Here’s some food for thought:

This is really interesting—it’s a way of remembering that city-building is a craft, an art, a body of knowledge. And that body of knowledge was disrupted and largely lost in the 20th century, as cities went all in for urban renewal and tried to compete with the then-new suburbs on their own terms.

Retail changed as land use changed, and the scale of development is just larger now. We’re less good at—because we do it less—building what urbanists call “fine-grained” places: densely packed but scaled small, like a home full of nooks and crannies writ large.

I think, as I wrote the other day about the abandonment of small stores by major grocery chains, that remedying this is beyond the scope of local land-use regulations. I’ve even wondered occasionally whether “urbanism” is an economic phenomenon outside of our control, as is its replacement that we have now. But I’m not convinced of that. I think the notion of knowledge is key: we can re-learn what we used to know—rebuild that knowledge with a lot of learning by doing, even if our continuity with it was broken.

There really was something violent about urban renewal; something revolutionary. We broke with our past in a way that was dramatic and, at the time, felt final. And yet it didn’t take very long for those schemes to fall apart.

The comparison with food, and particularly craft beer, is interesting. One reason it’s interesting is that it proves knowledge can be created. Craft brewing is taken for granted now, so much so that’s there’s something of a craft-beer bubble, and we’re starting to see breweries close down. But it worked, and yet there was no guarantee of that. It didn’t replace big beer, but it’s everywhere now. Craft beer is 13 percent of the U.S. beer market by volume, and nearly a quarter by sales in dollars. And that doesn’t account for the ways in which it changed the industry: smaller breweries growing too big to even be considered “craft,” large companies mimicking or even acquiring craft breweries.

That’s how you can imagine urbanism enhancing—leavening—American land use, architecture, and retail. A greater density of options.

But the difference is that craft beer and “slow food” and all that stuff isn’t really a restoration of some actual past status quo. Some people think it is, but it’s basically true that most normal people in history ate gruel, even if they maybe had some fresh herbs growing out back. Urbanism, however, is a restoration of a previous status quo. Obviously, we’ll do some things differently now than we did centuries ago, but I think good urbanism today will have more in common with pre-automobile cities than Sierra Nevada does with whatever we drank in the 1800s. Maybe I’m wrong—beer experts weigh in!

But the basic fact that we can get quickly and dramatically better at things—craft beer, new wine regions, countries that grow into export powerhouses. Can America do that for urbanism in the modern era?

Related Reading:

Main Street Manufacturing

A Small Town With a Big Department Store

The Opposite of Home Improvement

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