Although I am a left of center progressive I read The American Conservative and most of the time find myself agreeing with the articles there. They have a refreshing new blog there, New Urbs. They discuss how to turn urban America back to the people friendly communities of the past and manages to really criticize the suburbs at the same time.
Welcome to New Urbs. Over the course of the next year, The American Conservative will be opening a discussion on how to rebuild America’s communities and sense of place by fostering humane, sustainable, and walkable built environments, made possible by a grant from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. For while the breakdown of community and the family is a consistent theme in conservative circles, the conversation very rarely gets beyond some mix of exhortation towards traditional values and demands for rollback or reform of the welfare state. That’s where a school of urban design called “New Urbanism” comes into play.
Just as an individual is embedded in a family, and a family is embedded in a community, so too a community is embedded in its neighborhood. The patterns we live in can bring us into the sort of constant, casual, incidental contact that builds bonds between neighbors, or they can silo each of our families away, leaving civil society to wither as the “place between” is filled with asphalt and strip malls. As Paul Weyrich, William S. Lind, and Andres Duany wrote in “Conservatives and the New Urbanism” in 2006, “Edmund Burke told us more than two hundred years ago that traditional societies are organic wholes. If you (literally) disintegrate a society’s physical setting, as sprawl has done, you tend to disintegrate its culture as well.” New Urbanists aim to reinvigorate those traditional structures, like the classic Main Street with living space above the storefronts, and other homes right around the corner.
I grew up in a middle to upper middle class neighborhood in Portland in the 50s. The neighborhood truly was a community something I never experienced while I was raising my family in the suburbs. We used to have community events like picnics and barbecues. Everyone looked out for everyone else. I never saw any of this in the suburbs.
Suburban sprawl has, through an accident of history, often been defended by conservative Americans, especially those who mistakenly consider suburban living to be the pure product of free choices and free markets. Yet traditional building of the sort encouraged by New Urbanism is very amenable to conservative sensibilities. Traditional neighborhoods where a family can live within walking distance of their church, or send their child to the grocery store to pick up an ingredient for dinner, are often illegal to build today. Even the supposed free-market success of the automobile over mass transit has itself been heavily subsidized. These issues are of a kind with arguments and concerns that conservatives of all stripes should be very familiar with.
We had at least three grocery stores within easy walking distance of our house one of them a Safeway. You could fit several of that Safeway into a modern one. The bus stop that could take you anywhere else was about a block from our neighborhood. There was also a hardware store and a pharmacy within easy walking distance . Walking was made easy because of the wide tree lined sidewalks. The suburban community I lived in didn’t even have sidewalks.
I for one look forward to following this blog. It’s certainly a step in the right direction.