality rate for African American children in Atlanta - because crosswalks might require a detour of two miles, children would dash across the busy roads.

In what should come as no surprise, a major force against reform in urban design turns out to be...wait for it...the Tea Party movement! (Did you see that coming? I certainly did.) Here in California, it is the Right which opposes pretty much any spending on public transit. Or even raising gas taxes high enough to cover road maintenance costs. Those Republicans LOVE their welfare - the heavy subsidies of their lifestyles. And, they turn out to actually love near-totalitarian government...when it benefits them. As already noted, our city planning is centralized, and strict, and the pure opposite of free. (This whole chapter is fascinating - and the conspiracy theories spouted by the Tea Partiers are nuts.)

I have experienced this first hand, living in a fairly conservative city. (Very conservative by California standards.) You wonder why we have no high apartment buildings? Well, that’s because getting a permit for one is practically impossible. Not just because of regulations, but because the NIMBY contingent will come out and protest anything that looks like letting low income people live near them. And that includes building low-rise apartments next to single-family detached homes. Seriously! Or the most ridiculous one yet: our local state university, which was once at the edge of town, but is now mostly surrounded, has a large amount of undeveloped space - intentionally, so that it could expand. They are building some dorms. On their own land. To house college students. And the nearby residents are losing their shit over it. God forbid a college houses college students on campus!

But this is writ large all across our state. California desperately needs to increase density as our population grows - particularly in the coastal cities where the jobs are booming. But get this:

80% of our residential-zoned land is zone for single family homes only.

Say what?? We have some of the most populous urban areas in the world, to say nothing of the nation, and it’s nearly all sprawl. So far, attempts to force localities to allow five story apartments near transit have not succeeded. Eventually, I believe they will, because something has to give. If you already own a house in LA, I guess you are set, but younger people cannot afford to live there. So people are living in cars, RVs, and on the streets.

These are all complex issues with difficult solutions. But ultimately, the status quo cannot be sustained - and my children’s generation know this. What is needed is what they have: a shift in the way of thinking. As the author puts it, our current system seems designed as though the city existed purely for commerce, rather than for the people that commerce was thought to enrich. The city needs to belong to all of us.

To get there, we need to stop measuring the success of a city by its median income, or its property values, but by the happiness of those who live there - and that means everyone, not just the wealthiest.

I highly recommend this book as a starting point for the discussion. While Montgomery shows the problems well, and offers a look at ways they have been addressed around the world, this book isn’t intended as a detailed blueprint. And it is unclear if a single blueprint will work everywhere. Montgomery’s central point is excellent, however. We have made poor decisions in how we plan our cities, and have created a situation where fixing them will be difficult.

Overcoming regulation, inertia, and public opinion will be a tough task - but the conversation is already shifting as it becomes obvious that the status quo is unacceptable, particularly for the next generation. California has started to explore some options, as our very success as the world’s fifth largest economy has exposed the weakness in our current model. But we have the opportunity to find ways to make positive and innovative change, as we have in the past.

***

Just a fun article that is related: what if, instead of designing our cities around male breadwinners commuting to a 9-5 job, we built them around everyone else? After all, there are more women, children, and elderly than working-age males...

***

One more thing: I actually like cars. I love driving, for the most part. I wrench on my own vehicles, and drive a stick shift.

But by “driving” I mean propelling the car forward at a reasonable speed on the open road. I do not mean sitting in traffic, because that just plain sucks. And, for that matter, while I don’t mind driving to and from work (as I said, I have a short commute and flexible hours, so traffic is rarely an issue on an average day), I would be fine with catching transit or biking to work - I’ve driven that road a lot.

I also HATE trying to find parking. Which is why my preference would be to use transit in San Francisco (or other major cities) whenever possible. Now if LA would just get its act together…

How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

I’m almost making a habit of reading modern novelists’ non-fiction works before I read their fiction. (See, for example, David Foster Wallace.) I’m not sure after this that I am dying to read The Replacements, but it’s not because I disliked this book. On the contrary, I rather enjoyed this collection of essays. But they are short, and the novels tend to be long, and I have just a little hesitation about whether the style would wear thin after 300 pages. Actually, this is more of a concern with Wallace than with Franzen, because Wallace seems to like a more experimental form, which I enjoy in smaller doses. Franzen is pretty straight forward, and if his essays are any indication, is ruthlessly organized in his plotting.  

This collection contains works from roughly 15-20 years ago, which means that the cultural references will often take you back to 1995 or so. The middle of the Clinton years, so to speak, and the years when I was in law school, trying to be the good conservative kid, while progressively realizing just how screwed up the cult we were in was. Also, eventually moving out, getting a job, and getting married. Quite the transition time for me, and, as it would later turn out, the nation.

It was kind of weird, given my own experiences of the time, to read the perspective of someone who combined the role of “cranky old man” with the politics of a liberal - one that had a lot in common with 2016 Bernie Sanders, in fact. Maybe it was the fact that even now, most of the cranky old men griping about the young people tend to be conservative. Or that most of the old men - particularly the cranky ones - that I know, are both strongly Republican and lean toward retrograde ideas about gender and race. Or that the Right at this point in time is dominated demographically with old white men. So the “old white male liberal” is a bit of a new experience.

On that note, what I found the most off-putting about Franzen is the cranky old man act. But, to be fair, he knows he is a cranky old man. So he asserts his crankiness while trying to defuse it by acknowledging his own bias. I was simultaneously irritated at him while being forced to grant that he too was criticizing himself. I forgot to write down a quote to illustrate this, but if you read the book, you’ll recognize it.

Probably this tendency comes out most in his most famous essay, entitled “Why Bother,” which originally ran in Harper’s under the name of “Perchance to Dream,” a title Franzen did not pick, and didn’t like. The version in this book has been edited and shortened from the original. Franzen intended to make it a bit more clear, and less wordy - although it is still really long, something I should know considering the length of some of my posts. I actually found this particular essay to be one of the weaker ones. It’s decent, and it makes a number of excellent points about culture, literary works, and so on. The strongest part, in my opinion, is a conversation with Shirley Heath that is recounted, on the topic of what makes good fiction resonate. To quote extensively from Heath on the feedback she had received about literature, works of fiction are

“the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically. From Agamemnon forward, for example, we’ve been having to deal with the conflict between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to the state. And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They’re everything pop psychology is not...This is precisely what readers are saying: that reading good fiction is like reading a particularly rich section of a religious text. What religion and good fiction have in common is that the answers aren’t there, there isn’t closure.”

It is no accident, in my opinion, that the great religious texts rely so heavily on the story. Easy answers are hard to find in real life, and the easier the answer, the more likely that it is complete bullshit. In fact, most of the “easy” answers are only easy because they disregard most of the issues. Things are usually much more easy when you can dismiss the consequences to other people or other groups. (See, for a modern example, the fact that the “easy” answer of “no more Muslim refugees in our town/state/nation” is only easy if you disregard the needs of the refugees. If their deaths are okay with you, then I guess the answer is easy…)

This has been my quibble with American religion over the last decade. Evangelicalism seems premised (in practice) on the belief that the answers to all of life’s deepest questions are easy, that the answers are universally known, and the only reason their particular answers (spiritual and political) are not universally accepted is that the other side is wholly evil. Not only does this not match with reality, but it seems contradictory to the scripture we have, which is nothing if not full of messy, messy stories with no easy answers. To force it into a straitjacket they way the Evangelical Industrial Complex has is to do violence to the text and to the intent of the writers. Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox on this one.

Also on the topic of literature and readers is “The Reader In Exile.” Although it has its anti-technology moments, Franzen does his best to avoid the worst of this tendency. What is more interesting is his exploration of who the readers are in our society. Some, like me, are readers because we grew up with books and were raised by readers. Others, though, became readers as a means of self-preservation - and many of these end up becoming writers. It’s a fascinating essay, whether you agree with Franzen or not. One line was especially memorable.

Blaming the novel’s eclipse on infernal technologies and treasonous literary critics, as Birkerts does, will not undo the damage. Neither will the argument that reading enriches us. Ultimately, if novelists want their work to be read, the responsibility for making it attractive and imperative is solely their own.

I have wondered what Franzen would make of the fact that, 20 years after he wrote this, it is his generation, the Baby Boomers, who are least likely to have read a book in the last year, then either Gen X (my generation) or the Millennials. I think the kids are alright. It’s the grownups I worry about.

I should mention a few of the other essays. If you read nothing else in this book, please, please read “My Father’s Brain.” Franzen tells the story of his father’s Alzheimer’s Disease, and how it impacted the rest of the family. This is, hands down, one of the most haunting - and accurate - depiction of the reality of dementia that I have read. It is unflinchingly honest, and yet compassionate. I work in elder law, and deal with the legal side of these issues, and Franzen nails it. Everyone should read this essay.

Also fascinating was “Imperial Bedroom,” a response to the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. Franzen was horrified by what he viewed as an intrusion of the private on the public. In his view, it wasn’t that the parties’ right to privacy had been violated, but that the public’s right to have some areas of life free from the dirt of private relationships had been breached. In perhaps the most understandable “cranky-old-man” instance, he felt that this was part of a greater problem, exemplified by Viagra ads, a general lack of boundaries between what was for public consumption, and what was private. And it was the public sphere that suffered, not the private. I’m not entirely certain that I agree on this point. Sometimes the private is very relevant to the public. (These days, the age and power differential is the most relevant, not the sex itself.) But his feeling that there is no “public” place to escape from the private smut is warranted.

The better part of this essay, though, was his clear-headed analysis of the “declining privacy” hoax. I’ll lay it out for you. There is a truism that modern technology/culture/consumerism has lead to a terrifying loss of our privacy. This is poppycock. Anyone who has lived in a small town knows that it has never been easier to retain one’s privacy. A modern city dweller like myself may reveal a bit about me in this blog, or on Facebook. Sure, my purchasing habits are known by faceless global corporations. But for the most part, my business is my business.

In a small town, it wouldn’t be Walmart corporate that knows what brand of deodorant I wear. It would be likely every other person in town. If my client has a child out of wedlock that she places for adoption, a few people will know, and there will be a (confidential) government record somewhere. But in a small town, everyone would know, and if she couldn’t leave town, her life would be forever irrevocably changed.

Similarly, in our modern world, it is easier to go against the culture of one’s tribe without losing everything. My wife and I left fundamentalism, and we have paid some prices with certain friends and family. But in a small town, we probably would have had to cut all our ties and never come back. Now, these decisions are considered “private” in a way they weren’t before. One need not pretend to a religion one does not believe in order to avoid being burned at the stake.

Franzen’s very best point, though, is that what we talk about as “privacy” issues are not really about privacy at all. They are about liberty. Franzen breaks down the so-called “privacy” torts, and makes a good argument that they are actually about freedom. Freedom from trespass, defamation, and theft, specifically. From there, he argues that our fears of loss of privacy actually correspond better to fear of the specific harm inflicted. To give an easy example, I am not really worried that someone might know my social security number. It’s that someone might use that number to steal from me by taking my money or running up debt in my name. I’m not really afraid that my DNA might be analyzed, but afraid that the information therein would be used to deny me health insurance or a job. That BevMo knows my alcohol preferences doesn’t threaten me, but the idea that I might be denied a civil right because of what I drink is problematic. It isn’t the information, it’s what is done with the information.

I really should mention “Lost In The Mail” as another excellent essay. Franzen tells the story of the great US Mail debacle in Chicago, where mail was being buried, burned, and all kinds of things other than delivered. He didn’t do the investigative reporting on the case, but doggone does he tell the story well. It is moments like this that made me seriously consider getting his novels. He can tell a compelling story, even about the Postal Service, and make it thrilling.

Just a quick mention of a few others. “Erika Imports” is about his job as a teen working for an eccentric German immigrant entrepreneur couple. (That’s a lot of long words in a row, but that is the best description.) “Sifting the Ashes” is about tobacco, his addiction, and the overheated politics. “First City” is an interesting musing on the good and bad of New York City, and cities in general. It’s nice to see someone advocate for cities, rather than sugarcoating the small town and the all-white suburb. “Scavenging” is about finding and re-purposing old junk as a starving writer. And about obsolescence. And other things. It’s good. “Control Units” is a frightening inside look at the Prison Industrial Complex. One of the issues about which I have parted ways with my former political tribe is on the astoundingly high incarceration rates in our country. This essay predates our current criminal reform movement by a couple of decades, but the link of prisons and money was apparent even then. “Meet Me In St. Louis” is about the promotional filming he did for Oprah’s show before he was dis-invited. I love the exposure of the contrived nature of the biopic, and the complex emotional landscape of returning to roots one has both left and ultimately rejected. Like the description of his father, the moments involving his childhood home are lacerating and real. “Inauguration Day, January 2001” tells of tagging along with a Socialist protest of the George W. Bush inauguration.

There is one final essay I really have to mention in more detail. “Books In Bed” is a hilarious sendup of sex advice books and magazine articles. And sex writing in general. I feel I have found a kindred spirit in my dislike for modern sex scenes in books. Look, I’m no prude these days. My objection is most definitely not based on moral considerations. My objection is based, as is Franzen’s, on aesthetic considerations. Because sex scenes are almost always such terrible writing. To re-purpose a really awful music and sex joke, sex scenes are a bit like premature ejaculation, because you can feel them coming but can’t do anything about it. (Sorry, don’t mean to offend, but the metaphor really fits.) The whole time, it’s “no, no, please, don’t!”

Likewise, sex advice is usually terrible. Beyond terrible. Laughably bad. But it isn’t intended to be useful so much as to relieve anxiety.

I think Franzen really nails the root issue of our modern sexual anxieties.

Sexual anxiety is primal; physical love has always carried the risk that one’s most naked self will be rejected. If Americans today are especially anxious, the consensus seems to be that it’s because of “changing sex roles” and “media images of sex” and so forth. In fact, we’re simply experiencing the anxieties of a free market. Contraception and the ease of divorce have removed the fetters from the economy of sex, and, like citizens of present-day Dresden and Leipzig, we all want to believe we’re better off under a regime in which even the poorest man can dream of wealth. But as the old walls of repression tumble down, many Americans - discarded first wives, who are like the workers displaced from a Trabant factory; or sexually inept men, who are the equivalent of command-economy bureaucrats - have grown nostalgic for the old state monopolies. What are The Rules if not an attempt to reregulate an economy run scarily amok?

This is a brilliant metaphor! I firmly believe that mankind is better off under a free (if regulated) market rather than command-economy Communism. I’m not eager to go back to the Soviet days anywhere. And likewise, I am a Feminist, and I would not seek to go back to the days when women were essentially bought and sold like property - but had more of a guarantee of lifetime financial support in exchange for their monogamy and tolerance of the promiscuity of males. I would not deny abused women the right to divorce, nor would I abolish contraception, which has also done much to grant women control of their destiny.

But I would not deny that the crumbling of Patriarchy and Soviet Communism has resulted in displacement and anxiety. With freedom comes a certain loss in security. The old relationships must be renegotiated. And there are losers even if most are winners.

I think Franzen is absolutely correct that a major loser in the new sexual economy are sexually inept men. On the one hand, men without wealth have an easier time of it, but on the other, it isn’t enough to be a rich white man to guarantee marital and sexual success. I’ll confess that I have experienced this anxiety, being a short and not particularly attractive man. Once upon a time, I could simply work hard and become successful, and I could “buy” a woman for my wife. Now, I have to earn it sexually as well as financially. And that brings performance anxiety. (To be fair, I actually ended up finding a woman who wanted me, so the anxiety turned out in practice to be seriously overblown. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it.) But while the risk of failure exists in this scenario, either through inability to attract a mate or inability to keep one, the payoff is (in my opinion) worth it.

Franzen’s point that the old “winners” of the previous system find themselves on the outs, and therefore focus on returning the old system rather than adapt is outstanding. This explains pretty much the entire Christian Patriarchy movement. Seriously, though, read this essay. It’s outstanding.

This book was a good introduction to Jonathan Franzen. I think I will have to read some of his fiction now. There is a vulnerability about his introspection and self-awareness that is refreshing, and his writing is fantastic. Even though I do not fall on the same part of the political spectrum as he does, I think he has plenty to say to us all about our times and our politics and about life in general.

City Life by Witold Rybczynski

Source of book: I own this.

Occasionally, my wife brings home random books that were available for next to nothing. In this case, the book was one that I wanted to read, but had been planning to check out from the library. However, considering it cost 50 cents or less, it was actually more economical that the gas to travel to the library.

If I had to describe myself, I would have to say that I am not a country boy. I was raised primarily in the Los Angeles area, but I don’t think I am exactly a stereotypical urban denizen either. Like a great many in this country, I grew up in suburbia. I have lived in detached houses on individual lots, and traveled by car rather than public transportation. I have always spent time in the outdoors, including the wilderness, so I am not really a “slicker,” but I haven’t ever really experienced small town or rural life.

Anyway, one important skill to have if one wishes to live in a large, sprawling city like Los Angeles is that of navigation. Getting from one place to another can be a bit of a task if one does not know the basic layout of freeways and streets. I honed this skill as a child, and even then became interested in maps and how cities were structured. I was interested enough that I used to spend weeks drawing my own cities, towns, and subdivisions on dozens of attached sheets of paper. (I seem to have lost these, but I still have a collection of house plans I designed while in Junior High, complete with exterior elevations. I considered studying engineering before settling on the law.) And then, eventually, I became hooked on SimCity. I spent many hours playing around with different layouts and ideas, from cities with grids to cities designed to maximize property values. 

The original Sim City. Anyone else remember this?

But how do cities get their structure in the first place? To what degree did a master plan such as those I created play a role, and how much just happened?

Rybczynski explores a limited facet of this question in this book. A complete history of the development of cities would take multiple volumes, so he focuses on the development of the city in the United States. He also brings in cities such as Venice and Paris on occasion as a contrast or illustration.

I became acquainted with Rybczynski through his occasional articles on architecture in publications such as the Atlantic and the New York Times. He has an intriguingly international background, born to Polish parents Edinburgh, raised in London. He taught architecture in Montreal for a couple decades, before moving to Pennsylvania. I found that his writing was accessible, but informative. City Life was written nearly 20 years ago, and is one of several of his books that I would love to read.

There is plenty of interesting history in this book, with a particular focus on the designs and redesigns of Chicago. Time is also spent on important designers such as Frederick Law Olmstead, and on influential writers such as Tocqueville and Le Corbusier.

One new thing I learned was the origin of the word “ghetto.” The first, created in Venice to house Jewish refugees, was called the New Ghetto: the New Foundry or ironworks.

I also found interesting the three types of layout philosophies as described by Kevin Lynch. The first is the symbolic layout, such as Washington DC and other capitals in the old and new world, designed to symbolize some idea, religion, or philosophy. (DC shows the separation of powers, for example.) Second is the practical layout, which usually is in the form of a grid, and is calculated to maximize practical use. The third is the organic layout, which characterizes medieval towns which grew around the terrain, and is often characterized by crooked streets. All three can be found in cities throughout the world. Los Angeles itself shows characteristics of all of the layouts in different places.

History sometimes reveals surprises, and the biggest one in this book was the fact that several of the supposed “modern” ills of American cities were not in fact caused by the automobile, but existed long before. For example, sprawl began immediately. Christopher von Graffenried, the Swiss baron who founded New Bern, commented that “in America they do not like to live crowded, in order to enjoy a purer air, I accordingly ordered the streets to be very broad and the houses well separated from one from the other.” He wrote this in 1710.

Another surprise in this vein was that homogeneity of culture and consumption pre-dated television, malls, mass retailers, and mail order catalogues - to say nothing of the internet and the automobile. Tocqueville attributed this to the “spirit of equality.” In the 1830s.

The author also spent time on housing projects, poverty, and race. While I grew up in a poorer, primarily minority area of town, I never lived in a true ghetto, and certainly nothing approaching a true housing project

My knowledge of the horror of the “projects” comes primarily from books such as The Cross and the Switchblade by the late David Wilkerson and The End of Youngblood Johnson, which was a pretty bleak inside view. As Rybczinski points out, the problem with the projects wasn’t primarily an architectural issue - although they were often ugly - but one of stigmatization. The high rise blocks contributed to social isolation by concentrating the impoverished and removing them from mixed neighborhoods. By making the projects radically different from the housing for middle class, it made a line of demarcation. Unsurprisingly, the upwardly aspiring residents soon left for less stigmatized housing, while the projects ended up collecting and concentrating the poorest of the poor, with many soon housing welfare cases only. 

The infamous Cabrini Green project in Chicago.

 

This issue continues to be an important challenge in urban planning. There is a tension between those who wish to live in homogenous neighborhoods and those who wish to see more diversity of race, social, and economic status. I have seen a rise lately in the number of communities that are gated, in an attempt to keep the “undesirables” out. One wonders if this is a continuation of the same impulse that led many of the early planned developments to have racial restrictions in the deeds. (Even though these were ruled unenforceable in 1917, some developers continued to put racial restrictions in deeds until 1948. I actually ran across one of these deeds in one of my cases a couple of years ago. It was for a development near Mission Bay in San Diego. Right there on the deed: no “Negroes” can own the property or be a member of the property owners’ association.)

As the author points out, the suburbs are far more mixed than popularly believed. I certainly can attest that here in California, many - probably most - middle and lower middle class neighborhoods are an interesting mix. The problem for cities remains dealing with the “ghettos.”  This book is not a social science prescription, and the author simply notes the issues and the ways that architects and city planners have attempted to address the issue. If there was an easy, simple answer, then I suspect we would already be using it.

This book is a quick read, full of interesting history and ideas. It isn’t too technical, but focuses more on the stories than on the details of design.