The City of Tomorrow
May 30, 2019
What decarbonized, climate-resilient, and equitable cities could look like…
by Samuel Miller McDonald
Having grown up in the U.S., I used to think American cities were universal. The glass rectangles piled on top of each other, the glossy towers jutting up like angry glistening phalli, the barrage of bleating car horns, the unstoppable society of emboldened rats, the concrete chaos, the grime—that was it; that was just what cities looked like.
But since visiting cities older than the United States itself—and living in cities well over a thousand years old—I began to notice two characteristics common (though not exclusive) to American cities. First and obvious: they’re abominable. Between the buildings, the roads, the billboards, the cars, the facades, and the decay, they’re just objectively ugly spaces. Some older American cities are exceptions: iconic gems like Detroit, New Orleans, and New York (except for Midtown). But most American cities weren’t built to look nice or provide enjoyment for the people living in them; they were built to minimize construction costs and maximize developers’ returns on investment. In short, these cities were built to serve the bank accounts of a few rich men.
The second characteristic is less immediately apparent than ugliness, but it’s more intrusive in the long run. American cities can be difficult for living bodies to inhabit. The air is poor, the scale is off, the smells unpleasant, green spaces scarce, parking lots abundant, housing isolating and unaffordable, bars too loud, cafes too small, shopping centers too big, offices too cold, streets too hot, transportation inefficient or inaccessible, and plus, everything is violently unequal along both race and class lines. But looking globally, this is more a matter of youth than Americanness. Most cities under a few centuries old, from China to Brazil, tend to be ugly and brutal places to live. Even older cities are not immune from the encroachment of the hideous and the uncomfortable; at the edges of the Old Town in Edinburgh, Scotland, the grand stone cathedrals, symmetrical townhouses, and intricately-decorated facades intermingle with jarring, unhealthy-looking glass-and-concrete blobs. (This isn’t to suggest there’s no beautiful or humanely designed modern architecture; there most certainly is, it’s just vastly outnumbered by the ugly. Egocentric “starchitects” aside, only a small proportion of new construction even consults architects these days.)
This isn’t just the subjective ravings of a disgruntled expat. Tourists flock in droves to old, beautiful, livable cities like Edinburgh or Venice just to take pictures of stunning ancient buildings, or to stroll down lanes carved out for people instead of cars. Edinburgh has been voted the UK’s happiest city and also named the best city in the world to live. In the meantime, nobody’s booking a vacation to Houston, Texas to admire the gorgeous sprawl.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/05/the-city-of-tomorrow-is-the-city-of-yesterday
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