A reader made the observation that these missives don’t offer a lot of hope, don’t outline or explain the positives. Well, by chance, this came in today:
Today I took a walk in a beautiful neighborhood in Barcelona, where there is a famous palace/art museum called Palau Nacional de Montjuïc / Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. As I walked toward it, coffee in hand before starting work, I remembered how while I was growing up in the suburbs in the U.S., I used to think that cities with places like this were somewhere you could only visit on vacation for a couple weeks a year. In my mind, beautiful countries were the stuff of luxury trips you could only afford if you were rich, or something you’d only see in movies or read about in books. I was shocked to realize, when I moved here for a research project several years ago, that people actually live in these places.
Sure, I theoretically understood this before, but to come face to face with this reality was moving and changed my worldview. I realized firsthand that normal people like you and me can and do live in beautiful, magical towns and cities year-round. And not because they are rich (I was a broke student for much of the time), but because in many places, it’s normal to strive to build beautiful, human-centered cities. It brings people joy and a sense of pride, it embodies values and culture in physical form, and it enhances our life experience in various ways. As I move forward with my work in the field of urbanism, my goal is not to encourage more people to move to these places (or to build castles), but rather to encourage people to make more places that are beautiful, interesting, exciting, fun to live in, unique and beloved. — emphasis added
What prevents us all from living in vibrant, interesting, people-centered places? Failure of imagination, fear of what we might lose…? For too many USAnian cities, the deeply-rooted car culture with the attendant waste of land on parking and roads, as well as the public health and environmental damage, will be hard to change. But a better future is out there and we could start working on it today.
As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 100 years ago…the next best time is now. And the corollary that the wise plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. “An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport,” argues Enrique Peñalosa. If your city’s traffic is so persistent as to warrant dedicated daily news coverage, you almost certainly have demand for a dedicated busway or train. What you don’t need are more lanes or bigger highways. Just because Elon Musk doesn’t understand induced demand doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t. We give up a lot for the freedom of driving which turns out not to be worth much in cities. For getting between cities, it makes some sense but not where land is valuable and where people need land for better uses.
So the sunlit uplands are there, if we want them. And if we can’t have what we want, what are we even doing? What is the value of choice if the choices are dumb and bad? We need to imagine better choices and make them reality.