Recently, I saw a comment on a Reddit thread about video game collecting that went something like, “Remember that this is all junk, and nobody will care about it when we’re dead. Just enjoy it. You’re collecting this stuff not because it matters, but because you like it.”
Hmm. I definitely like the idea that my personal interests happen to be of ultimate cosmic significance. One can hope.
But beyond that tendency to hope that my interests are somehow right and not merely pleasing to me, I do think there’s real value in preserving and remembering the past. Collecting and preservation are not just exercises in accumulating stuff, or exercises in nostalgia. At its best, preservation cultivates humility. It can reduce your tendency towards self-importance by broadening your sense of everything that has come before you.
Now, this doesn’t quite map onto cities or historic preservation, because buildings interface with the real, everyday world. They’re not collectibles that can be stowed away. But I’ve been thinking about how collecting and the rising interest in “retro” technology kind of looks like America’s relationship with cities.
Part of the appeal of “retro”—retro games, cassettes and vinyl, Polaroid cameras, etc.—is an actual idea beyond just “this stuff looks cool.” It’s that obsolescence/technological progress may have been the wrong way to think about these technologies entirely.
A vinyl record is not a sort of inferior CD; it’s a technology and an experience of its own, and “obsolete” doesn’t capture its relationship with newer technology, or with us. A Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo game is its own kind of game, with its own gameplay, art style, music style, and motifs. It’s no more “obsolete” than pre-Renaissance portraiture or black-and-white cinema.
“Retro” is a rejection of the idea that old technologies are merely points along a linear, inevitable path of technological improvement. Inconvenient? Not worth the trouble? Maybe. But not obsolete.
This seems very much like what has been happening with cities in America over the last three decades. Our 20th-century revolution in land use was based on the idea that pre-automobile cities were outmoded relics of a previous time. The car demanded a new kind of urban planning and a new kind of built environment. This probably felt true for many decades; cities deteriorated during the Great Depression and World War II, and then suffered the crime wave. (Urban renewal, of course, did not help.) The old city was confidently consigned to the past.
But the pre-automobile city is not a technology, like dial-up internet. It is a valid and time-tested way to organize neighborhoods and everyday life. Like the vinyl record, urban life might be inconvenient or frictional in some ways. It doesn’t mix well with cars, and cars are here to stay.
Maybe it isn’t better. But it can be delightful. And its inconveniences do not imply that it is outmoded, or that everything that came after it is superior simply because it is newer.
What we now might call “traditional urbanism” was once
