What’s Wrong with the World

God Bless you, Culbreath.

A return to the city built for the ambulatory man, as opposed to the city built for automobile, is a big step; but of course, we can hardly neglect cars completely. So there is a balance here that the ideal city aims at.

Most of the social areas I know of IRL are based around a shared interest-- church, school, hobby, etc-- and they still often have to have at least token charges or a membership policy to enter just so they're allowed to keep out thugs, drugs or jerks.

Part of why I do most of my socializing online, sadly. We don't have enough of a shared culture for a public space to be used freely-- there's ALWAYS someone who will, er, deposit fecal matter in the pool.

Perhaps five years ago I did some reading in the sort of people who want to revive cities, etc.

If I may say so, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now that the issues Jeff raises here briefly about the homeless and drug addicts are insufficiently well-addressed by approaches to this problem that focus mainly on a) aesthetics and, relatedly, b) dislike of cars.

You _cannot_ make a city good by aesthetic means. I would go so far as to say that you cannot even _begin_ to do it. The idea that you can is, in fact, non-Christian. Why do I say that? Well, consider the phenomenon of government programs that give nice houses to people who trash them. The nice living environment didn't make the people different from what they already were, so they trashed the nice houses. External environment doesn't make people different, though a philosophy that rejects the fallenness of man assumes that external environment can do exactly that.

If you clean up some city, put in these "new urban" spaces inside, ban the cars, etc., the people will be the same people they were before. If the drug addicts and homeless were hanging out in the uglier downtown, making it un-ugly won't by itself stop them from hanging out there, spraying graffiti, etc. (I was really shocked at all the graffiti in the lovely European town of Leuven in the summer of 2009, by the way.)

So it seems to me that the purely aesthetic approach is, if nothing else, very seriously incomplete. If we're to "fix" a city, we need to ask what to do about the people who are already messing up its atmosphere. And we need to ask this first, before we just give them a prettier atmosphere to mess up.

Virginia in 1776 had a population of only 20,000,

That's impossible. I cannot seem to locate an actual value, but most sources agree that the 13 colonies had 2.4 million, and Virginia had the largest population. VA, NY, and MA dwarfed all the others in population.

I agree with Lydia that you need to change the people to even hope to change the cities. That being said, it would help to ALSO change some features of the space and arrangements. Cars are not evil, but they do create some issues that have to be solved. If we could start from scratch (I know, highly unrealistic), I think perhaps we might set up enclaves of residence/living business that don't have cars where everyone uses electric scooters and bikes to move around, and major roads, trains, buses, trolleys, whatever between and around the enclaves. By "living businesses" I mean small businesses that cater directly to personal needs: barbers, restaurants, dry cleaners, etc, not industrial, not huge warehouses.

One of the problems of modern cities is that there is little permanence (comparatively speaking). If Joe down the street lives there more than 10 years, that's a lot, and it's darn near certain that his kids will live miles and miles away, if not altogether in another state. I have no clue how to turn this feature of life around, I really don't, but it clearly adds to the dissociation in cities.

Christopher Alexander spent much of his career as an academic architect examining this very question. There are hundreds of answers. He and some of his grad students organized and presented them in a classic book called "A Pattern Language." It's really just a list of patterns in the built environment, at all scales - from highways down to flatware - that are found in situations where people report feeling "right," and where they want to linger. The findings are in natural history: Alexander and his team conducted research, interviews, surveys, etc.

What is a pattern? E.g.: 5 inch trim. If the trim around doors and windows is less than 5 inches wide, it feels insubstantial and flimsy, and makes us uncomfortable; more, and it makes us feel oppressed and weighed down. E.g.: sidewalks should be separated from busy streets by a solid concrete or stone barrier at least 18 inches high, preferably more. When such barriers are absent, pedestrian traffic is strongly discouraged. E.g.: trees in plazas should not be planted on the nodes of a regular grid; the notion of regular grids contradicts the nature of trees.

It's an expensive book, but I highly recommend it, because it is absolutely fascinating. It will make you conscious of many, many things you have always known, but never suspected. Reading the book, again and again I had that delicious experience of recognition: "Of COURSE! Of COURSE that's true. How _obvious_. How clever!" It will educate your eye about the built environment. You'll find yourself in a place you really like, and looking around you'll be able to see why; and vice versa.

Most of the egregious violations of the syntax of the Pattern Language that occur in modern cities are attributable to the breakdown of tradition, of one sort or another.

There is of course much more to a livable polis than the way it is built. But there is a strong positive feedback relation between the built environment and social hygiene, whether for good or ill. A few alterations in the built environment can have a huge impact on social health. San Pablo Avenue is a long boulevard that runs from downtown Oakland north to Richmond, California, a mile or two inland from the east shore of San Francisco Bay. 30 years ago it was a wasteland. Boarded up shops and clouds of litter were the least of it. People were shooting up and defecating on the sidewalks, that's how bad it was. Emeryville and Berkeley started planting sycamore trees along the sidewalks and in the median strip. Oakland and Albany soon followed suit, along their stretches (some spots are still being filled in). It turned the street around. Today, it is more and more a leafy, amiable place, with many bustling businesses, lots of foot traffic, new apartment buildings in the old vacant lots, cafes with tables outside; and a cheerful mood. It's really amazing to see the difference. There are still some lousy and dangerous residential neighbourhoods on either side, that still make a deleterious contribution to the demographic of the street, but these too are being penetrated by the predominating virtue, and the streets are cleaner, safer, greener, tidier. Bit by bit, the change happens, and spreads. It's neat to see that sort of thing happening.

There are certainly competing goods here. On the one hand, there's the good of having one's own property (by which I mean a yard or garden) in which one's children and their friends (and oneself and one's friends) can play and associate. Massive individual green spaces tend to be at odds with urban settings, but yards in general don't seem to be, I think. On the other hand, yards are space, and space stretches things out, and that makes walking more difficult. But I think a good city has to accommodate both public and private green spaces in at least certain areas. Cities without enough trees are just unbearable.

Well, consider the phenomenon of government programs that give nice houses to people who trash them.

Two words: property values. The only dependable way to keep property nice is to have it privately owned and maintain its value too high for riff-raff to occupy. That's certainly the key for residential property. I think the same thing goes for commercial or mixed-use property: valuable improvements maintained by people with the resources to keep thugs away. It may sound cruel, but cities need some kind of slums: mixed-income property areas, or areas that can't be made to hold value, inevitably decline. People who cannot or will not care for infrastructure and obey the laws dependably need to be compelled, even if only by soft social pressure, to live somewhere that doesn't interfere with everyone else. Actually, one of the best ways to insulate a neighborhood is fairly simple: don't build roads that connect it to other neighborhoods. The nicest neighborhood in my good-sized Southern hometown might as well be a lake: it's impossible to enter it on one side and come out in the corresponding place on the other side. But if you do it the other way this can lead to lawsuits: Memphis was sued in the 70s over the roadway patterns in and out of several predominantly black neighborhoods.

Of course, there are lots of more mundane matters. Straight roads, for instance: nothing drives me battier than the mindless twists and turns of modern subdivision streets (and too many urban core streets). Roads that are wide enough to account for population growth. Residential communities centered around common focal points: churches, libraries, parks. Street-level storefronts (like used to be seen downtown in every city), not strip malls (which rarely do anything but kill neighborhoods). Attractive buildings.

Public spaces can work, but you need some way to insulate them from anti-social types.

Virginia in 1776 had a population of only 20,000,

That's impossible.

But it must be true! I found it on Answers.com! http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_population_of_Virginia_in_1776

Another source mentions that Virginia had a population of 78,000 in 1710, but went into decline when Jamestown lost the capitol. http://www.localhistories.org/colonialamerica.html

The 2.4MM figure for the 13 colonies, according to Wiki, includes native Indians and slaves. Not sure about the other numbers.

Another source maintains there were 576,000 blacks in the colonies in 1780, but doesn't specify how many were slaves: http://www.fpri.org/orbis/4702/taylor.peoplebritishamerica1700.html

External environment doesn't make people different, though a philosophy that rejects the fallenness of man assumes that external environment can do exactly that.

Lydia, there is a synergy here. See Kristor's fascinating remarks and buy that book he recommends. Environments change people, and people change environments. Obviously aesthetic changes alone are not enough. But a population that appreciates beauty, order, proportion - "pattern language" - enough to change its own environment is a population that is already changed itself.

Ironically, the curvy suburban mazes that drive Titus and me nuts were promoted as a more humane alternative to the urban grid, and as a way to keep residential neighbourhoods impenetrable to anyone but their denizens, so as to keep them more secure. They were also, it was suggested, likelier to promote street life, make it safer for kids to play in the streets, harder to navigate with cars (and so less likely to be used as short cuts), less noisy, etc. I bet that they worked to achieve all those goals. Nevertheless I hate them. When I am in such neighbourhoods, I cannot ever tell where I am. That's an extremely uncomfortable feeling. I avoid those places like the plague. Which, of course, is just what they were designed to make me do.

But they may do the same thing to their residents. Alexander suggested that steets laid out in a curvy maze decohered neighbourhoods - making it hard to figure out who your neighbours were, and where exactly they lived - so that they went too far. By making it hard to know how one could get away quickly should the need arise, they also trigger claustrophobia. He suggested instead the ancient traditional pattern within neighbourhoods of grids whose nodes were T intersections wherever possible. T intersections are to begin with, and strictly in terms of traffic engineering, much safer than four way intersections. They also make it hard to use residential streets as short cuts, or for criminals to case, while at the same time they make neighbourhood navigation more intelligible for the residents (and first responders, UPS, contractors, etc.).

Lydia is of course right that it is vain and erroneous to look to city planners or architects for our salvation. But it is likewise vain to look to physicians for salvation. That doesn't mean we should never go to the doctor. It doesn't mean that doctors are just useless. That the built environment can't do the whole job does not mean we should disregard it altogether. Planting a tree or sprucing up one's yard is in part an act of love toward one's neighbours. It is a sign - a sacrament, if that is not going too far - of what we are willing to do for each other.

But, Kristor, the very point you are making seems to me to indicate that there's a lot of subjectivism and guess-work involved in this sort of aesthetic planning. As you point out, the people who designed the neighborhoods you dislike were trying to make more humane physical spaces. Now you bring in a different set of considerations to say that they failed. I'm not sure the "new urban" guys are really all that much more likely to make spaces that everyone loves, either.

I'm not into curvy streets. I think you and I would probably agree on that. But by the same token, I _really_ want good-sized lots, for aesthetic reasons, and I feel a certain amount of resentment against city planning that is biased in favor of these picturesque houses that are practically sharing a wall (if not actually sharing a wall). I grew up in a city environment with what we called "gangways" between the houses, and I never want to go back to it. When I was a kid and could get out into the suburbs, I felt enormous, almost physical relief. The sense of space. The possibility of breathing. I thought people who lived there were in heaven. I still feel that way in my ranch-style house on my corner lot. I'm not asking for a whole patch of woodland or a whole farm. Too much responsibility. But those suburban-sized lots--I'm all for them. I think they're a great boon to humanity.

Jeff says,

But a population that appreciates beauty, order, proportion - "pattern language" - enough to change its own environment is a population that is already changed itself.

Jeff, I think this is kind of naive. It's not going to be the people who actually live right there who are doing the "changing." It's going to be some city planner armed with a federal grant, hand in hand with a bunch of bureaucrats. Even if you like the result, aesthetically, it seems to me to go way beyond the evidence to say that if someone in that city got the money and the legal right to make that change, this somehow means that the population has already improved itself and lowers the odds of undesirable characters walking about.

It's interesting, though: The post asked, "What makes a good city?"

I anticipated some kind of crunchy/"New Urb" set of thought processes here--well, with the Kunstler reference, it wasn't hard to pick up on--and I basically said, "Good people make a good city. Or at least, they help a lot and are a necessary condition." And I questioned the over-focus on aesthetics in some "improve the city" groups.

It seems to me that one response could be, "Okay, let's do something about those other problems. Let's make the police clear up the drug pushers. Let's see what we can do about laws on vagabondage and loitering. Let's apply the broken window principle. [Just because Giuliani, a thoroughly unpleasant fellow in some ways, applied it, doesn't mean it's a bad idea.]"

In other words, y'all who are "into" aesthetics could _round out_ your approach by facing the law and order questions head-on as well.

Is Kunstler irreligious? I've been wondering whether he would be a possible friend to my budding project to relax the ban on mentioning churches & religious schools in housing ads. One of the points of this project, of course, is to help revive church-centered neighborhoods in cities and suburbs.

Lydia's point about goodness has its place. But sometimes the only reason lowlifes have ruined areas is because of the diffidence of the people who are supposed to clear them out and keep public space safe and livable.

Titus' point about property values is accurate, but useless for those of us who can't afford "good" areas.

Isn't neighborhood insulation itself a cause of neighborhood decline? If one has to drive everywhere, a community is more difficult to form.

The problems of "scale" and "sprawl" are related. Austin Bramwell has noted that much urban sprawl is government-driven. This has the side-effect of keeping undesirables out, but also of making life less affordable for the non-criminal poor and the young and more automobile-dependent.

Sounds to me like Kevin might be one of those rounder-outers. :-) (Which is meant as a compliment.)

Another source maintains there were 576,000 blacks in the colonies in 1780, but doesn't specify how many were slaves:

And at least 1/4 of them were in VA. So VA must have had more than 20,000 people. The 1790 census puts the VA population at 747,000.

http://www.virginiaplaces.org/population/

When I was a kid and could get out into the suburbs, I felt enormous, almost physical relief. The sense of space. The possibility of breathing.

I think that Lydia is right: different people have different sensibilities about what "feels right" in some pretty basic ways. A neighborhood may be designed for maybe one primary "feel right" sensibility, but a whole city better have several types of environments for different folks. Some people like to be at the center of the action, and love the idea of living in the middle of high rises where there are parties, huge displays, etc. I need more peace and quiet than that.

But a bigger problem, I think, is this: Far more people find it unhelpful to be crammed in close together than like it. But the amount of space it takes to satisfy people who don't like compact spacing is itself a major problem: giving everyone a good sized yard automatically means everyone has to drive a car to get to any store at all, so roads have to be bigger, which means higher speeds, and kids have to stay away from them, and then neighborhoods don't interact internally as much, and so on. That is to say, some sprawl ends up causing more sprawl than people actually want. Is some sacrifice essential to solving that problem, or can it be done merely by well-designed cityscapes and incentives?

I would like to ask for how people feel about close houses with small yards (like gardens) but with large common areas that have ball fields, tons of trees, etc. I know that Lydia wants to have more space than that for her yard. Maybe most of us do. I lived in a townhouse development for a while that (I thought) was a pretty reasonable compromise - except that it was full of neighbors that I could not stomach. So, the other half of my question is: is the reason we need space partly due to the fact that we have no control over who lives near us, and what if we replaced that with neighborhoods (or street blocks) where you have to get a majority vote to be able to move in? I wouldn't mind living up close to people who were strong Christians, were conservative, and felt the way I did about child rearing and discipline. But if I have to worry about CPS when I spank a kid because my neighbors are 9 feet away and don't believe in spanking, I'll go somewhere else.

We live in a gated community, surrounded by fields and trees, that has background checks required before they'll rent to you, an if-the-cops-come-to-your-place-for-a-disturbance-you're-out policy and is largely military families with small children.

People don't pick up after their dogs, throw garbage all around fast enough that the five or so guys who do cleanup can't keep up on weekends, drive WAY too fast and don't socialize much, etc. We've also had thefts. When I helped a lady and her little two year old (the lady couldn't pack groceries and keep hold of her daughter, and like I said folks drive way too fast) get their stuff in, you could've knocked the lady over with a feather.

You can't make jerks give a dang, and there are far to many children in adult bodies.

The census of 1790 has Virginia at 747610 total.

http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1790a-02.pdf

Lydia: Well, of _course_ there is guess work involved in design. Except for God. Good intentions, road to hell, so on and so forth. Should we therefore abstain from design? Are we even _allowed_ to refrain from acting toward our best apprehension of the Good, however feeble our capacities, when we apprehend a mundane problem?

Alexander's Patterns are, precisely, an attempt to avoid guess-work insofar as is possible with such things. He didn't make up the patterns, or choose the ideas he liked. He looked for design sucesses that were already achieved. He interviewed lots and lots of people, and asked them what places they most loved, and why. Then he went and analyzed those places, to see what they had in common. Thus if the question was, e.g., "What is your favorite public eating or drinking establishment, and what do you love about the place?" he would collate the answers and go to those places, if he could, and see what they had in common. One of the commonalities was booths. So then he and his students would build booths of various dimensions and materials, and ask people to eat or drink or visit with each other in those booths, in real eating establishments, and see which booths they liked best, by keeping track of how long people lingered in them. They tested: height of partition, privacy curtain or not, depth of seat, pony walls or not, cushions or not, all that stuff. Me, I'd much rather eat in a booth than at a table out in the middle of the room.

I love good-size lots. I grew up in Indianapolis, on the north side, where all the lots are just vast. It was great. Not suburban, but the acme of urban residential. Suburban lots should all, ideally, be set up so that the half-acre back yard verges into the primeval forest. Bill Watterson illustrated the suburban ideal perfectly in Calvin & Hobbes.

As to Jeff's naivete, there are some upper classes that love their cities, and have hope for them, and others that do not. Indianapolis is fortunate in this respect. Or, rather, fortune has nothing to do with the renascence of that city. Its urban leaders, private and public, have been conspiring together, actively and continuously, to rejuvenate the city since about 1960. In that year, Indianapolis and Detroit were in much the same condition, except that Detroit had a lot more going for it in the way of installed plant and equipment. Indianapolis is now a really pleasant, inviting place, and business is _booming_. Detroit, well ... not so much.

Where a people love their city, they will invest in it. Where the upper classes are engaged in these efforts - as in Indianapolis, Berkeley, Emeryville - they can get the ball rolling, by making investments. The virtue has to start somewhere. And virtue is catching, because it has good results, and people are attracted to it, and it feels good. Virtue is just nicer than the alternative. If the city fathers have decided to plant trees all along your derelict devastated street, well, perhaps there is something good about it after all, even if only that it is shadier in the summer. Maybe you'll think twice about spitting your gum on the sidewalk. Maybe if the city sweeps the gutters every month, you'll sweep your sidewalk, too. Maybe you'll plant some flowers. It adds up; no, it compounds.

There is a book about this compounding process unfolding in desolate Alice Springs, Australia: A Town Like Alice. It began with one woman's determination to open an ice cream parlor. In NYC, it began with Giuliani's determination to clean up just one little thing, that was for him personally the straw that broke the camel's back: the squeegee guys. Once that was done, everyone in the city - particularly the cops - was emboldened to enroll in his next project: Times Square. From there, it mushroomed.

Chicago was a fearsome dump when I was growing up. The wooden fire escapes at the backs of all the buildings were all rotten and falling down. It was really third world. My first impression of Chicago was driving into town on some freeway at night and seeing a car on fire on the shoulder, with no one stopping to help. I thought, "Hell, this is like a town in Mordor or something." I have been back, recently, and it is a totally different place. _The wooden fire escapes have all been rebuilt_. They are square, plumb, tidy. Many of them have flowers blooming. Shoot, lots of the alleys have flowers planted. Not in all the neighbourhoods, of course. Only in the neighbourhoods where there are people who have acted to correct a problem.

None of this sort of thing is due entirely to the built environment, of course. To say so would be rank materialist reductionism: can't have that! Police work, integrity of public officials, and so forth, are crucial. The good health of a city supervenes upon the decisions of predominantly virtuous, responsible citizens - all of whom are fallible fallen sinners. Yet their successes, such as they are, will all somehow find expression in the built environment: bars coming off windows, flowers planted, vacant lots developed. And as an urban area begins to seem like a good place to live, or work, or invest, real estate developers and architects will get involved. That's where books like A Pattern Language can and do come into play. Alexander's work has been extraordinarily influential.

Lydia wrote:

In other words, y'all who are "into" aesthetics could _round out_ your approach by facing the law and order questions head-on as well.

I absolutely agree with that. And not only law and order, but public and private morality and a bunch of other stuff too. It all goes into the mix. I did mention drug addicts, loitering, religion and culture in the OP, did I not? Why then would you think I was making an "aesthetics is everything" argument? Did you think I was arguing that bad architecture and suburban sprawl cause drug addiction, loitering and godlessness?

Kevin Jones wrote:

Is Kunstler irreligious? I've been wondering whether he would be a possible friend to my budding project to relax the ban on mentioning churches & religious schools in housing ads. One of the points of this project, of course, is to help revive church-centered neighborhoods in cities and suburbs.

I am fairly certain that you can count Kunstler out. He's worse than irreligious, although he might feign a certain public tolerance. When it comes to religion he's a boilerplate secular Jewish intellectual, but with less restraint.

Tony wrote:

The 1790 census puts the VA population at 747,000.

Well, that sort of destroys my population-quality argument. :-) But thanks for the correction all the same. I'll make a note in the OP.

As an aside ... If it's true that in 1710 there were 78,000 Virginians, and by 1790 there were 747,000 Virginians - an increase of 958% in 80 years - that's pretty amazing. Where did all the people come from? It seems that fewer than 300,000 Scots-Irish immigrated from 1710 to 1775, and they didn't all settle in Virginia. Perhaps a topic for another thread.

Well, no, I didn't exactly think that, Jeff. I just was kind of surprised at the entirely aesthetic reaction to my original comment, was all.

Kristor, I grew up in Chicago. Not in a slum or anything. Near Lawrence and Pulaski. But I detested it. It was a middle-class neighborhood, but there was a dirty-movie theater at the end of the street that I walked past every day on the way to the bus stop to go to school. I wonder if it's still there. I should ask my parents. I used to do a lot of visitation for church, and those falling-down back wooden fire escapes--or back railings, or whatever one calls them--are familiar to me. I believe a lot of gentrification has taken place all over, and I believe you that it's a lot better. I suppose cities, big cities, will just never be my thing no matter what. I was back for a day visit about two years ago and could see that things looked somewhat cleaned up (for example, in the Ravenswood area where my former church is), but I still felt suffocated.

If you clean up some city, put in these "new urban" spaces inside, ban the cars, etc., the people will be the same people they were before.

I don't agree. They will be changed, if only on the margins - but marginal changes can feel pretty big. Front porches, for example, create different kinds of neighbors. Verticalism in architecture lifts the mind and the spirit, or at least makes it easier to do so. The irreligious person confronted with beautiful religious art lessens his hostility, lowers his guard. Lighting affects the mood; curves, the imagination. These little things matter and impact one's personality. They don't save anyone's soul, and they don't turn a criminal into a saint or even an honest citizen, but on the margins they can make public virtue a little more thinkable and doable, especially as they accumulate.

I think, too, that zoning and planning have a tremendous impact on community life. The last time I checked the average commute to and from work was 70 minutes per day. That's largely the result of bad planning and the fact that our cities are highly undesirable places to raise families. But there is no reason that I can see why a family should not enjoy a good sized yard close to employment and a normal community life.

I'm not anti-suburb myself, far from it. But not all suburbs are created equal. I would think that in a smallish city the size of yours it would be possible to come very close to the ideal.

I would like to recommend the smaller and perhaps less expensive, if harder to find, Timeless Way of Building as a first place to start with Christopher Alexander.

I would also recommend the essays of John Brinckerhoff Jackson, a guy who came to much less elitist conclusions about suburbia than most fancy writers on architecture and what they call the built environment, despite his sometime affiliation with Harvard.

Hardly anywhere before the 19th century do you see people speaking of "culture" as prerequisite for a good civitas. Aristotle wrote that ethnic homogeneity is best for a stable city state. He wrote: “A state cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in any chance period of time. Most of the states which have admitted persons of another stock, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by sedition.” The republican Romans recognized a nation (a natio) is a small tribe of inter-related people; the very word natio (from the verb nasci) implies link by blood. The Medieval notion gentilesse had nothing to do with culture (as the concept didn't then exist) but was a type of refinement and good manners that resulted from good breeding. Throughout most of Western history, blood, soil and ancestral traditions were much more important than the modern, rather flighty notion of "culture."

Let me also put in a word for mixed-use zoning - particularly the kind that allow families to live in the same building, or just behind, that of the family business. This kind of integrated life should be an option for many more families than it is today. (To accomplish this would also mean creating a more favorable climate for small family enterprises, another aspect of this many-layered issue.)

Lydia writes:

I grew up in Chicago. Not in a slum or anything. Near Lawrence and Pulaski. But I detested it. It was a middle-class neighborhood, but there was a dirty-movie theater at the end of the street that I walked past every day on the way to the bus stop to go to school.

My mother grew up in Andersonville near Clark/Ashland and Foster, perhaps a little over three miles away.

Her mother was a community activist of sorts, and drove a "massage parlor" out of the neighborhood back in the late 1960s when a judge had the power (and the will) to do so. She was later involved in organizing a "Whistlestop" community safety initiative, the need for which I now recognize as a sign of the neighborhood's decline.

My own memories are colored by childhood nostalgia of summer and winter visits.

The area has since been gentrified, but I am not sure "gentrification" is the solution to urban neighborhood renewal. It is nigh synonymous with SWPL-ism, isn't it?

Can one improve city life without gentrifying it? Something tells me the gentrifiers control all the relevant city planning boards and are skewing city politics (and city inmigration) their way.

MAR, I have to leave now, so please make that your last "blood and soil" comment on this thread. Thanks a bunch. And I would encourage you to depart, now and then, from Winston Churchill's classic definition of a fanatic -- "a man who can't change his mind and won't change the subject".

JC: I was only pointing out that your superficial notion of a civitas lacks historical gravitas. BTW, an ad hominem attack is not an argument. Regardless, I'll leave you to your millenarian machinations. Sorry for referencing the OED entry on "culture," Aristotle, Latin etymology and Medieval history. Thanks.

Lydia, I started spending time in Chicago again last year when my daughter moved there. I had not been to the city in, oh, 30 years. When I first went to visit my daughter, I was just stunned at the change from the days when I used to visit my church youth group friends there. Flabbergasted. I have always been a big fan of architecture, and it used to hurt me to see all those beautiful buildings in Chicago so cruelly neglected. But now, when I go there, it's the opposite: I rejoice, my blood fairly races, to see those beautiful buildings being cared for, restored, renovated.

And there is a concomitant change in the mood of the people on the street. This struck me just as forcibly. The streets are crammed with people, downtown, even at 10:00 pm on a freezing February night. Thousands of them. And they are cheerful. 30 years ago, they seemed dour, grim, belligerent. Now, they seem happy, vigorous, gregarious, engaged. They seem stronger.

Timeless Way of Building is about Alexander's attempt to rediscover the traditional vernacular ways of building that over the millennia generated the Pattern Language. It is an attempt to re-inhabit tradition, and apply it to the modern predicament.

As to suburban sprawl, merits and demerits thereof, I believe that a nice homeostasis between spreading out and efficiency would be far easier to achieve if roads were privatized, so that their users had to pay tolls and their owners had to pay property taxes on their huge real estate portfolios. Both sets of people would economize on their use and development of roads, so only the most useful and important trips would be taken, and only the most useful and important roads would be developed or maintained. That would create strong incentives to use the train, or DSL, to do business. Road companies would be local monopolies, but the regulatory framework for such firms is highly evolved, and actually works pretty well. Right now, by contrast, the only variable cost to driving is the time it takes to be stuck in traffic. It therefore makes sense, if your time is not particularly valuable and you already have a car, to use the roads as much as possible. That's the fastest way to amortize the fixed costs entailed in owning the car. The more miles you drive, the greater your profit on the project. It's a textbook case of Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons.

Aristotle wrote that ethnic homogeneity is best for a stable city state. He wrote: “A state cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in any chance period of time. Most of the states which have admitted persons of another stock, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by sedition.”

Look, Aristotle wasn't called "The Philosopher" for a millennia for nothing, and I am doing my best to get a handle on him because he got an astonishing amount right. I revere him for several branches of philosophy. But his ideas on racial issues? Well, not so much. On the other hand, I haven't looked at this aspect so maybe he didn't mean exactly what it seems, but it wouldn't be surprising given the time he lived in any case. I think this is perhaps the only area in which we can confidently say we shouldn't trust our ancestors without close examination since only the outliers were right. There was a famous debate that concerns the matter that I'd like to learn more about.

I started spending time in Chicago again last year . . . I had not been to the city in, oh, 30 years. When I first went to visit my daughter, I was just stunned at the change . . . those beautiful buildings being cared for, restored, renovated.

I haven't witnessed this personally since I'm not familiar with downtown areas in any large city, but I think many cities had severe urban rot and then over time led to a renewed interest and revitalization efforts in the last decade or more. I don't know enough to know where the trend is going now though.

But there is no reason that I can see why a family should not enjoy a good sized yard close to employment and a normal community life.

I would like to think so also, but I fear that is just isn't so. What I suspect is that the compactness of high efficiency _work_ where you have to have 600 people in the same building (and that's modest compared to some buildings) means that they cannot all have a yard, and all live close by. Could it be that modern efficiencies of production simply are not human-supporting in other respects? Oh, and there is the not-so-easy to deal with "efficiency" of being able to leave one employer and hire on with a better (which has its converse as the ease of one employer firing you and hiring another) means that maybe you used to live near work, but don't anymore. I have a lot of doubt that kind of instability is good for humans anyway, but the question ties in with city arrangements.

There is a subtle split in the discussion between those who discuss aesthetics and those who discuss society. In other words, there are really two topic being discussed that sound similar: what makes a good city and what makes a city good. Subtly different questions, but perhaps, related.

The Chicken

I would think that in a smallish city the size of yours it would be possible to come very close to the ideal.

There, Jeff, we're in agreement. I'm a huge fan of this smallish city. Of course, we still have our bad neighborhoods, and I'll admit (this won't surprise you) to skepticism about the power of city planning, etc., to clear them up. But as far as space and distance from work, etc., I agree with you. A real city-dweller would consider it a dream. Very short drives everywhere, no traffic jams to speak of, and possible to have good-sized lots and yards.

Tony, on your question way upthread about people living close to one another and having similar approaches to life: I think that would help for people who _have_ to live within nine feet of each other--young couples, for example, or even young singles. But I'm sure there would still be lots of people, myself included, who would be very sad about having to live within nine feet of the next house on both sides.

What I suspect is that the compactness of high efficiency _work_ where you have to have 600 people in the same building (and that's modest compared to some buildings) means that they cannot all have a yard, and all live close by.

There's no rule that you have to live in the same place forever-- my husband and I started looking for something better than our two room broom closet (two ROOM, not two bedroom! A bit over 400 square feet, all told) when I became pregnant with our daughter.

If we want to make "high efficiency" less souless, we should look at Japan. The Sasebo (smallish city-- maybe Spokane sized, relatively?) apartment complex I lived in had a pizza place at the bottom, there were quickie-marts and all sorts of small stores all over the place, we were maybe two blocks from the sailor bar district, and there were plants EVERYWHERE. I was the only apartment that didn't have a miniature orchard on my deck, because the ship was gone so often. If you got up high enough, even the department stores had parks on top of them for the employees to eat in. They're also a lot better about building houses on surfaces we wouldn't even try. ^.^ (of course, the stairs are killer, too....)

Zoning is a BIG deal. So are property taxes-- if the city charges on the whole footprint, then any little farms that didn't sell out will be forced to anyways. (A bleedin' shame, since the ones near our place are a wonderful addition.)

"I'm an American, Chicago born..."

Living in the greatest city in the world, I thought I'd add a few comments of my own to this already lively discussion:

1) I think Lydia made a lot of good points and I was especially struck by this comment: "When I was a kid and could get out into the suburbs, I felt enormous, almost physical relief. The sense of space. The possibility of breathing. I thought people who lived there were in heaven." As a kid I was the exactopposite. I grew up in the suburbs but whenever we'd go visit my Dad at his work downtown I felt alive -- I just loved downtown Chicago with it's tall buildings, it's people jostling one another, it's el trains, the cultural institutions we would visit (especially the Art Institute), etc.

So I think there has to be variety when we plan cities and there has to be a place for folks who like New York, Chicago, and small town America.

As an interesting note, I live about 15 from where Lydia grew up, still in the City limits but my neighborhood has a very suburban feel -- so depending on where you are in Chicago and which neighborhood you live in your built environment and experience of the city will be different.

2) I have to admit I was surprised at Jeff C.'s hostile reaction to MAR. My parents were classic Chicago ethnic kids who basically left the city for the suburbs because the public schools were now full of black kids and of poor quality. I just don't know how you can talk about the health of the modern city without talking about race. Without going into the full HBD rant, you can't look at the history of Detroit in the 20th Century and not ask yourself if one of the things that makes for a good city is you can't put too many black folk in the city.

3) Speaking of Chicago ethnics, at one time (not too long ago) if you asked a Chicago Catholic where they lived they would say their parish name -- which is one reason I think so many Chicago neighborhoods have done so well -- they had the church as their anchor and center of community life. Obviously, this has changed quite a bit these days but the church is still surprisingly strong in Chicago and many parishes are the center of neighborhood life.

4) I do think there is some interesting wisdom in the book Kristor is quoting, although like Lydia I remain somewhat skeptical unless you combine good design with good economics, good policing, a society that frowns on single-parents, good character formation, etc.

There, Jeff, we're in agreement. I'm a huge fan of this smallish city.

We spend the majority of our social life in a smallish city about 25 miles from here. The more I think about it, Lydia, the more I realize there are strong similarities between your city and Chico, California - both university towns roughly the same size. Just for fun, let's take a look at some numbers from City Data.

Kalamazoo, Michigan

http://www.city-data.com/city/Kalamazoo-Michigan.html

Population - 72,825 (2009)
Median age - 26.1 years
Demographics
White - 69%
Black - 20%
Hispanic - 6%
Asian - 2%
Population density - 2950 per sq. mi.
Bachelors degree or higher - 33%
Graduate degree - 14%
Foreign born - 5.2%
Sex offender ratio - 149 to 1
Unemployment - 14.6%
Crime index - 604.9
Household size - 2.3
Family households - 48.8%
Households with unmarried partners - 6.8%
2004 election - Kerry 51%, Bush 48%
2008 election - Obama 59%, McCain 40%
Religious affiliation - 35.3%
Catholic - 25%

Chico, California

http://www.city-data.com/city/Chico-California.html

Population - 64,015 (2007)
Median age - 25.9 years
Demographics
White - 77%
Black - 1.4%
Hispanic - 12%
Asian - 4%
Population density - 2307 per sq. mi.
Bachelors degree or higher - 34%
Graduate degree - 10.5%
Foreign born - 8.9%
Sex offender ratio - 492 to 1
Unemployment - 13%
Crime index - 273.8
Household size - 2.4
Family households - 49.6%
Households with unmarried partners - 6.9%
2004 election - Kerry 44%, Bush 54%
2008 election - Obama 50%, McCain 48%
Religious affiliation - 27.4%
Catholic - 35%

The similarities are clear. College towns with young populations, high numbers of non-family households (students), smaller than average household size (students), above average education levels, low to average population density, and higher than average unemployment (students).

The differences: Chico has less crime, a much higher (i.e., better) sex offender ratio, fewer blacks and more hispanics, is more politically conservative (hard for me to imagine), and is less religious (no surprise there).

* I see that the election numbers are county numbers. Chico, although very polarized, is more liberal than the rest of the county so that explains things.

I have to admit I was surprised at Jeff C.'s hostile reaction to MAR.

MAR seeks to turn every discussion, no matter the topic, toward his beloved pagan-blood-and-soilism. I just don't want to go down that rabbit hole again.

... you can't look at the history of Detroit in the 20th Century and not ask yourself if one of the things that makes for a good city is you can't put too many black folk in the city.

Granted, statistically the correlation is strong in the United States. There's no getting around it. However, I don't believe that causation is purely racial. I recall that some smaller cities in the south, for example, have high percentage black populations and relatively low reported crime figures. So I think these problems can be addressed - not solved or eliminated, but addressed with significant improvements - on the level of law and order, economics, religion and culture.

I just don't know how you can talk about the health of the modern city without talking about race.

Talking about it is one thing, and relevant when considering a place to live, but on the level of public policy, what are the options? As far as I'm concerned any overtly racial social policies are off the table.

So I think there has to be variety when we plan cities and there has to be a place for folks who like New York, Chicago, and small town America.

Yeah, I think that's true: you need places that cater to the different feelings: the "wide-open spacious", the "jammin' center of everything", the "genteel park-side", and a few others. The real trick, then is to arrange the economics of it so that the people who _want_ to live in type A can do so, and the people who like living in type B are not forced by circumstances to live in type D. That's really tough to accomplish, since people's likes don't track with their income potential, and people's income potential doesn't track with the inherent costs of certain types of neighborhood styles.

Granted, statistically the correlation is strong in the United States. There's no getting around it. However, I don't believe that causation is purely racial. I recall that some smaller cities in the south, for example, have high percentage black populations and relatively low reported crime figures.

I think that's true: the underlying causes are historical and cultural, not racial. The solutions are to change the culture. (The race picture itself is also changing while we watch: a 40 year preference by blacks to marry "lightwards" is increasing the light brown numbers). Unfortunately, the culture is not uniformly moving in the right direction, what with over 65% of black kids born out of wedlock. But that change is hitting white people as well. There is a lot more opportunity for a black kid to succeed in the standard American dream today than there was 60 years ago, though, so it's tough to really say. I don't think the good-neighborhood / bad-neighborhood distinction tracks with race nearly as clearly as it might have 40 years ago.

Jeff C.,

You say,

"As far as I'm concerned any overtly racial social policies are off the table."

If only liberals agreed! Unfortunately, most big cities, and certainly my beloved Chicago, are saddled with all sorts of goofy affirmative action laws as well as the legacy of anti-discrimination laws (disparate impact anyone?) and racial tension between police and minority communities. If we could get rid of all these laws that take race into consideration and allow white folks to use tests to promote policemen and firemen, hire employees, etc. and award contracts based solely on quality and price then you will improve the governance of of cities. You will also send a powerful message that only hard work and merit will lead to success.

I do think that the principles of good design can help guide good public policy -- here I think of Daley dismantling our verticle high-rise public housing ghettos (just not a good idea to group that many poor people where they can't be properly policed). The replacement for the high-rises is the idea of mixed income housing -- integrate public housing with regular folks and hopefully middle-class behavior will rub off. I doubt the poor* will necessarily start to emulate the middle-class (as Lydia said above, you just can't transform people with better homes and better neighbors) but Daley has helped the neighborhoods that used to be near public housing high-rises start to rebuild and improve.

*The one exception to this is the amazing success of the Section 8 program, which basically gave public housing residents the chance to move to the suburbs for a better life. Studies have been done on the first wave of these Section 8 families and they dramatically improved their life outcomes out in the 'burbs -- but the program may have suffered from self-selection bias (i.e. the most motivated and determined poor single mothers took advantage of the program to give their kids a better life).

P.S. What's wrong with shopping malls?! I love them for their convenience and now even Chicago has plenty of malls. Three cheers for buying all the goods and services you need in one easy trip!

"Where did all the people come from?"

Quite a few came from what is now Germany (1732 in the case of one branch of my family) and folks had large families in those days.

Racial tension isn't solely the consequence of Democrats' social engineering.

Richard Nixon's Philadelphia Plan installed affirmative action for government contractors in a city which had recently passed from Republican WASP/Quaker control to the control of white Catholic ethnics. This certainly stirred up racial conflict in the Democratic Party.

This discussion has cast unforeseen light on the end of the lives of my Chicago grandparents, and I think their story deserves to be added here. My great-great-grandfather had purchased that family home for my great-grandfather as a wedding gift. The family could rent out the second-storey apartment, forming many lasting friendships with the better renters.

In the mid-1990s, when my grandparents were in their early 70s, their house was severely damaged by an arsonist who was never apprehended. A year or two later, after much tears and rebuilding, they were hit by arson again.

It took years off of their lives, which were already strained because they lived with their two mentally disabled daughters. My grandparents both died a few years after the last attack.

Since the perp was never caught, there's no idea whether the attack was racially motivated.

But the lack of adequate police protection was surely worsened by the racial politics of the city. If the police cannot capably run off suspicious persons for fear of provoking an anti-racism civil rights lawsuit, innocent people will die or suffer from criminality and cities won't be good places to live.*

My uncle still lives in Chicago (northwest of Lawrence & Pulaski, come to think of it) in a middle class neighborhood that is still a decent place to live because many police live there. But if policemen's residency requirements are abolished, he'll probably have to leave when the cops escape to better neighborhoods in the suburbs.

So with this family story in mind, it's hard to see how aesthetic urbanism will do anything for my uncle and his wife. It *will* boost property values for wealthy urban yuppies, the same types who will lecture me about becoming an authoritarian.

I don't deliberately try to become more authoritarian in my thinking, it just comes out that way.

*(This is one reason why drug legalization will be disastrous in some regions. Pre-criminalization, there were far more cultural and legal restraints on people with criminal propensities or public drug problems. And perhaps the drug war itself is a failed substitute for that strictness, being very cruel on offenders where the previous system was only minimally cruel but effective in preventing escalating crime.)

Well, yes, without the striking story to make the point, I thought of what Kevin Jones is saying when Jeff C. asked what "policy implications" the racial matters have for the good of our cities. One policy implication the racial aspect has is that police work has been stymied by racial considerations and that this has badly messed up our cities and must be turned back. One can call that a "negative" policy implication, but that's true in many cases. After all, if we're saying we need to _change_ the buildings or whatever to make the cities more beautiful and humane in design, that's also a "negative" implication about the way they are presently laid out and built. Another thing that needs to _change_ is the politically motivated worry about "racial profiling" that discourages good police work.

(This is one reason why drug legalization will be disastrous in some regions. Pre-criminalization, there were far more cultural and legal restraints on people with criminal propensities or public drug problems. And perhaps the drug war itself is a failed substitute for that strictness, being very cruel on offenders where the previous system was only minimally cruel but effective in preventing escalating crime.)

Yes, the fact that the war on drugs is failing does not mean that decriminalizing will succeed. The problem seems to be that there is no effective social / legal / moral barrier high enough to counter the perceived "benefits" of drugs. That inequality needs to be turned around. More than likely, changing only one of the three will not succeed, we need an effective solution that uses all three. Since politicians only have the legal end firmly under control, they tend to see the problem as a legal problem - if you only have a hammer, all problems are nails. But we can think of larger solutions. It may be that initiating some cultural parts to the solution can be done by legal means, but any cultural solution will take decades and law-makers (being politicians) tend to have a much shorter leash. It's not hopeless, but sure is daunting.

In my opinion, the drug problem is BOTH a cause and a symptom of the difficulties of citified living. I suspect that part of it is that large cities are a morally dangerous environment intrinsically, in a way that small cities and modest sized towns are not, but I don't know that I can explain that exactly. Where you find public ills, you generally find them in higher concentrations in the cities (even higher than the population concentration, that is) and earlier in the cities than you find them elsewhere. It almost seems that higher concentration _itself_ brings out more of the evil in man than it brings out the good.

Maybe a necessary part of a design for a good city is being a small city. Makes it tough to solve places like NYC.

One policy implication the racial aspect has is that police work has been stymied by racial considerations and that this has badly messed up our cities and must be turned back. One can call that a "negative" policy implication, but that's true in many cases.

So we need to repeal certain racial policies and practices, not enact them.

I suspect that part of it is that large cities are a morally dangerous environment intrinsically, in a way that small cities and modest sized towns are not, but I don't know that I can explain that exactly ... Maybe a necessary part of a design for a good city is being a small city. Makes it tough to solve places like NYC.

I believe that to be self-evidently true. We're stuck with large cities, though, and they do serve a purpose. One thing that might help is to turn large cities into an amalgamation of smaller ones, which most started out as anyway - to break them up administratively and logistically. Unsustainable high-rises (more than seven stories), especially apartments, should be done away with entirely. As for rowhouses, townhouses and condos, I think they have their place in small concentrations, but large concentrations lead to the kind of transience and anonymity that destroy community life. Smaller-scale economies will also help a lot: smaller employers and smaller industries don't need huge population centers to supply labor and consumers.

Scale is important, but Giuliani was able to turn New York around by focusing on the social environment. Simple things like, allowing for side-walk dining increased foot traffic and made streets safer and friendlier. Boom boxes were banned from public squares and parks, trees and flowers planted, new lights, benches and tables installed, swings and gym sets restored, bicycle and jogging lanes created, while idle characters were replaced by the more colorful cast of children, chess-players, cellists and all the talent one expects from a city full of aspiring artists. Add community policing as performed by the most professional police force in the country, and the result is a remarkably safe and vibrant city able to able to recover from some of the insane social engineering and Le Corbusier-style planning schemes of the 60's.

America's Safest Cities - Forbes
1. Plano, Texas
2. Portland, Ore.
3. Honolulu, Hawaii
4. San Jose, Calif.
5. Omaha, Neb.
6. New York City
http://www.forbes.com/2010/10/11/safest-cities-america-crime-accidents-lifestyle-real-estate-danger.html

I have to admit I was surprised at Jeff C.'s hostile reaction to MAR.

I don't think it was hostile. At some point you have to state disagreement or people assume you agree by your silence. Being new here and not having heard anyone disagree as yet I supposed at least some here did until this. The problem I have with the term "blood and soil" as used by MAR isn't so much the historical baggage, as the fact it is claimed there isn't much blood, history, or geographical loyalties in the U. S., which I think is preposterous. So I take the claim to really means that it isn't of the right type. Likewise, who thinks WWII era Germans had insufficient loyalties to their race and nation before the Nazis preached this nonsense? For these reasons the statement does seem to me to have some strong Pagan connotations rather than just a healthy statement of natural loyalty.

Don Colacho, great points about NYC.

As for the safe cities, San Jose is a remarkable place in many ways. It's my favorite large city in CA, hands down. Portland, on the other hand, is safe only because it is relatively childless and devoid of the demographic that is most crime prone: young men. Omaha is more remarkable.

Smaller-scale economies will also help a lot: smaller employers and smaller industries don't need huge population centers to supply labor and consumers.

That's interesting. I have wondered whether the large corporation is inherently a problem, and whether larger scale operations (like car manufacture, perhaps) needs to be done by something like a temporary alliance of smaller groups, consisting of much smaller numbers (maybe a few hundred, tops) in each group. But that would simply do away with the efficiencies that are realized in the huge manufacturing plants. Difficult to see how to organize an effective manufacture of an airliner that takes the capacity of a large number of people, when you can't move the partially finished product around between groups (other than by having an enormous company do it.)

Here's the thing, though: The people in the poorer parts of the city definitely don't want things broken up, because they want the richer people elsewhere to have to pay for their benefits. Interesting situation with this in...Memphis, TN, I believe it is. The parts of the county other than the city have an independent school board. There is therefore a possibility that at some point they will restrict their property tax dollars to their own schools. Memphis proper, worrying that this might happen, looks likely to literally disband its own school board and school system operating structure, so that the county will _have to_ take and keep fiscal responsibility for the city proper, the school board will be a single board elected across the entire area, and the money will continue to flow from the suburbs into the city (as it has been all along). In other words, the opposite of breaking up into smaller groups. A merger, to make sure those nasty suburbanites can't "escape." Did someone say "sprawl"? Ah, yes, property values in the _next_ municipalities out are going up in anticipation of this merger, because parents might want to move yet farther out to get away from it.

New York City could be a guide for Jeff's aims. Does anyone know what Giuliani's reforms have done to costs of living in the city?

Crime obviously makes housing cheap. (It's a useful tool for the blockbusting realtor.)

Can there be a "sweet spot" where low crime and affordable housing are possible in a city?

One other issue, with the multi-generation family of the city: human longevity is now a factor. If most people move near an elementary school for their kids, but stay in the same house for 40 years, their whole neighborhood will age and the school will shrink or close.

Isn't Jeff's ideal of "a strong core of interconnected families who remain in the city for generations" dependent on a higher death rate among the elderly?

Families will stay in the city more easily if they can inherit family property there.

Intentional customs could provide an outlet, like if elderly parents decide to move to a nearby apartment so one of their children may raise their family. But intentionality is hard.

Maybe we should just smoke more.

Isn't Jeff's ideal of "a strong core of interconnected families who remain in the city for generations" dependent on a higher death rate among the elderly?

NO! - it is dependent upon families having more children and some of them choosing to stay.

New York City could be a guide for Jeff's aims. Does anyone know what Giuliani's reforms have done to costs of living in the city?

Agreed, but Jeff's project still has significant hurdles in New York. First and foremost, the break-up of families has done incomprehensible damage to the school system for reasons too obvious to mention. The public system would implode if both the parochial schools and the absurdly priced private schools were to shrink any further in capacity. Secondly, once uninhabitable neighborhoods have been gentrified by young people and retirees. It remains to be seen if both groups will put down the roots necessary for forming lasting communities. Third, there are still the crazy-quilt highways imposed by eminent domain, which served to cut-off and strangle many established communities.

Finally Giuliani and Bloomberg's reforms have ushered in a housing demand that has made NYC one of the most expensive cities in the country to live.

Still, the way the Apple has risen from the ashes is instructive.

There are some _very_ large manufacturing plants that have been built over the last 60 years that are in rural areas - surrounded by farmland. Because of the automobile - or, in this case, I guess, more likely the pickup truck - they have no trouble assembling a large, 24/7 labor force from the surrounding countryside. Boeing is a bit different, because they need so many engineers in one place; ditto for Microsoft. Yet even these businesses can increasingly scatter their intellectual workers anywhere in the world where there is broadband connectivity. So there is nothing inherent in the large enterprise - make that "the large _private_ enterprise" - anymore that requires a large city.

Cities are inherently more sinful for the same reason they are inherently more dangerous with respect to infectious disease. An egregious sinner in the deep woods has little opportunity to infect his neighbours with his sin. In the city, we are forced to cope with the sinfulness of others - if only of such sins of omission as are manifest in traffic - almost every waking minute.

But large enterprises not only need employees, they need suppliers, contractors, services, consultants and so forth, and the closer the better. A big city provides those. There are some exceptions - we have just one here in my rural county, Johns Manville - but for the most part, the convenience of a large population center is hard to compete with.

The people in the poorer parts of the city definitely don't want things broken up, because they want the richer people elsewhere to have to pay for their benefits.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the poorer areas, too, were smaller and ideally intermixed with the rest of the city. A ways upthread Titus made an interesting remark, that "cities need some kind of slums". The idea being, I suppose, that the presence of the poor and otherwise marginalized populations would ruin the quality of the better parts of the city if they were integrated with it. That may be true for a portion of this population, but it certainly isn't true for a large number, who should be integrated and would benefit from this integration, and would not be a significant drain on the rest. It would be worth the subsidy.

Here's the thing, though: The people in the poorer parts of the city definitely don't want things broken up, because they want the richer people elsewhere to have to pay for their benefits [schools] . . . property values in the _next_ municipalities out are going up in anticipation of this merger, because parents might want to move yet farther out to get away from it.

All true. One of the reasons I think the current regime of tying the school a person goes to where they live is a bad idea. There would be some problems created by breaking up the current system, but I think there are more fundamental problems by keeping it the way it is given the current state of many school districts and unionization.

But large enterprises not only need employees, they need suppliers, contractors, services, consultants and so forth, and the closer the better. A big city provides those. There are some exceptions - we have just one here in my rural county, Johns Manville - but for the most part, the convenience of a large population center is hard to compete with.

I agree with Kristor. I have been in what I'd call very large factories in what most would call small midwestern towns, and they were put there before modern communications and travel are what they are. Contractors will move there and spring up to service these enterprises. For things such as engineers or consultants that won't spring up locally, all you needed was proximity and people will move. Even in the 50's being within 200 miles of a large city or university would do. These days, all you need is a desirable location since a lot of city people want to live in the hinterlands.

BTW, I got a kick out of a vendor I know from Green Bay, who on the "about us" page of their website it says they are "Located a quick cross country flight from Silicon Valley, we're in touch with the heartbeat of the valley, without the costs associated with the location." I suppose it is "a quick cross country flight" from Miami too.

That may be true for a portion of this population, but it certainly isn't true for a large number, who should be integrated and would benefit from this integration, and would not be a significant drain on the rest. It would be worth the subsidy.

I'm not at all sure what you're proposing here, Jeff, and don't want to jump to conclusions, but it's not sounding like a good idea to me insofar as I have a dim clue about what you have in mind.

Lydia, I should clarify. I'm definitely not proposing any kind of forced integration. I am proposing that residential districts not be anywhere near as economically segregated as they became after WW-II. I don't have any bright ideas about how to accomplish this - there will always be rich areas and poor areas - but I would suggest that curtailing these mega-subdivisions on a local level would be a good place to start. The economy has already put the brakes on them, perhaps permanently, so the point may be moot.

Jeff, residential districts have been economically segregated for a lot longer than that-- look at any of the old ghost towns, or any decent sized town that still has a lot of the 150 year old buildings. It's dead simple to know where the rich lived, once you know what to look for. (usually up on a hill, the houses are a lot bigger, the roads are straighter, there's usually some old parks and some sort of physical barrier between them and the workers; huge old trees, sometimes dead of old age, are also a hint)
Knowing where the poor folks lived is a bit tougher in a living city, because it's usually been torn down, but the toff areas still have a great view and often still have those great old houses.

My grandmother was taught to see it by her dad, a Scottish immigrant. (He had a lot of...issues with folks acting superior because they had money, once he got money.) I've gotten to where I can recognize a town that was started as a mining place in the late 1800s with freaky-to-my-friends accuracy, because the layout is so similar. ^.^

I don't have any bright ideas about how to accomplish this - there will always be rich areas and poor areas

Jeff, how about allowing an multi-story building structure (oh, say 8 stories, not 80), where some of the floors are given over to smaller units like 2 bedroom condos, and other floors are given over to full size 4 bedroom houses with little gardens, and one floor to a couple of palatial residences - but they ALL had voting rights on who moves in (or out - they can vote to eject someone and buy his property off him at the going rate). Oh, and by the way, some of the small units would be exactly what the old folks exchange for when they no longer need the full 4 bedroom house and cannot keep it up. In other words, you mix it up with young and old, rich and those of modest means, etc. If (as I would want to do) you also initiate one of these with an underlying covenant that makes the entire entity reflect a special affinity for certain cultural values (Polish, or Baptist, or chess-playing, or whatever you decide), you can start down the road of creating a true neighborhood right from scratch. Well, you can if you can find people willing to pay money to live with people they find congenial and of similar outlook.