The sidewalk has no ideology

I rarely read Andrew Sullivan but his Latest Post sums things up scarily and I fear accurately. It's nothing dramatically new -- just the Red/Blue divide of the USA -- but he states it well. I am observing these divisions harden and it is not a pretty picture.

I've also observed some signs that "cultural conservatives" are trying to take over new urbanism and somehow contort it into part of the conservative agenda. It won't work. The good news/bad news is that practically-speaking many of them are not yet up to speed enough about NU to put up a convincing front. They confuse NU with Doric columns and some vague and undefined notion of "traditionalism." Thus their arguments -- ungrounded in any basic understanding of it -- will be unpersuasive. But that's too bad in one sense because we need as much knowledgeble discussion of cities as possible. The sidewalk has no ideology.

The danger is that conservatives' efforts may politicize an endeavor which hitherto has been largely & thankfully outside the left/right split --- thus providing some literal common-ground on which liberals and conservatives can agree.

(You may laugh but I think it is a healthy thing that an extreme conservative, a left-winger and a balanced & sensible moderate such as I (!) can all agree that the design of a Wal-Mart store is not a good thing for America. Let's put aside the labor and jobs issues from urban design -- they are not all one issue at all; I can easily design a Wal-Mart which was designed as a very urban, "Main Street" building -- and was in fact part of a main street -- but which hewed to the same labor and purchasing policies it has today, whatever one thinks of those policies. And, btw, that's a perfect example of the limits of new urbanism. For better or worse, a Wal-Mart built according to new urbanist principles would still be very much a Wal-Mart.)

I hope that cultural conservatives will forebear and desist from trying to make NU a conservative manifestation of "traditional" society. Intellectually, there is simply no basis for such a claim. For example, columns (even the most traditional columns) are only an optional, incidental and totally trivial choice in an new urbanist design. "Learning from the past" is a truism, a cliche, something so obviously human that it cannot be claimed by one party or another. (The fact, for example, that the new Koolhaas-design for the Seattle Public Library largely ignores the streetfront -- and more on this building later -- is not a sign of anyone's radical ideology but simply that a group of well-meaning people got cowed by a an architect with more skill as a self-promoter than as an urban designer. If anything, it is simply a sign that environmental education -- awareness of the environment -- has not gone very far among educated Americans.)

Now I don't really care what cultural conservatives do about other parts of our common social lives so long as they stay out of my life and go do their thing without bugging people who do not agree with them on matters of personal conscience. The danger I am talking about, (and it's a danger to things which conservatives value as well), is to the slowly-growing intellectual and political movement toward re-shaping our cities. My concern is that if they continue in the intellectually untenable position that new urbanism is somehow "conservative," they will diminish NU as a useful social force by politicizing it.

Likewise for liberals, btw. They too can be prone to politicize NU and make it into a transformative movement -- but with their own spin. I have only been to one formal NU event -- the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in San Francisco almost ten years ago. It was a good conference with interesting speakers and great informal conversation. But I was puzzled that the organizers were trying to present new urbanism as some sort of "revolutionary" force which would change society at every level and in every aspect. The roster of speakers aimed to create a broad-based "socially-progressive" coalition. I just didn't get it; NU just ain't that powerful. (I also thought that it was a political mistake. Why weren't the people who build those huge churches in the suburbs on the dais? Or the home-builders? I gather things have changed at CNU.) New urbanism is completely consistent with liberalism -- but it also comopletely consistent with conservatism (whatever those stupid code words mean these days.) New urbanism is great but it will not cure anyone's warts. (Actually that's a bad example as warts may very well be related to physical activity! and one of the benefits of NU is to create places where people feel comfortable walking. But you get my intent.)

I love to see people of all viewpoints support the principles of new urbanism and city comforts, (which btw are not exactly the same but there is an awful lot of overlap and no conflict worth noting.) I urge ideologues of any stripe to join in and see it, talk about it, build it, buy it etc...but to leave their ideology at home in a bushel basket. Libertarians, especially, are invited so long as they recognzie the necessity for community involvement.

Now I know this takes away some of the frisson of the hunt and to see NU as non-ideological may lower the emotional level (and thus interest) around new urbanism. I'll take that risk.

Comments

[Thomas]

Why would it be a bad thing for NU for conservatives to adopt it? As far as I can tell, supporters of NU are predominantly liberal--they look like you, talk like you, think like you, etc. And the most prominent political opponents are conservatives. Wouldn't it be better to have conservatives on board?

And how hard is it to get conservatives on board? Not very. They need to understand that there's nothing 'revolutionary' about NU, as you point out. And they also need to understand how we got where we are today--that the current patterns of urban design and development are not a conservative scheme, and aren't to be the legitimacy that would come, in the conservative view, from tradition.

I agree that there's no need to politicize NU, but that doesn't mean that people can't explore the continuities and discontinuities it has with the rest of their theory of politics.

[David Sucher]

I think it would be lovely for people who have a conservative perspective to support NU. The more the merrier; it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling when I find I can agree with a (usual) adversary on even one aspect of this mysterious world.

But I would warn them, if we were speaking mano-a-mano, that
1. NU cityscapes will not inculcate 'conservative values'
and
2. if they disagree and really think conservatism will be a by-product, please be quiet about it!, and let it be a stealth strategy, as politicizing NU in that manner is a sure way to hinder its adoption.

As Phil Langdon said (paraphrasing) 'Hang all the stuff about the marvelous indirect impacts of NU; it just makes better places to live."

(Apologies to Phil if I misstate; and he is invited to guest post to set the record straight -- or for whatever reason he likes.)

[TM Lutas]

One thing that might be appropriate to say is that modern architecture that does not adhere to NU are anti-conservative. The truth is that conservatives, especially older ones are a bit warped by living through a period where everything seemed to be tilted toward the left (that includes the right). Neutral expressions of civilization that are smack dab in the center are thus viewed as rightist by those who are used to seeing moderate leftism marked as centrism.

This problem of the misaligned center crops up in all sorts of fields and I don't have much of a solution for it except to observe that the effect exists and to advocate charity towards those whose world views are warped in this fashion (and such warping occurs on both sides of the left/right divide).

[Michael Blowhards]

Actually, in my tiny experience, the people most likely to slap the "conservative" label on NU aren't conservatives, they're academic-media-celebritect-establishment types. They see NU as anti-art and reactionary, or at least they aren't shy about throwing around such accusations, and they still like to think of themselves as altruistic, progressive and radical. Pretty funny, no? The idea that po-mo or decon is being done for the good of the people? Yet there's a little of that around still. Anyway, it seems to me that the root of the problem, if there is a problem, is that the establishment types still insist on imposing political labels on architecture styles and approaches. Back when I was talking to architects, it was surprising how quick some of the "progressives" were to anger about NU, and to name-call. You could tell that it was all they could do not to call NU "fascist."

[Carl Jahnes]

To say that 'the sidewalk has no idelolgy' is itself an ideological statement! The writers I've seen who think NU can foster what they nebulously define as 'traditional conservatism' are only speaking of virtues like neighborliness, the ability to limit the pervasiveness of technology's penetration into life (places where cars aren't necessary to life), conservation of resources, etc.

Alan Gowans in 'Images of American Living' shows how what became 'the International Style' was generated by European Architects who wanted to symbolize scientific socialism's most 'certain' promise to usher in the Kingdom of God, or let me say rather, Heaven on Earth, if only people would embrace her tenets. Corbusier's 'laboratories for living' and Mies's rationalized and ephemeral three dimensional steel grids became irresistable symbols that human imperfections were some day soon going to vanish! Why, with such promise of architectures ability to deliver a messianic salvation, should one *care* how a Miesian skyscraper interacts with its urban context, and relates to the street? It's like the Millenniarian flagellants of the first millennium wandering from village to village wondering with the deliverance which is nearly nigh, why do you continue to go to work, feed yourself, engage in the mundane stuff of everyday life? Join us, wander with us, and announce to the lost the deliverance which is nearly nigh!!

The international style as a symbol of the ability of science to bring salvation permutates into what, according to Venturi, we eventually "learn from Las Vegas", and in the early years of the 20th century zoning and building codes, more symbols of rationalistic science's ability to bring order to chaos (those terms culturally defined in a specific way, of course...) are enacted into law, and are used to surgically insert the parking that these derivative Miesian structures require when they are plopped into the middle of existing urban fabric. These formulas for 'architectural and urban scientific order' are used to separate uses into districts to promote the general health and welfare! The resulting urban form they produce makes 'urban renewal' possible and seemingly compelling...and old urbanist neighborhoods, slums, tenements, industrial wastelands, are razed and gleaming Pruitt Igoes are erected with language written about them in the 60's promising exactly what the scientific socialistic language of the 30's and the NU language of the 90's and the New Millennium promised and promises...Pruitt Igoe was going to *make* the slum dweller more 'human' by the way it structured human relating, the same way supposedly NU forms will bring 'deliverance' from the same evil suburban anomie. All it did was turn the stairwells into urinals and great spots to launch a mugging.

All this language about what NU promies to human relating is *clearly* ideological. It's premises like the premises of other architectural medicine offered for bringing healing to human relating are there in the articles written when the structures were 'unveiled'.