Who Would Build the Roads, indeed!
What happened to American Cities, and the "missing middle."
Milwaukee’s “progress”. Courtesy of Culture Critic.
There’s an account on Twitter/X called “Culture Critic”, and it is, I think, the very best thing on that platform (with the possible exception of J.K. Rowling.)
CC asks the important questions, namely: “Why is our world so much uglier than it was in the distant and not-so-distant past?” And “why were artists living in times far technologically inferior to ours able to craft unbelievably transcendent art, while today’s artists make stuff like this?” And “whose idea was it to make churches look like warehouses?”
Culture Critic doesn’t pretend to have all of the answers. But just posing the questions does a valuable service in itself.
In yesterday’s article, though, which appears as a thread on Twitter/X, CC asks: “Why do American cities feel less ‘alive’ than their European counterparts?” - and then proceeds to illustrate the situation and tell us a little about what led to it.
And this time, the answer is in fact pretty simple: Government intervention got us here. In the form of eminent-domain takings of private property, for the purpose of putting massive, inhumanly sized freeways in the middle of our living spaces, and zoning laws, to separate our daily activities from each other.
Did I mention that most of what CC posts is visual? That is the case here, and he (yes, it’s a “he”) does a wonderful job with the visual portrayal of what has been done to our cities. I recommend looking through the entire thread - it doesn’t take long.
I also recommend signing up for Culture Critic’s newsletter, in which he goes into more detail on these topics. It’s free!
"the answer is in fact pretty simple: Government intervention got us here."
I always say that whatever people can do can be done more poorly and more expensively by the government.
We had Robert Moses in NYC. The cross Bronx Expressway turned the south Bronx into rubble. In Paris, they hired Andre Malraux to head modernization efforts back in the 1970s I think. Any author who makes great doodles in the margins of his writing of his cats cannot be all bad. Malraux came up with a genius solution. You buy a beautiful old townhouse? You can go wild in the interior but the facade must remain as it was. It preserved so much of the beauty without hamstringing the owners in their quest to make it the home they wanted. The huge highways are on the periphery and there was — even when I had a Paris apartment so very long ago — a bullet underground train that could convey you from one end of Paris to the other in minutes. It was built below the metro lines as I recall. They had underground parking so you could park and walk a block to the Champs Elysees. Not saying that Paris is the place I used to enjoy as a part time home anymore but I watched their approach to upgrading infrastructure and those practiced here and there were so many differences.