The French Revolution For Buildings

Urbanism as rediscovery

I am a conservative urbanist because 20th century urban planning, reaching its culmination in urban renewal, was the French Revolution for buildings. I mean that literally. What we did to our historic cities in the 20th century, and the way we reoriented the way we built places, was, in every sense of the word, a revolution.

It’s a curious thing that those opposed to this new revolutionary status quo are the ones viewed as radicals. When I was a kid, and didn’t know much about any of this stuff, I remember seeing the terms Smart Growth or even occasionally New Urbanism derided as commie plots. Not liking cars, advocating for bicycles, wanting decent public transit—these issues tend to reside on the American political left, which makes it easy to lazily caricature them as communist-adjacent. Car-oriented suburbia became the “normal,” the status quo, very quickly, in just a few decades.

Because these urbanist issues reside on the left, they often get bound up with other left-wing issues (or other issues which have ended up on the left, like concern about climate change), which furthers the impression that they’re “leftist issues” and therefore weird or radical ones.

Perhaps it is true that, by the middle of the 20th century when urban renewal began in earnest, Americans broadly wanted something new: suburban homes, space for their cars, self-serve box retail with air conditioning and free parking. It would indeed have been difficult to slowly retrofit cities for modern conveniences without demolishing large parts of them. There were still buildings in very poor areas of cities that didn’t have indoor plumbing. And the nation had a housing crisis, which—ironically—was the reason for building new suburbs which later became the poster children for NIMBYism, making it harder to solve the current housing crisis.

Given that we rarely talk about anybody other than Jane Jacobs when discussing the resistance to urban renewal or the master planning of Robert Moses and his ilk, it’s likely that defending the existing historic cities was a minority position (no pun intended, and of course it’s no laughing matter, but it was poor and minority neighborhoods which were most readily torn down or disinvested). In other words, despite the nature of what was being done, it would have looked and sounded as though “urbanism” was the domain of cranks and critics, not an old cultural normal being swept away.

But in any case, the “revolutionary” or “radical” side in urbanism never was, and is not now, those who oppose single-family or single-use zoning, or the colonization of the street by the automobile, or the automobile’s status as one of the greatest killers of children, or the wholesale demolition of historic urban fabric, or the planning “wisdom” of the 20th century.

All of these causes are fundamentally conservative, if not almost stick-in-the-mud or even a tad Luddite. They would echo, if achieved, an actual time in American history, probably some time before 1920. Accounting, obviously, for modern conveniences, an America in which urbanism “won” would be an America in which the clock was turned back a century.

Urbanism today does sometimes come in the form of protest or advocacy or a certain sneering elitist tone. But the substance of what urbanists of most stripes actually want is not revolutionary. What we ultimately want is to restore a learned, accumulated wisdom that a true class of revolutionaries blasted away, imagining, perhaps, that they were scraping off the accreted barnacles when they were burning the ship.

As I noted at the beginning, I really mean this literally. The speed, tinged with a kind of glee, with which we swept away the old, tore down the historic, made way for the elitist plans of people who thought the world had been waiting for their intellect: it is all distinctly revolutionary. Every revolution carries with it not just an idealism about the future, but, perhaps even more importantly, a contempt for the past. There is no humility in a revolutionary. Why be humble, when you know you’re right, and everything that came before is obsolete? The revolutionary is a narcissist; he wonders why he is born into this world that he does not like.

Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, wrote this: “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” This is an insight, but it is also a description: a description of the revolutionary mindset. It is striking how applicable it is to revolutionaries of all stripes. Urban renewal and the ideology of which it was a part is so obviously an instance of this, that it makes you wonder whether Americans really are a small-c conservative people, as we often think of ourselves as being.

Now, I would like to note that you can take this too far. There’s the whole “RETVRN” meme, and then there are the actual fascist-adjacent online weirdos who love traditional architecture, which is weird. And there’s the “This is what they took from you” meme or the “I just want her back” meme, with pictures of traditional cities. All of that is a bit silly.

Urbanism is restoration, rediscovery. Not in a grand political sense, but in the sense of finding some old thing in your grandma’s closet and looking at it closely and thinking, Wow, this is cool, it’s really well-made, I wonder what this was for?

Rediscovery or restoration is not an ideology of the past; it is a humility and curiosity as to why the world we live in exists, how and why it was built, and what we can learn from it that others might have seen as superfluous or outdated. Seth Zeren said this once, and I’ve said something similar. I suspect a lot of us urbanists have had this feeling, whether or not we’d put it this way: “We’re living in the ruins of a former civilization, with no idea how they built it.”

It’s always striking to me that the early New Urbanists were very much not social engineers or technocrats. They were not a cadre of Robert Moseses who liked cities. Starting in the late 1980s, they realized that we no longer knew quite how our historic towns and cities were built. We could figure it out easily enough by looking and reading, which they did. But the working body of knowledge, by which we unselfconsciously built these places we still love, had fallen out of favor and out of use. It would take, and it did take, a great conscious effort to do again what we had once done almost by rote.

Like the saying goes, cookie-cutter is okay if the cookies are good. The cookies used to be good. When the pattern you are replicating is good, a lot of work is done for you. And a lot of work is done for you, too, if you’re willing to learn from the past. Not the past in the abstract, but, literally, in the concrete: in the world you inhabit, which more likely than not is there for a reason.

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Related Reading:

Car-Free Cities Don’t Feel “Radical”

A City’s A City No Matter How Small

The Work Of Restoration

Urbanism Is American History

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