Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities)

Bedside Essays for Lovers of Cities

Daniel Solomon

Washington | Covelo | London

Contents Prologue iv The Continuous City

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Buildings of the Third Kind

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Italy Is a Strange Place

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Whatever Happened to Modernity 30 Three Giants and a Midget

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P.S. 53

Š 2012 Daniel Solomon All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 300, 1718 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20009 ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics.

Cover design by Maureen Gately Cover photos: Perfume Bottle by Vernon Lix, copyright 2012; Ground map by Daniel Solomon Design Partners

I s l a n d Pr e s s E - s s e n t i a l s Pr o g r a m

Since 1984, Island Press has been working with innovative thinkers to stimulate, shape, and communicate essential ideas. As a nonprofit organization committed to advancing sustainability, we publish widely in the fields of ecosystem conservation and management, urban design and community development, energy, economics, environmental policy, and health. The Island Press E-ssentials Program is a series of electronic-only works that complement our book program. These timely examinations of important issues are intended to be readable in a couple of hours yet illuminate genuine complexity, and inspire readers to take action to foster a healthy planet.

Learn more about Island Press E-ssentials at www.islandpress.org/essentials.

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Prologue This collection of essays is about the Darwinian epic now being enacted to determine the dominant life form in the twenty-first century. For most of human existence, the planet has been taken for granted as an eternal and not particularly fragile verity. Things are different now.

For the first time in the long story of our species, people are aware that life on earth is intertwined with how we choose to live, what we eat, and how we move around. For what appear to be good reasons, the way we go about building cities is due for some big changes. Although cities have always been the seats of human culture, trade, and enterprise, only recently have they figured so prominently in a calculus of survival. Global population was 1.5 billion in 1910, 7 billion in 2010, and will be 12 billion in 2075. Of that, 10 percent was urban in 1910, 50 percent in 2010, and 75 percent will be in 2075—staggering, abrupt, unprecedented change.

There is a sense of palpable threat to our way of life, perhaps to our very survival. The explosion of urban populations joins with the dual crises of peak oil and climate change, all mixed together and headed toward us like a pestilent whirlwind. The whirlwind is now roaring in the middle landscape, not far off, and some still manage to ignore it. But this newly defined triple threat—urbanization, peak oil, climate change—has seized the imagination of many, in the way that iv

syphilis and the plague did at other times. All manner of people have come forth with suggestions for our salvation: cyclists and recyclists, train buffs, dietary revolutionaries, spiritual expeditionaries, agrarian reactionaries, bio-politicians, solar technicians; everyone with an idea wants a piece of the action.

In this atmosphere of widespread unease, some aspects of city building have generated a cascade of new thinking. We have begun a new era with regard to the sources and uses of energy and material. We have begun to think in new ways about transportation, water infrastructure, and waste. We now have contending systems of evaluation and reward in all these areas. In America and around the world, cities are on people’s minds, and quite rightly. How do we prevent our buildings and transportation from frying the planet? How do we keep burgeoning urban places fed and watered, their air breathable, their effluents sweetened, life within them tolerable, or better yet, enjoyable, interesting, amusing? There is no lack of attention to these matters, so much so that one hesitates to add to the clamor, and become yet another crisis opportunist, fanning the coals of career with the hot wind of looming calamity.

Most likely, The Sustainable City, under the constant crush of urbanization, is an ever-receding chimera, a rainbow. Perhaps it is the elusiveness of this receding goal that fuels the urgency of the search. Environmentalists for the most part are an urgent bunch, with much to be urgent about. All around the world, the search is on for the Bonanza, the Holy Grail, God’s Kingdom, whatever it is that will allow our new millennium to at last breathe easy and say, we are sustainable, not spiraling into Malthusian doom. There are earthly rewards and pleasures to be bestowed on those lucky or clever seekers who help point the way. Like the fifteenth-century’s great voyages of discovery, the twenty-first century’s path to sustainability is a highly competitive sport.

But when it comes to the form of the post-oil city—the actual arrangement of buildings, highways, streets, and public places—the cascade of new thinking comes to an end. There do not appear to be new choices, though there are new issues of unprecedented scale and import. There are fresh slogans for old ideas, but the contenders for the form of the next generation of human settlements are actually the same foes who have been duking it out for ninety years or more. Their

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battles are like those one finds on late-night cable channels with high numbers— classic fights, always the same fights over and over: Frazier versus Ali, Ali versus Foreman, Basilio versus Robinson, any number of stiffs versus Evander Holyfield—he with the countenance of Othello and body by Michelangelo, perfectly ripped forever, thanks to cable.

There is, however, no late-night cable station to memorialize and etch in our memories the heroes and great battles of urbanism, hence the need for books.

There seems to be a collective amnesia about urbanism, as if the subject had no history, and the ideas of the moment never had a previous life. While the contenders in the realm of city form are the same as they have been for nearly a century, the prize is new, and the new champion will be named the Sustainable City.

Introducing the combatants (though they have been around for so long that introductions are hardly necessary): In one corner is the old champion with victories in all the great cities of the world large and small, the Continuous City, where streets are lined and shaped by city blocks. The blocks in the continuous city are known as perimeter blocks because buildings usually face streets all the way around. In the other corner, still battling hard despite a record of all defeats and no victories is the Ruptured City, where streets and buildings each go their own way without a nod, and blocks, where they exist at all, are freestanding slabs of building. This is the grandchild of the city laid out in ninety-five dogmatic prescriptions in 1943 by Le Corbusier in The Athens Charter.

One would like to think that this collection of essays, its subject matter, and the argument it puts forth is a superfluous assertion of the obvious, that virtually every sentence of The Athens Charter has been so discredited many times over that the discussion would be over. That would be a felicitous state of affairs, but it is, alas, not the way things are. Ruinous ideas about how to shape cities and their buildings, ideas that lie behind generations of urban calamity, keep reasserting themselves. They pop up here and there, no better than before but with vigorous new life. These weary notions currently command some of the most colossal investments in city building in human history, in China and in Dubai. You also see their tenacious influence coated in the glitz of Las Vegas, in the security-obsessed “campuses” of Silicon Valley, and, scariest of all, in places that should know bet-

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ter, like London. They appear within the sanctity of the academy, where architects, and now landscape architects, direct inexhaustible ingenuity to new rationales for the indulgences of unfettered form-making.

A feature of aging is that our personal tendencies exaggerate themselves, and we become parodic versions of ourselves. We all become more-so, whatever “so” might be. And so it is with old ideas about urbanism. Through the wizardry of new software, the human habitat can now be transformed into gratuitous geometric contortions that were only vague, hand-sketched dreams in the past. Design offices with global reach employ row upon row of fresh-faced new graduates, warping and twisting vast new projects with ever-slicker, faster, and more seductive images, unrooted in place, environment, history, the logic of construction, or the rhythms of daily life. The phenomenal power of the digital tool has made the dreams of architects more potent and more dangerous than ever before. For those who don’t keep track of architectural and urbanistic wet dreams, it may seem like the stuff of comic books, but watch out—pretty soon you may be living in it. So it is not an exercise in the superfluous, in the face of general alarm, to sound the trumpets once more, and to find fresh new words to argue the cause of the greatest and most sublime of human artifacts—the city.

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The Continuous City City growth is an inescapable fact of life in the twenty-first century, as it has been for a long time. While for many cities growth is inevitable, the form that growth takes is not. There are three main ways in which cities can grow, each profoundly different from the others: (1) Cities can sprawl and decentralize; (2) cities can erase themselves and build anew; or (3) cities can regenerate themselves more densely within their own structure.

Sprawl and erasure were the dominant modes of urban growth chosen in the United States in the last half of the twentieth century. Each took hold after World War II, and each was a form of rupture with a continuous urban history that extended from the first colonial settlements until World War II. The rupture was both an upheaval in ideas about cities and their organization, and actual physical rupture that left American towns full of holes and gaps that were never there before. The atrophy of urbanistic skills and the acceptance of rupture have been fueled in part by the argument that cyberspace trumps physical space and the form of cities doesn’t really matter anymore. The catchiest phrases to describe the non-city of electronic communications were coined by its earliest champion, Melvin Webber, more than forty years ago: community without propinquity; the non-space urban realm.

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This essay looks at the struggle between the ruptured city and its antonym, the continuous city. The continuous city is not a static thing. It changes all the time because that is what living organisms do. But change in the continuous city is evolution, not upheaval; the living honor the dead and make sure that the unborn get to know them. New buildings, new institutions, new technologies in the continuous city don’t rip apart the old and wreck it. They accommodate, they act with respect, and they add vibrant new chapters to history without eradicating it.

The ideas on both sides of this battle are old and tested. The results are in, and have been for a long time. To predict urban futures according to these contending models, one has simply to look at the ample productions of each. An observer of the last seventy-five years of city building cannot escape the conclusion that the form of the city and urban culture are inexorably intertwined.

The continuous city is and has always been the petri dish of urban culture.

What the sustainable city must sustain is the culture of the city: the way people cook in New Orleans, the way they dress in Milan, dance in Havana, speak in London, wisecrack in New York, look cool in Tokyo. Those things just don’t grow in the non-space no-place of the virtual community without propinquity. It is dull out there—dull, dull, dull—and we have proven that to ourselves over and over, from Milton Keynes to Tysons Corner to the outskirts of Beijing.

The continuous city thrives when the third way of city-growing is employed: reconstruction and expansion within the basic form, if not the physical boundaries, of existing cities. In opposition to the ruptured city, it is continuous both spatially and temporally. Its physical continuity consists of a fabric of perimeter blocks, broken only where breaks have purpose—for parks, squares, or monumental buildings, perhaps for creeks, infrastructure, or exceptional topography. Its temporal continuity rejects the idea of great historic turning points, revolutions, upheavals. It honors its past as it embraces change, accepting change as a normative and continuous process of evolution. In the continuous city, space is continuously defined from building to building and block to block, and time is a continuum in which the past is a welcome and enriching presence in the future. The argument for this way of building acquires force when it is compared to the baleful perniciousness of the other two models for the calamitous beginnings of the twenty-first century.

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No one is silly enough to claim that form is all there is to city making, that urban problems magically go away if architects and city builders simply get the shape of things right. The relationships among economic life, cultural vitality, and the form of the city are complex and interactive, but non-place sprawl like Silicon Valley is not self-sustaining on its own. There is simply not enough life to bump up against on the journey down the highway from a shapeless gated community to the parking lot of an office “campus” where one gets lunch from the steam table in the big, florescent cafeteria. In places all over the world, the young smart ones who are inventing the new ways of livelihood gravitate to those places of urbanity defined by the perimeter block and the tight, old, life-sustaining relationship of block, street, and building. Simply tracking the rise and fall of real estate values makes this assertion unassailable.

From 1930 until 1945, almost the only construction in the United States was federally funded public works—important stuff, but not enough to occupy a generation of architects. When architects don’t have anything to build, they fantasize about it. It’s like sex for prisoners or priests, and as with prisoners and priests, the fantasies can be very strange. They also form the basis for action, not always healthy action. As soon as World War II ended, there was a ready-made library of polemics, decades in the making, to launch the postwar world. The generation of my teachers and mentors digested those polemics and believed that sprawl and erasure were absolutely necessary and beneficent. When they had their chance, they seized it and built their dream world, as has every generation of architects lucky enough to hit a patch of prosperity.

Both versions of city building, sprawl and erasure, were promulgated with such force, with cultural and economic roots so deep, and with effects so lasting and pernicious that each has generated an entire literature of counter-polemic.

Building one’s dreams does not ensure that society at large will really embrace those dreams. Large numbers of people in much of the world have learned to hate the basic structure of that postwar dream world, to hate sprawl, and to hate the erasure of historic cities and historic architecture.

One can date the birth of the counter-polemics to 1958, with the release of Jacques Tati’s immortal film Mon Oncle, a tragic and hilarious lampoon of both

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modes of postwar town building. Stone by stone, a traditional French town with its communal and mercantile life, its quirky architecture, its characters, and its intimacy is destroyed—replaced by a new mechanized dystopia that looks identical, indoors and out, to California sprawl of the 1950s. Many other films followed.

François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), with dazzling performances by Julie Christie and Oskar Werner, portrays a luxurious form of suburban sprawl as an Orwellian nightmare of lobotomized mindlessness. Mathieu Kassovitz’s uncannily prescient La Haine (1995) is an indelible picture of French sprawl and the hopeless lives of poor, young immigrants trapped in the brutal social housing far outside Paris. It begins with the old joke about a man falling from a skyscraper repeating to himself, “so far, so good . . . so far, so good.” Ten years after La Haine, those same grim, isolated repositories erupted in weeks of violence that shook French society to its roots. The consequences of sprawl as a means of insulating French society from its minorities abruptly became clear as the falling man struck earth.

Not all the bitter films about sprawl and erasure are French. The 1999 feature by Chinese director Zhang Yang, Shower, is about the systematic erasure of Beijing. A father and his beloved mentally handicapped son operate a bathhouse, which serves as the focus of community life for a small group of intimate friends.

Soon it will be razed along with the rest of the traditional hutong neighborhood it serves. Shower (just) escapes the maudlin as it portrays what is lost from the fabric of the city and the lives it had sustained.

Perhaps the grandest milestone in the polemics generated by the postwar hegemony of erasure and sprawl was the publication of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. While Jacobs is revered as a kind of Saint George figure slaying the dragon of modernist city planning, she was hardly a lone voice. The historic preservation movement found its voice at the same time, following the senseless and tragic demolition of New York’s Penn Station in 1963.

The publication of Aldo Rossi’s evocative The Architecture of the City in 1960, translated into English in 1966, opened the eyes of a generation of architecture students to the radical idea that buildings are actually part of something bigger than themselves, something that predates them by a lot and will likely postdate them by

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as much. The poetic and elliptical Rossi’s love of cities appealed to architects and their students, while the policy-wonkish Herbert Gans captivated city planners and social activists with The Federal Bulldozer, a bitter and systematic critique of the City of Erasure as practiced by postwar slum clearance and urban-renewal policies.

The many fine minds and serious artists who took their best shot at the cities of sprawl and erasure since 1958 did so mainly in defense of the culture of the city.

Despite a protracted chance to do so, the ruptured city of the postwar era has not produced much that one could claim as urban culture.

One might say that Los Angeles is a special case that disproves this contention.

It was largely built by and for the automobile; it was spatially ruptured from the beginning, and without doubt it has evolved its own distinctive contributions to the world: dress, manners, fiction, the products of the entertainment industry, car culture. It has even turned the fragmented architecture of the ruptured city into a chic export commodity in the works of Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Eric Owen Moss. What is fascinating about Los Angeles is that it constitutes the story of the ruptured postwar city in reverse. As the city has choked on its own hypermobility, with a lung-searing, mind-numbing, all-day rush hour on the major freeways, people have learned to avoid driving as much as they can. Each of its many satellite centers—Pasadena, Glendale, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Downtown, and a half dozen other places have had something like hernia operations—healing their ruptures by generating their own businesses and services to become denser, more walkable, much more like traditional continuous cities. So Los Angeles, the anomalous ruptured non-city with urban culture becomes less anomalous all the time.

Perhaps the most vivid and enduring portrait of Los Angeles in rupture mode is the 1991 film Boyz n the Hood. The film portrays ghetto sprawl, the isolated and isolating communities of Watts and South Central where the complete lack of connection to the economy and the life of the larger city breeds the violent hermetic inversion of car-centered gang life. Boyz n the Hood is sprawl as dystopia, and it belongs on the same shelf as Mon Oncle, Fahrenheit 451, and La Haine.

The many gifted cultural warriors who have railed against the conventions of postwar town building for a generation have recently acquired a formidable poten-

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tial ally. The environmental movement can and should come to the rescue of the continuous city. There are unassailable ecological arguments against wrecking the hearts of cities and dispersing their energies. By every measurable environmental criterion, continuation of these practices is indefensible: the consumption of land, the amount that people drive, the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, the cost of infrastructure, the time and money that households devote to transportation, the health impacts of car-centered life. These topics have generated an entire bibliography, neatly summarized in Peter Calthorpe’s Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.

Despite all of this, despite the eloquent laments of artists, despite the irrefutable claims of science, the phenomena of urban sprawl and erasure still have their protagonists. There is no end to the astonishing twists that human belief systems are capable of. Whoever would have thought that evolution would be a controversial subject among twenty-first century politicians, or that science itself, not only the science that proves global warming, would be the subject of question?

The brutal urban strategies of clearance and reconstruction that failed so colossally a generation ago, never quite seem to go away. Ringing polemics that had such seductive force in the 1930s seem to ring on and on, with wave after wave of crazy people proposing, celebrating, sometimes even building the very things the world learned to despise forty years ago. Some of the deepest, most tenaciously defended bunkers of erasure planning are set in certain schools of architecture. From these bunkers, which ironically include the Institute Berlage in Rotterdam, a worldwide conspiracy communicates in the hermetic codes of critical theory—gibberish to the ears of most people, but like other forms of jive talk, comforting to those who speak it fluently. Does numinous experience predate or postdate narrative? Jive (Yiddish is jive) is usually a semi-secret language of the oppressed, and architects, prone to think of themselves as victims of larger forces, are drawn to its various forms.

It is ironic that one of these bunkers is the Institute in Rotterdam. H.P. Berlage was perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest proponent for a modern continuous city of perimeter blocks. His great plan for Amsterdam South produced one of the century’s finest accomplishments of city building. Amsterdam South is a masterpiece based upon centuries of Dutch evolution of the perimeter block,

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and building upon the techniques of immediate precursors of projects such as the Spaarndammerbuurt neighborhood in Amsterdam and the Spangen district in Rotterdam. Anyone who contends that great urban places could only be produced in remote historical times should just go to any of these places and walk around.

Amsterdam South (1927–1929) makes use of a block pattern developed by J. M. van der May at Spaarndammerbuurt a dozen years earlier. Double rows of buildings wrap around a small midblock park. Continuous building frontages face out to the streets and inward to the park. Between the double rows of buildings is a ring of private gardens. Dwellings repeat in simple standardized patterns, broken by roof forms, passages, and stairs that give emphasis to special places. Groups of entrances get special embellishment and there are beautiful passages from the streets to the midblock. At Spangen (Burgdorfer and Brinkman, 1919) rows of buildings inside the block, perpendicular to the perimeter, define a sequence of linked courtyards. At Amsterdam South, Berlage employed these devices at enormous scale with virtuosic skill in a neighborhood built on a hierarchy of streets, from tiny lanes to grand boulevards. It is hard to think of more than a few instances in the whole history of cities in which private accommodation and the civic life of a townscape are fitted together with comparable comfort and grace. Berlage summarized his method quite simply: Staedte bauen heisst mit dem Hausmaterial Raum gestalten.

City building means configuring space with residential fabric.

Not long after New Amsterdam, the continuous city began to unravel dramatically and most inexplicably in Holland, which had the best of reasons to know better. By 1936 the Bos en Lommer project in Amsterdam by Merkelbach and Karsten, had embraced the new idea of the “open block,” an assertion of the autonomy of individual buildings, as opposed to the continuous fabric of Berlage and his precursors. In the name of modernist “honesty,” the subtle syncopations of Amsterdam School façade-making gave way to patterns that have the interest, charm, and relentless logic of ice trays. Thus began the systematic unlearning of

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centuries of accumulated skill.

If Berlage could see what goes on today in the institute that bears his illustrious name, he would be turning multiple pirouettes in his grave. A 2008 Berlage Institute studio exercise for a new European capital in the heart of Brussels is typical of student work at many of the most prestigious American and European schools of architecture. The first thing one notices about these European capital projects, like so many student exercises, is their utter grandiosity—filling the egos, ambitions, and expectations of twenty-two-year-old fledglings with enterprise at a scale that has been realized at the heart of empire, perhaps a half dozen times in human history. The second thing one notices is the absolute contempt for the existing fabric of Brussels. Just wipe it out, as polemically as Le Corbusier proposed wiping out the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris with the Plan Voisin in 1930. Finally, most alarmingly, the spatial organization of all these projects completely ignores the tradition of urban blocks that made the Dutch urbanism of the early twentieth century one of the glories of the world. In every student project, row upon identical row of faceless buildings float in a matrix of undifferentiated space, and the great intrigue of streets, courts, passages, and gardens that Amsterdam built for centuries is no more. Berlage was the finest student and the most subtle and refined exponent of a tradition and set of skills that now appear completely forgotten in his eponymous Institute.

While architectural enthusiasms, ambitions, and hubris keep alive the ethos of erasure, one would think that sprawl was a dead duck. With ecological arguments so clear and compelling, with so few enthusiasts for a deprived, featureless culture of no-place, one might think that no one on earth would still argue that mid-twentieth-century automobile-dominated sprawl is a good thing or that it represents a sensible strategy for the times that lie ahead.

That is not quite the case. Bright minds have come together under the flag of Landscape Urbanism to concoct a sophisticated (or sophistic) rationale for autodominated decentralization and the irrelevance of traditional urbanism. An attitude that unifies the multiple and various manifestos associated with this movement is a reflexive disdain for anything that bears the aroma of defense of the historic city. Landscape Urbanism has multiple intentions, some of them interesting and

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constructive. Certainly it has produced stunning new examples of urban parks and reclamation projects, but it has also become a safe haven for the unrepentant rupture crowd, the aesthetic libertarians of the self-renewing avant-garde. They base their argument on what they consider to be hard-headed facts of real life. In this view of the world, the traditional city has been “commodified as a cultural product” for the sole purpose of “optional excursions into themed environments.” One assumes that Manhattan and Paris are included as objects of this diatribe.

Landscape Urbanism is a contrarian formulation, a reaction to what it considers the anachronistic, formulaic irrelevance of the modestly successful twentyyear-old movement called New Urbanism. As one closely associated with the formulation of New Urbanism, I believe that the New Urbanist movement, as it has evolved, has done much to earn, or at least to explain, this reflexive disdain from its learned critics.

New Urbanism, as defined in its charter, deals with the structure of the American metropolis from the scale of blocks, streets, and buildings, and the scale of neighborhoods, districts, and corridors, to the scale of metropolitan regions. New Urbanism is predicated on the beneficence of walkable, mixed-use communities, density sufficient to support public transportation, mixed-income neighborhoods, and architecture that honors local building traditions and climate.

Over the past two decades, work of widely ranging character, purpose, and quality has carried the New Urbanist flag, and proponents of the movement have had divergent interpretations of its emphasis and its meaning. While the message has been mixed and muddy, the impact upon development practice and within planning bureaucracies has been profound. Paradoxically, New Urbanism is ignored and/or vilified within the architectural academy where it was born, while at the same time it has secured a foothold as a virtual orthodoxy among planning bureaucrats and many developers. The disdain for this movement by the architectural establishment and the academy has deep roots, and like most cases of long-term visceral hostility, it has proved corrosive to both sides.

Urbanists (old and New) despise the sheer goofiness of architectural indulgences promoted by the cult of genius. Architects (almost all of them would-be geniuses) despise infringement from defenders of the city on their entitlement to

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invent. This intractable conflict is fueled by the lunatic embrace by some leading New Urbanists of a rigid and doctrinaire imposition of “traditional” architecture.

For this vocal group, the aesthetic achievements of the twentieth century were simply a mistake or a momentary aberration. This is not just historic consciousness that values and builds upon past achievements; it is the literal proposal to build in the manner and materials of the eighteenth century. Surely, this is an exercise in cultural self-marginalization more extreme than that of the Shakers of Pennsylvania or the Hassidim of Brooklyn. Finally, there is the sad but inescapable conclusion that much (though certainly not all) of the building done under the flag of New Urbanism, unable to achieve the excellence, craft, and materiality of past times, has turned out to be butt-ugly, inept, illiterate, badly built, tacky and kitsch, to name a few of its less-attractive traits.

So while disdain for New Urbanism is understandable and earned, New Urbanism’s basic formulation withstands the challenge from Landscape Urbanism and the modernist establishment, which itself is mired in a kind of nostalgia for the harsh realities of modernity—a wistful sentimentalizing of anti-sentimentality.

There are fundamental facts that support the New Urbanist conception of the metropolis against its challenger. The first can be observed in many places: Bryant Park in New York City, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Place de Vosges in Paris—great traditional urban places that are teeming with life, and not the artificial life of “commodified tourism.” They are filled with young people of various colors, eating sandwiches and pushing strollers. These are not idle visitors; they are the new cosmopoles, the beating heart of twenty-first-century economic life.

In the great American real estate collapse of 2008–2009, the plummet was led by the sprawling wastelands outside Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Atlanta. The densest concentrations of foreclosures occurred where everything else is least dense—like the endless ramble of the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. But in Boston, Manhattan, San Francisco, Chicago, real estate trembled a little, never collapsed, and quickly recovered its energy. When the credit freeze that began in 2008 made the purchase of housing in these places impossible, the rental market soared.

It is illuminating to talk to real estate brokers about who stands behind this stability and renewed vigor, who it is that that puts their money into places to live and

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work in these resilient cities. They will tell you it is overwhelmingly the young and the youngish, building careers in thriving new industries—biotech, biomedical, and information technology in its many forms and offshoots—including software writers, web designers, gizmo makers, researchers, gamers. As prosperous young people compete for shelter amidst limited housing stock in the liveliest cities, the packaging of resumes, credit reports, and personal references for prospective landlords has achieved the status of an art form. The symbiosis between Silicon Valley and San Francisco seems typical. An indefatigably energetic nineteenthcentury city provides the preferred living place, the focus, the heart, and the center of gravity for a sprawling non-place, close enough so that each pumps lifeblood through the other.

A second powerful force that argues for the New Urbanist conception of the city is the transformation of automobile worship from a universal religion among the young, as it was for the American Graffiti generation, to a series of esoteric, hermetic cabals. Subscribers to car magazines still lose themselves in reverie for a vanished world. Each month as they turn their anxiously awaited pages they are alone in a snorting, responsive beast, charging along an empty twisting road, wind in the face. The various forms of car fantasies that survive as isolated subcultures are for the most part the domain of the ancients. Parking lots at NASCAR races are filled with giant Winnebagos that schlep a devoted group of nomadic gray-hairs from track to track—one form of the golden years attractive to some. Top Gear is a top-rated BBC television program based on car fantasies of various sorts. But Top Gear, like other reality shows, is about vicarious adventures. Its viewers are no more likely to drive laps at the Nürburgring in a Lamborghini Gallardo than they are to swing on a dangling vine over a tributary of the Amazon.

Some among the very, very rich indulge in the fanciest version of car worship, flying or trucking their million-dollar vintage machines to join fellow aficionados and roar around Montana or Tuscany or various race tracks around the world. The automobile romance at its most glamorous is sustained by a tenacious and dedicated subculture of mostly elderly billionaires, Jay Leno and Ralph Lauren among them. But for the rest of the American Graffiti generation, it is gone, gone, gone, never to be rekindled by the silent whoosh of an electric econo-box. Trundling

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along a jammed freeway in a 550-horsepower BMW M-5 or a 565-horsepower Cadillac CTS-V won’t do it either. The experience of driving one of these overpowered luxo-behemoths is as different from a 1950s’ race car as riding first class in a Boeing 757 is from piloting a WW II vintage P-51. For most young people, the romance of the automobile is simply a mystery, and living in the automobile metropolis is a time-wasting, boring, and expensive inconvenience. For kicks they have snowboards, skis, hang gliders, parasails, surfboards, climbing gyms, and the like—cheaper and (as they say) way funner than cars. The attempts by academics and architectural elites to preserve or revive sprawl and erasure as dominant modes of city building seem to have little resonance among those who constitute the life force of the twenty-first century economy.

We are at the beginning of a time of radical involuntary change. Like it or not, we face the retooling of American industry, the American landscape, and the American city to equip our society for the age after oil. No amount of ostrichheaded right-wing demagoguery will make it go away. There is no choice; the post-oil economy and the post-oil city are upon us, with effects as profound for this century as railroads were for the nineteenth century and automobiles were for the twentieth century. There is no question that zooming around freeway ramps in a nifty-handling car was great fun, especially when they were empty, but it is something to look back on (fondly, if that sort of thing ever interested you), but not to look forward to.

But what we can look forward to, our own dream world, may not be so bad.

Part of our redemptive dream seems to center on food and how we take care of our bodies. How we shop, cook, eat, and exercise stand at the center of an ethos of city building. The quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink are also a part of that center. Caring for the planet and caring for ourselves seem to go hand in hand.

In times to come, more people in more places will be healthy and fit, spending parts of each day exercising and eating yummy fresh food. More of us may have workplaces where we breathe fresh air and know the seasons from the nuances of light that fall across our desks.

More people may be able to walk from one place to another. Walking as a matter of routine, enjoying it and encountering a broad and unpredictable range of

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human possibility along the way is central to our dream city. Sprawl and erasure insulate us from the great pageant of humanity, anesthetize our consciousness, and diminish our insight. The city should be didactic, the great teacher of human possibility. Only cities, only continuous cities, can perform this role, because they are the places that experience is not selective. In the city of twenty-first-century dreams, obsessions about physical well-being and human connection take on spiritual dimensions and inform architecture and city building. The continuous city is as healthy for the soul as it is for the body.

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