Note on city planning

December 2, 2010 at 7:32 am (Uncategorized)

(A corollary to a point that Tocqueville makes somewhere) Europeans designed their cities so that the people could be idle or entertained or dissolute in public squares; Americans design theirs so that the people are supposed to go home and get drunk in front of their fireplaces or televisions.

5 Comments

  1. John Farrell said,

    December 2, 2010 at 10:20 am

    Priceless!

  2. peeping thomist said,

    December 3, 2010 at 6:37 am

    So very true. I remember mobs of people in the public square of even an Irish city on Bank Holiday late on a weekend night shouting and cheering and slowly realizing this was fairly normal.

    Although to be fair, American cities were designed later on (and I’m not so sure if they were all originally designed so), and European cities were designed centuries before “modern times.”

  3. love the girls said,

    December 4, 2010 at 10:14 am

    “Americans design theirs so that the people are supposed to go home and get drunk in front of their fireplaces or televisions.”

    Some comments are pithy, and some comments are just plain shallow. This one is shallow.

    Cities are designed, and more specifically lived in according to the socialization that is intended. And as society changes, so likewise do the cities, albeit cities change more slowly than American society so that that the built forms can actually be seen as an archeological memory of the past.

    A past, for instance, that once included trolley cars until General Motors purchased the trolley car systems because the socialization it intended was capitalist exploitation. A system that fit the socialization of its time where neighborhoods were intact and front porches were commonly used.

    But those neighborhoods are now gone, and in their place remain the houses with those same now unused front porches. And when city planners demand that front porches be built, those new front porches likewise go unused. Just as balconies in urban areas likewise go unused. The people are inside watching their flat screens, but not because the local urban landscape forces them to.

  4. Joseph Drake said,

    December 4, 2010 at 1:20 pm

    Until you framed the question so, I never realized the superiority of public drunkenness over private stupors. At least the public drunkenness preserves some measure of community.

  5. love the girls said,

    December 4, 2010 at 3:38 pm

    Mr. Joseph Drake nails it. The perfect synthesis of insight with mirth. Nicely done.