Is urban design a question of morality?

Several days ago I wrote with some dismay about the unwisdom of presenting our awful urban environments as an issue which can be solved through some 'contemporary version of moral re-armament.' Via Armavirumque, I stumbled upon a post at orthoblog of a talk given by Roger Kimball.

The upshot? Things are as bad or worse than I thought.

Some folks do seem to want to make our problems of urban form part of their culture war and of course that is assuming that the built environment is by their definition part of "culture." (If not, then we would indeed have an even worse problem.) But it is troubling enough as is. Kimball says:

Alas, that caveat exhausts the upbeat portion of my reflections.
For I also believe that no one who cares about the spiritual health
of this country can regard our present situation with anything but
dismay. The "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" that Matthew Arnold
discerned as the sea of faith ebbed into darkness around him has
become a deafening thunder. You mentioned several important evils;
many others could be adduced, including the decline in educational
standards and liberal learning, the attrition of
manners and civility, the ubiquity of a shockingly degraded and
corrupting popular culture: everyone will have his own inventory of
horrors.

What opened this Pandora's Box? How have we come to troubling pass?
In my view, the essential problem is not pragmatic but moral. Among
other things, this means that changes in public policy won't fix
things: only a change of heart will. The question is, where do we
find the incentive for the necessary change of heart? There is no
single or simple answer to that question. We are living with a
crisis of values that amounts in the end to a crisis in faith. There
are many sides to this crisis, and a long history. Almost a century
ago, Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter that he felt "a wave of
relentless Barbarism, rising from below the ground. . . . Never have
affairs of the mind counted for less. Never have hatred for anything
that is great, contempt for all that is beautiful, abhorrence for
literature been so manifest." What would Flaubert have to say could
he but visit a class in cultural studies at one of our premier
universities today? What would he think of MTV? Of Calvin Klein?

In fact we may very well be in the midst of a moral decline; I don't need to or care to debate a Rorschach test. The creation of an urbane, decent, moral neighborhood, a neighborhood where people possess some sense of connection to each other, is in no small part related to the relationship with which one arrange streets, sidewalks, buildings and parking lots. And this arrangement is not a question of morality. It is based on practical rules which are themselves in turn based on human behavior. It concerns me that so many people seem to see this particular "cultural" of urban design as a moral issue.

It further concerns me that anyone, as Kimball explicitly does, would make cultural matters a partisan issue. (He suggests no neutral political ground for the literally all-encompassing issue of urban form.) If he believes (as he surely must) that urban design is part of culture (or else he would have to be chided on that point!) then to make it a partisan issue is both without foundation and indeed mischievious as it serves to create yet another needless conflict.

Such harsh words about a society which has voluntarily desgegregated itself. As a side-note, it never ceases to astonish me that people who have in their own lives witnessed a most dramatic and peaceful transition of a society (anywhere, anytime) from vicious racism to something still imperfect (but a whole lot more moral) could possibly get on their high-horse worrying about the spiritual decline of our culture. I shake my head in wonder. The excellent "spiritual health" of the USA (about which so many people seem to spend so much time worrying) is no better demonstrated than by our last 50 years i.e. the manner with which we have dealt and continue to deal with racism. (I won't even mention environmentalism, feminism, etc etc which while sometimes prone at the margins to a silly excess of enthusiasm, mark a profound and positive transformation of American and, possibly, world society. Indeed these "isms" are an advancement of consciousness along lines of which, I believe, Teilhard de Chardin would have appreciated.)

ONE MORE POINT: What I don't get is how Armavirumque et al can place the West so firmly (and I think largely correctly) on the side of the just when it comes to fighting terrorism (for example, here) and yet sound like oh-you-know-his-name when it comes to our essential spiritual stance. Kimball's language above is pretty harsh....sounds like oh-you-know-his-name. Which is it, guys?