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| Ogden Avenue, Rainy Day |
"We shall solve the problem of the city by leaving the city."
Henry Ford
With an explosion of industrialization in the 19th century Western cities grew to a scale and frenetic intensity that completely overwhelmed traditional patterns of human settlement and experience. The transformation that occurred in 19th Century London, Paris, New York and Chicago is happening now in Eastern cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Mumbai.
In Europe the squalor and pollution of industrialization occurred on the edges of much older and well established urban clusters with valued urban cultures. In North America large cities emerged simultaneously with industry - thus embedding the adverse consequences of industrialization (poverty, over-crowding, pollution, cultural conflict) at the very center of the American urban experience. For decades into their explosive growth cities like New York, Detroit and Chicago literally operated like giant machines with few public spaces or amenities to speak of.
For 150 years the industrial city has haunted the American imagination. Frontier mythologies and a strong culture of individualism have encouraged Americans to ideologically abandon the prospect of urban living. Cities are popularly perceived as places that physically and mentally corrupt individuals. In this context popular desires to escape the metropolitan labyrinth of human tragedy for the salubrious isolation of country living was easily romanticized to the point of becoming a cultural imperative during the 20th Century. The city was thus increasingly abandoned and replaced by a metropolitan vision that attempted to obfuscate the contradictions of modernity (inequality) while protecting some people from the consequences of industrialization. Architecture and urban planning were employed as mediums for reforming society to the demands of modern work and leisure by rationally isolating an immense variety of urban functions while segregating people of different backgrounds, ethnicities and economic fortunes.
The industrial city, in other words, exploded, splitting along the most obvious seems in its fabric - pushed from the inside by a combustion of cultures and pollution and pulled from the outside by the promise of open space, purity and control. The public realm - the streets and the urban spaces that facilitated the mixing of diverse peoples and ideas - was abandoned for the privatized domestic realm. Mass suburbanization was not without its economic benefit of course. With energy and infrastructure subsidized by the Federal Government, the unprecedented inefficiencies of sprawling private enclaves facilitated the creation of a consumer society based on the principles of planned obsolescence and identity politics.
As America suburbanized, societal racism encouraged the demonization of the city as a hopeless realm of undisciplined and undeserving minorities. The city became a void defined by negative stereotypes and "un-american" values. Urban life was thus alienated from American culture in order to absolve society from responsibility for its failings. The suburbs were legitimized by being popularly portrayed and understood as a natural choice rather than a consequence of domestic policy decisions and consumer marketing strategies.
America continued its retreat into the 21st Century. Our way of life became privatized and deeply cynical. Though the middle-class continued to pursue an ostensibly healthy frontier lifestyle, most Americans found themselves surrounded by an uninspired landscape of poorly constructed tract housing, strip malls, highway signage and endless asphalt. America became the most physically isolated, sedentary and obese society in history. Though the Internet and digital communication once promised to reconnect people it has mostly served to bond people of similar dispositions together while doing little to bridge the increasing social, ideological and economic divides that grow more severely entrenched with each passing year.
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In all natural systems, civilizations, organizations and technologies there exists an inflection point of diminishing returns. Past such a point increased complexity and energy investment yield little if any actual developmental progress. Scale and proportion are fundamental criteria by which to understand the health of these systems. Presently we find ourselves in an obese society, at an inflection point of diminishing returns. In the United States there is growing evidence to suggest that instead of prolonged growth, accelerated innovation and a greater “flattening” of the world, our near future will likely entail significant conflict, exhaustion and contraction. After 60 years of grossly unsustainable energy and financial practices America’s experiment with mass suburbanization may have reached its logical conclusion.
In a state of physical and ideological isolation and we have become fatally incapable of agreeing or even understanding our collective problems. We cannot overcome the collective crisis confronting our society (energy and water shortages, climate change and social alienation) without rebuilding and reforming the physical space, infrastructure and culture of civilization.
In the 21st Century we shall solve the problem of civilization by returning to the city.
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