I sometimes argue that America in the era of suburbia and car centricity represents a split, a break, a discontinuity, or a schism with America as it existed before that era. And I use this argument to suggest that in some way there is an alternate timeline—one where we never made this break with ourselves—and that fundamentally urbanism is about discerning what this alternate version of our country’s built environment would have looked like, and building it now.
I presented that argument in 2023:
I’ve begun to think about the land-use changes of the 20th century, taken together—mass car ownership, Interstate Highways, urban freeways, and “urban renewal,” suburbs, strip plazas, and box stores—as a revolution….I think another appropriate word would be schism. That’s the term used to refer to a split within the church, most famously the Catholic-Orthodox split in 1054, known as the Great Schism.
I think of what happened to this country in the 20th century as a sort of schism with ourselves, a period of revolutionary change that separated us from our heritage, that broke our continuity with how we had built and inhabited our places. That somehow made us imagine that the last 70 years of city-building and place-making were more of a status quo than the last 5,000.
And more recently, writing about Old Town Alexandria:
The housing crisis is largely our very slow process of trying to undo the winnowing moment that old urbanism went through. To heal, as I think of it, a schism with ourselves.
As I often do, I’m going to spell this out and then question it a bit.
The aforementioned Great Schism—the split in 1054 between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy—is conceptually very interesting. It’s more interesting, I think, than Catholic-Protestant arguments. Protestantism is sort of like an 18-year-old rebelling against his parents; maybe they both have a point.
But Catholicism versus Orthodoxy is more like you cloned that 18-year-old, and he grew into two extremely similar but also pointedly distinct adults, and then the two versions of him met some decades later and each one argued they were the real version of that 18-year-old in his adulthood.
Now I don’t care which side you’d pick, or even if you think religion is nonsense; it’s an analogy. And the question is, how do you know whether a given moment or state is continuous with a previous one? That is—in the context of this argument about urbanism and land use—can America today understand itself as legitimately continuing its heritage before this land-use schism? Or are we now the version of us that split from a main trunk that should have been what we would be now?
First, I suppose you’d have to establish that such a schism or break actually did occur, as a matter of history. 1054 is easy; the two churches excommunicated each other, and that was that. But locating the exact point, or even the exact way, in which America abandoned its historic cities is tricky.
Such a break would almost certainly have occurred between 1920 and 1960, and more narrowly between 1930 and 1950. There are points, or waypoints, we could identify, which show how over this period the old towns and cities morphed from unselfconscious, unremarkable places into something like artifacts or bits of obsolete technology.
It might be 1929, when a majority of American households first owned a car. The establishment of the first historic district in 1931—Charleston, South Carolina—is another. A more dramatic one is 1949, the genesis of the federal urban renewal programs. A more obscure moment: the construction of the last identifiable traditional small town in the United States—which I made an educated guess as having taken place in North Dakota between 1950 and 1953. The end of streetcar service and new line construction is another. There are probably more.
The publishing of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961, strikes me as the last possible moment before we left the old order behind. Probably, we already had. Jacobs, in that book, writes with a slightly elegiac, backward-looking tone, which suggests to me that by 1961, traditional urbanism and pre-car life, and even the memory of it, had already fallen out of general circulation.
If someone could write as early as 1961 about traditional urbanism as a curious, disappearing thing to be studied and understood, then despite its continued existence, the urban world Jacobs lived in and wrote about had long since ceased to be an obvious, unremarkable normal.
If there is not one single moment at which a break occurred, it is clear that during this 1920-ish to 1960-ish period, we remade the way we traveled, lived, and built our settlements, in a manner which simply cannot be seen as evolving from or continuous with what came before. While much of the legacy built environment did survive, the way we thought about it, and the way we expanded on it, changed greatly.
Yes, the New England village was different from the railroad town was different from the big city was different from the streetcar suburb. But all of these, even the last, share a pattern and design language and are identifiable as variations of more or less the same thing. Suburbia—particularly in separating homes from everything else, and in effectively demanding a private vehicle for mobility or access—is a difference in kind. The moment at which suburbia first became the normal or default mode of building a new settlement is when our Great Land-Use Schism was complete.
The other question—harder, and also more tenuous and more conceptual—is,