I’ve written before about the tension between the public and private realms: in other words, civic or community spaces we all share—parks, squares, streets—and private property and possessions. The tension arises from the fact that American suburbia in many ways is a private duplication of, or replacement for, the public realm. Private automobile vs. public transit. Backyard pool vs. public pool. Gated/HOA amenities and private yards vs. public parks. All that kind of thing: wealth channeled into the suburban lifestyle and its underlying development pattern in ways that pull it away from a more broadly shared public investment.

Probably my favorite piece about this is one I wrote after our trip to Croatia about a year ago, inspired by trying to drive in the old city of Split:

We didn’t touch the car once during our three days in Split. The parking and driving situation in the old city basically made the car a liability, something too risky and stressful to use. The American in me was frustrated. In fact, I wanted to drive to a Walmart and sit in the massive parking lot and luxuriate in its space and convenience, idling my engine with the air conditioner on full blast (Europe and air conditioning don’t always go in the same sentence).

My urbanist convictions momentarily gave way to that frustration, and the idea that I was at fault for bringing a car into the city only made me more annoyed. Walkability might be a nice novelty, but sometimes you just have to get somewhere.

However, once we checked in, got to our room, and went out to explore historic Split, all that frustration melted away. The fact is that if everyone could park conveniently in the old city, there would be no old city. Americans learned this the hard way—though we did it to ourselves—to the point that many American downtowns have more parking than they do actual buildings. It’s always sobering to think about what once stood on virtually every urban parking lot.

And fittingly, you can broadly think of this, as many people do, as the “American” approach or the “European” approach. You might think of it one way: America is a land of private wealth and public impoverishment. Or you might think of it another way: Europe is a place where you can sip a coffee on the sidewalk, but then you have tiny appliances and no air conditioning.”

I don’t take the view that urbanism is a “European import,” or that there’s something inherently “collectivist” about cities or public transit. I certainly don’t oppose private property rights—one reason zoning irks me so much, in fact, is that it departs from America’s supposed culture of economic freedom.

But nonetheless, there might be something to this. Think about the pandemic and how it altered public life. You could say that when the pandemic squeezed “American” capitalism, we adopted more “European” habits. We used parks and public spaces more; we embraced outdoor dining and even drinking. Does that show that “Europe” is what people naturally do when they don’t have a massively subsidized private realm and hard-core consumer economy?

Maybe? Maybe speaking of the public and private realm as being in “tension” isn’t quite sharp enough. Maybe they are different in the way that acids and bases are different. A completely acidic and alkaline substance doesn’t and can’t exist (it sort of can—I’m not a scientist, I’m making an analogy). Maybe there is just this spectrum of land-use and commerce acids and bases, and Europe and America reside in different spots on that same spectrum.

More to the point, maybe you can’t have all of the private comforts and frankly luxuries of the United States and also have a rich and inviting public realm, great public transit, etc. A lot of Americans would say, okay, we’ve made our choice. But have we? Or do we mistake our chosen point on the spectrum for something inherent and unchangeable in American life, and never even considered how it might be moved? Or have we considered it but—like me with a car in Old Split—found it too difficult, even if we like the idea of it?

One area where this tension seems particularly clear is parking. Parking takes up a tremendous amount of urban space and is expensive to build and maintain, especially when free, and especially in the form of a garage. More parking, in a city, necessarily means less space for everything else. It is, in essence, impossible to build a traditional city which is also oriented around the convenience of motorists.

Maybe that’s the acid, corroding the base of what we once built—and leaving us with the impression, today, that the corroded shell is all we ever had.

Related Reading:

Have You Ever Seen a Nursery Like This?

Fifty Million Private Realms Might Be Wrong

Old City Driving

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