Thoughts

Ah, Fall! Just makes you remember the smell of new books and musty old classrooms, doesn’t it? Makes you feel as if a new world is opening again. We are all energized. Power to the people! Question authority. Don’t trust anyone over… let’s see… it would be 70 now, I suppose.

Autumn reminds me to question old ideas, consider new ones, and hold on to the ones that are timeless. Sorting those out is particularly tough in my profession. 

Sometimes I go back and re-read some of my old columns just to make sure I don’t have to use the “Law Professor’s Expostulation.” It is named after a teacher who was, in addition to being one of the country’s preeminent land-use law experts, somewhat of a character. A former student once trapped him on the witness stand with a quote from one of his law school textbooks—a quote that contradicted a statement Prof had just made to the opposing attorney. “Aren’t these your own words, Sir?” the cross-examiner said.

The old gentleman didn’t miss a beat. “Why hell,” he explained. “I’ve changed my mind since then.”

Few of us will ever achieve that level of respect. Most of us, however, remember things that we once thought were granite-hard truths only to see theme morph into putty as the years rolled by. Take some examples from urban planning.

We all used to believe that bigger and wider made everything better, particularly streets. Then we began giving mere children their own personal automobiles some six or seven years before they had enough sense to drive them. They see those wide streets not as a convenience but as the Neighborhood 500. Stuck with the streets, we sure wish we could see the front porch of our neighbor across the street without binoculars, but we sure aren’t going to risk walking over there for the privilege.

Meanwhile, the New Urbanists have shown us that narrow streets can not only function better, but also create a more person-friendly environment.

How about curbs and gutters? If there ever was a sacred cow in planning and engineering theory, it was the superiority of curb-lined streets. Suddenly now we are noticing that they sure wash a lot of impurities into creeks and rivers. And those curbs don’t seem to regenerate the aquifer the way grass swales do. Hmm.

We don’t even need to mention the practice of creating malls from our Main Streets. Oh heck, let’s do it anyway. This was going to save downtown when I was a cub planner. It was what the out-of-town experts were foisting on the locals back then.

Let’s move on to parking. Cities are slowly, from the literature I read, moving from a stance of “the more the better” to one of “do you really need that much?” If I can manage to last a few more years, I may see the day when we say “this is all you can have.”

“Tear it down and rebuild” was the going urban mantra in the 1940s and 1950s. Lay this one on the so-called “Greatest Generation.” It was before my time. After hundreds of thousands of displaced families and thousands of mutilated neighborhoods, they recognized the folly. (See The Power Broker  by Robert Caro or The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, the two most essential books, in my opinion, on American city planning.)

Back to my era—sometimes we must test the alternatives before we reach a sensible position. Take sidewalks. They used to be a given. Then we decided we didn’t need them. Then we decided that we need them sometimes. Then, more recently, we decided that we needed them everywhere after all. Now we are realizing that their presence or absence should reflect the context of the particular development. That is to say requirements for sidewalks might best be made according to considerations of density, location, and the function of the street. Again, thanks to the New Urbanists.

So what urban principles may be the fallen angels of the future?  I don’t know—maybe the assumed efficacy of highways and bypasses. Our traffic planners seem to operate under the belief that a new highway, an additional traffic lane, or one more bypass will solve every problem from slow growth to the “heartbreak of psoriasis.” So far they have only created more traffic. Planners in the future may point to the mess they have made by not expanding their mandate to transportation in general.

Or, as much as I hate to say it, the jury may still be out on new urbanism. I am a true believer and there is no doubt that they are building nicer-looking subdivisions—mostly for rich folks. Future city leaders may discover, though, that they failed to address the real urban problems facing our communities. I don’t see many of them, for example, in the Arkansas Delta. The movement may prove to be akin to pseudo medical treatments that make us think we feel better for a wile but don’t really get at the underlying cause of our misery.

Speaking of which—misery I mean—that’s enough for this now.