Is It Possible for Us to Go Back to the Future?
As Los Angeles, that mass of exurban concrete, prepares to create a downtown avenue along Grand Avenue, Jane Jacobs, a thinker who envisioned happily conflated urban environments, has died. Writes the New York Times in its obituary:
In her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.
In spite of my living in an exurban area--brought here sixteen years ago by my denomination to start a new congregation where people were coming to live, I embrace Jacobs's vision. Triggered initially by the post-World War Two deterioration of core city infrastructure, the emergence of a baby-booming middle class who thought that bigger was better, and the flight of whites away from blacks then beginning to populate the industrial North, our metropolitan areas have become often depressing concrete landscapes. Like locusts we eat, discard, and abandon central cities and succeeding ring communities, gobbling up farmland and small communities along the way, leaving in our wake empty buildings, pawn shops, and check-cashing salons.
The whole exurbanizing process, of course, is highly dependent on the internal combustion engine. But with newer communities composed of ever-larger houses being built all the time, commutes of an hour or more per day are becoming commonplace for many workers.
The result of all this, of course, is a technologically-enabled privatism that I'm convinced leads to the destruction of community and all the benefits that accrue from people living, working, playing, worshiping, and entertaining together.
Today, President Bush delivered a major speech with proposals on how to break America's dependence on oil. Whether the proposals are worthy or not, I leave to others to discuss. But surely one way our petroleum addiction can be ended is if we embrace Jacobs's vision of moving back into our cities together, curbing our need for more and more fuel.
A whole lot of other costs might be reduced as well.
But more than that, I think that our souls would be enriched. Imagine what it might be like if we all used sidewalks to go to parks by foot, meeting our neighbors along the way, passing the local school, slipping into the local theater for a movie or trekking to the stadium for a baseball game, dropping by the deli to pick up cold cuts for our packed lunches which we would enjoy either at home as telecommuters or at our offices, also within walking distance. On the weekends, we could ride to the country reclaimed for farming and conservancies.
Gertrude Stein once said derisively of Oakland, California, "There is no there there." Unfortunately, that's true of most of the places where we Americans live these days. But if we began to pursue Jacobs's ambitious, back-to-the-future vision, that wouldn't have to be the case.
[Here is a link to the Washington Post's informative obituary.]