The Deleted Scenes - The Old Frontier
Bear with me here. Back in May I wrote:
This is one of those pieces—hopefully a fully baked one. There’s this idea I’ve tried expressing here and there, that suburbia/car dependence/the current land-use status quo that emerged in the 20th century is a kind of rupture with or departure from an earlier American character to which we are now slowly returning. In a long piece for Vox last year I touched on this, and challenged the idea that higher intensities of development in suburbia are “out of character” with those places. Rather, I suggest, their current form—and particularly the expectation that it will never or should never change—is out of character with their own selves:
And in this piece for Discourse Magazine, I wrote about the inversion of attitudes about urban growth in America. At one time, before this break in the 20th century, small towns competed for population, wanted taller buildings, saw themselves as potential future cities. I quote a newspaper article from 1912:
That was about Boyce, a tiny village in northwest Virginia which was home to about 300 people at the time. I went on to argue:
And I explored an adjacent idea in a totally different context here, writing about a buffet which reopened after COVID almost unchanged. I’m referring here to the Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession:
And I wrote recently about the nature of housing advocacy/YIMBYism:
So you can see, altogether, that I’m sketching this broad idea that our current attitudes toward land use are anomalous. And the job of folks in this broad land-use/housing/urbanism space is to heal the schism with ourselves that is the suburban revolution. This is how I respond to people who see urbanism as a European import or a socialist plot, or who think the car is the soul of America. They see newness, innovation, departure. I see heritage, return, continuity. More than 100 years ago, we competed to grow and competed to build. That attitude held in the very same places which today view their lack of change as an immutable characteristic. Now you could argue, perhaps, that horizontal growth is also in our character. Maybe suburban sprawl radiating out from the city and developing the countryside is sort of like manifest destiny or westward expansion in miniature. Maybe there is something in the mind—at least the American mind—which favors settling a place rather than building it up. Maybe it’s similar to the human preference for building over maintaining. But if there’s anything to that notion of suburbia as a frontier—or if our century-old pro-growth attitude was that of the westward settler rather than the urbanist—I’d like to offer urbanism as a kind of settling of a frontier in our backyard, settled once and then forgotten. As a picking up, once again, of the trajectory we sharply abandoned. Freeing our suburbs and small towns of the zoning codes which decree they will never be more than what they were when they were encased in regulatory amber. There is so much possibility in these places, if we let people act on it. It’s so dismaying to me to hear people in my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey fondly recall its glory days as a tiny working city, and yet fight tooth and nail all the projects pointing in that direction today. I wrote awhile back about a young-ish guy in town who has a store on Main Street. He grew up in bland Fairfax County sprawl. He’s so enthusiastic about his classic store and his town. He sees it with fresh eyes, in a way that the old guard no longer can. It’s like they mistake the form for the substance. They recall what was; people like this business owner can imagine what it could be. Newcomers don’t take the place for granted. Last time I was in Flemington, I wandered around the construction site of the old hotel undergoing restoration and redevelopment. Long ago, there was an oyster house nearby; that structure now houses a newsstand. The hotel’s restaurant probably served plenty of oysters too back in the day. Just by the fence marking off the site, I picked this up: A heavy, impressively sized piece of an oyster shell, buried for who knows how many decades; it could be from the 1800s. A little piece of the town’s history, unearthed and made visible again only because of a new development project. Continuity in change. I guess it’s easy to take a place for granted, or to see it with a kind of familiar boredom, after decades. And the people who live in a place and like it for what it is right now have every right to their opinion. Yet I see so much potential in these once-and-future cities. I see a frontier right here that we inhabit but do not recognize, calling out to be settled and stewarded once again. Related Reading: Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 700 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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