Here’s a lovely walkable small town:

It just happens to be on our bedroom dresser.

Isn’t it interesting how this idea of lovely, dense (though not usually high-rise), walkable, mixed-use places endures in both our actual old-fashioned cities and towns, and in the culture: Christmas movies, Christmas villages, Americana paintings—yet feels so distant in most of the built environments we actually inhabit day to day?

Look at what’s in my own Christmas village. A popcorn stand (wonder how much it would cost to license that, if it’s even allowed). A train (like many small towns, including my hometown, used to have). A number of neighborhood stores and services. Not pictured, a church. There are buildings with presumably residential second and third floors.

The only “suburban” building I can ever recall seeing from this Christmas village collection is a Kohl’s store—interesting only because you never expect to see a big-box store in a Christmas village! You know what’s never in these villages? Parking lots. Cars (with the exception of vintage cars or trucks hauling Christmas trees).

Urbanists will make these points—that Christmas villages are essentially pre-automobile small towns, that nobody takes wedding photos in suburbia, etc. And what we mean is, why are these things reserved, closed off, special?

I understand there’s a certain silliness to this kind of analysis, or at least many suburbanites think there is, as I once would have. Of course there are no car/driveways/parking lots. This is fake: nostalgia, rose-colored glasses, abstraction. Asking why there are no parking lots in a Christmas village display is like asking why there are no murder mysteries in children’s books. Or, maybe it’s like asking why can’t every day be like Christmas. The real world has its noise and mess and inconvenience and ugliness.

But…why can’t every day be like Christmas? The answer is that some things are valuable and special for their rarity, for their fleetingness. There’s something that’s just sort of metaphysically or psychologically true about that. But in a sense, I think a lot of people are also, maybe not consciously, expressing the idea that we should limit or ration beauty or loveliness.

Why does the loveliness of traditional urbanism seem off-limits in everyday life? I wonder—and have wondered before—whether there isn’t a certain secularized puritanism going on here. It’s almost as if we don’t believe we deserve lovely, lovable places in our everyday surroundings. Maybe we aren’t avoiding cities like the plague as much as rationing them like ice cream. You can’t have dessert all the time. But urban living at its best is vegetables that taste like dessert. I think this idea just feels wrong to a lot of people. It’s very hard to separate enjoying yourself from slacking off. There’s always that cultural parent tsk-tsking, “Alright, time to get back to work.”

There’s something very, very deep here: urbanists need to challenge the American idea that misery is a proxy for merit. We need to argue that living every day among beauty is not soft, not indulgence, not immaturity, not an undeserved perk.

We need to argue not that urbanism isn’t terrible, but that we’re good enough to deserve it.

Related Reading:

“Streets Closed to Vehicular Traffic”

Ugly Buildings and Open Space

The Train Not Taken

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