Ranting to /dev/null

Urbanism

I've been reading Josiah's recent posts on various urban subjects (here and here for starters). I just finished reading the article linked to in his last post. I have to say that I think it doesn't deal with the history of the city in any realistic way, and has a far too sentimentalized story to tell.

My objections can be summed up in a single world: population.

Ancient Athens, which can be viewed by any reasonable standard as something of the exemplar of ancient urban life, only had around 300,000 people in it. In 1500 there were only about two dozen places in the whole world with more than 100,000 people. In 1700 there were fewer than fifty. Until the 20th century, the vast majority of the world's population lived in centers of less than 10,000 people. This is, by today's standards, barely even a small town.

Looking back on a bucolic past in which everything one wished to do was within walking distance is all well and good, but in a town of 10,000 this is fairly easy to do. Try doing that in a city of 20,000,000. The world's 100 most populous cities (list here) contain around a billion people. A billion people live in metropolitan areas exceeding 3.6 million inhabitants. In fact, 80% of the world's population lives in an urban center with a population in excess of 500,000. A mere 3% of the world's surface area is devoted to urban space, but in that 3% lives the vast majority of the human race. The author complains of sprawl, but if people were to live in places of the densities he describes, (perhaps 100 people per square mile) we would need orders of magnitude more room. New York has a population density in excess of 10,000 people per square kilometer: the author suggests neighborhoods that can't accomodate more than a fraction of that.

For two thousand years, the church was at home in small cities and rural villages. When the Industrial Revolution hit in Britain, the rural areas emptied out and urban populations skyrocketed. For a number of years in Britain's industrial centers, it was impossible for more than a fraction of the population to attend church, because there simply weren't enough churches. The parish system - the most geographical way of dividing up a territory - assumed a relatively even distribution of population. The new urbanization totally destroyed this system. If anything, urbanization has been the single biggest problem the church has had to face since it began incorporating Gentiles into its ranks, and has not, to this day, really figured out how to deal with a population as densely compacted as a modern city.

Human beings have not traditionally sought the Good Life in industrial/post-industrial cities, but in pre-industrial rural centers interspersed with a few small cities that served as centers for commerce and governance. Thinkers as early as Plato and as recently as Jefferson assumed that the pursuit of the good life had something to do with agriculture, or at least owning lots of land.

The "traditional" neighborhood is not nearly as traditional or historic as the author seems to believe. A modern city is not simply a conglomeration of several neighborhoods - though cities did tend to get their start in this way. As recently as the middle of the 19th century, what is now the Upper West Side of Manhattan was farmland. Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens were distinct. But as the population grew, and people started building out, they all ran together. The only reason the Five Boroughs are distinct at all now is the presence of bodies of water - and the line between Queens and Brooklyn, not being marked by a river, is purely arbitrary. Cities are single units. There may be differences in character between them - Harlem is a far different place to live than Morningside Heights, though they're only a block apart - but there is no question that the two form different parts of a greater whole, and are not particularly distinct.

The neighborhood concept is really only good for up to ten or twenty thousand people, but you can't just take a couple of neighborhoods, stick them next to each other, and expect each of them to keep on going as autonomous and independent social and economic units. It's unnatural (people get around, you know) and inefficient (why run two police departments when one slightly larger one would work so much better?). Furthermore, as cities have become the nerve-centers for regional, national, and international commerce, politics, and communications, there is a need for several thousand people to work together in the same place. When the Twin Towers were destroyed in 2001, initial casualty estimates ran between fifteen and twenty thousand people because the buildings employed that many people. Where were these people supposed to live? In a ten block radius from their place of work? That's okay if you've only got one such building, but what about the rest of the WTC? It probably employs upwards of 50,000 people. You want them to all be able to walk to work? Sorry. It just won't work.

The "New Urbanism" is all well and good, but it totally ignores the fact that the world's population has grown geometrically in the past two centuries, as well as the fact that what they're doing is not a return to traditional roots as much as it is an attempt to return the world to an era in which most people lived in rural areas or small towns.

Posted by ryan at July 19, 2005 02:15 PM | TrackBack