Wednesday, May 13, 2009

City beautiful (====o=n=t=h=e=r=o=a=d====)

"The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree.  We shall both have our own car.  We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline.  All of which will necessitate a great deal of work. . . .  Enough for all."  (Le Corbusier, The Radiant City).

Think about where our first-person narrator must go in a week: He lives 30 miles from his work under a pine tree.  That means that each day he must commute 60 miles.  In addition to commuting, since he lives in a degenerate, car-centric society, he must drive everywhere else.  Perhaps he lives in the middle of a large area zoned strictly for residential use (and which contains an abundance of pine trees), and the nearest grocery store is 5 miles away (the road is flanked by pine trees).  Once a week he must go to the grocery store, so he drives ten more miles (on a road flanked by pine trees).  Perhaps, one day his secretary hosts a dinner and after work he drives to his/her house, and then back to his, adding 30 miles.  He must go to a convenience store (next to a forest of pine trees) three miles away for essentials such as toothpaste and deodorant, so he drives six more miles.  He buys clothes from the mall (in which are miniature pine trees) that is six miles away, thus warranting twelve miles of driving. Added all together, he drives 378 miles in the week.

Imagine his car gets 30 miles-per-gallon.

He burns 12.6 gallons of gas in a week.

Imagine 1,000,000 live in the same miserable metro area in which he lives, and each of them burns 12.6 gallons a week.  

That's 12.6 million gallons of gas burned in a week, 655.2 million gallons burned in a year, six billion five-hundred fifty-two million burned in a decade. 

All in one city.  And that doesn't take population growth into account.  

Jane Jacobs, in her excellent book entitled The Life and Death of Great American Cities, presents a theory of urban vitality and success.  I will summarize it by describing a fictitious yet realistic neighborhood in Greenwich Village, New York City:  On a small block in Greenwich Village, NYC, there are two small grocery shops, two bars/clubs, three restaurants, a café, an art gallery, a travel agency, a real-estate office, a small clothing shop, and on top of everything, apartments.  The residents of the apartments provide a steady stream of business for the grocery stores during the day.  Customers traveling to the real-estate office during business hours may stop at the café and gallery.  During lunch hour, workers flock to the restaurants.  At night the clubs and bars attract hordes of people.  Additionally a steady stream of pedestrians in transit between one location and another choose to walk down the block each day (for the blocks are easy to navigate and all streets connect to other streets).  The result is a continuous and diverse stream of people traveling down the block.  The people who travel down the street either live on it, are there for the specific purpose of using one of the businesses (making that business a primary attraction of people to the neighborhood), or are in transit to somewhere else.  Clients of the real estate agency, passing by the grocery stores as they walk to the office, decide to pick up food.  Tourists coming to the restaurants, passing the art gallery, decide to take a look inside.  Trendy people going to the clubs, passing the clothing store, choose to enter it.  The primary attractions being situated in an area rich in diverse commerce creates an entirely new demographic of secondary consumers to promote the businesses in the neighborhood.  As a result of all the pedestrian traffic, the businesses on the street flourish.  Small businesses owners can, by simply having a street-front window, attract multitudes of consumers.  Thus the spread of unique goods and ideas is fostered.
Approximately 30 miles north-west of Philadelphia sits a miserable toll Brother-Town (Toll-Brothers being responsible for the development of parasitic housing developments in rural areas, thus turning them into sprawling suburbia - Toll-house would be a more descriptive name but for the fact that the houses do not posses toll-housey charm).  In this town, respite from the noise of fast-moving automobiles diffusing over the empty landscape from large highways and feeder roads is nonexistent.  The detached roaring wine of automobiles as they pass by on a highway or high-speed road is a harsh, lonely sound.  There is the pitch-less approach of the car, then the sharp, descending ZZZHNK as the car passes by, and then a pitch-less fade out. To travel, people isolate themselves inside padded boxes and take to the lifeless highways.  To the solitary pedestrian walking through coal-covered woods, only the indefatigable drone issued from the immense highways that is the epitome of emptiness can be heard.

            The people are disconnected.  They isolate themselves from their vacant surroundings.  The landscape is littered with parking lots, defunct factories, lengthy expressways, woods with much surface area, and spacey developments.  The open space is so wide and so empty that the people seek comfort within the confines their cars and within the sight-blocking aisles of immense suburban supermarkets. 

            To travel is to drive.  For when the nearest strip mall is four miles out on the highway, to drive is a necessity.  Driving takes away the casual interaction between pedestrians in a sidewalk, the intrigue of multicultural shops, the variety, the diversity.  It is not even efficient for the traveler, for miles could be meters.  The human drives from an immaculate house down an immaculate road to an immaculate highway that leads to an immaculately generic strip mall with immaculately generic shops that sell immaculately generic products produced by immaculately generic corporations, sincerely immaculately generic and insincere corporations. 

            Culture gets smothered by tires moving at 70 miles per hour and doesn’t even have the chance to fester before it has been rolled down and become part of the highway.

            The houses look like they have been cut out of white dough with a generic cookie cutter and slammed down onto empty lots far removed from anywhere useful.  The developments are endless.  One ends and after a brief forest another begins.  They are ugly, similar, and inhospitable. 

            American culture is based on interaction, in assimilation, in acceptance, in democracy.  These suburbs illustrate isolation and separation.  They are cultural vacuums.  They are created and run by lifeless droning corporations.  

Suburbia is taking over, slowly but surely.  The Washington metro area is expected to increase 80 percent in land area by 2030.  Los Angeles grew 45 percent in population and 300 percent in land area between 1970 and 1990.  Decentralization must not keep decaying our cities.  Bokonovsky groups of identical houses in homogenous developments miles from where people need to be will make for a nightmarish Brave New World.

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