I wrote, last week, musing on nostalgia and how we think about the past:

When I first started to take an interest in this stuff and found these things were worth some money, my dad was kind of surprised. He remembered seeing all this stuff for sale in Kmart, back in the day. How could anybody pay big money for 40-year-old mass-produced junk? But they did! And time had given these things a sense of being unfamiliar and unique. I wouldn’t say they’d become antiques, but they’re obviously from a different period in design and technology, and for whatever reason that makes them desirable. An antique or a “vintage” item isn’t inherently those things; those are judgments or perceptions we place on them.

So what I’ve wondered with regard to this is, which pieces of mass-produced junk in a big-box store, right now, will be collectible and desirable in 40 or 50 years? What item in a Walmart, if you bought a bunch of them and stored them away new in their packages, would be worth a big premium as a “VINTAGE/RETRO NEW IN BOX BOXED” item? (eBay sellers love their screaming capital letters and duplicative keywords.)

I also, not surprisingly, have an urbanism tie-in to this point: this is precisely how many Americans, and apparently most planners and engineers, viewed America’s legacy cities in the middle of the 20th century.

What could possibly be worth saving in these rundown slums? Who would want to live in buildings without plumbing? In landscapes without parking lots? How long could tenements slapped up to overcrowd people remain structurally sound, anyway? Obviously the new city—the car-oriented city—was innovative and desirable. It is possible that, in that time and context, it couldn’t have been resisted.

Nonetheless, our old cities underwent almost the same exact process as my collection of vintage Japanese clock radios. First, new in their own right; then aged and timeworn, during which most of them were destroyed; and then rediscovered, seen with fresh eyes, that middle period of abandonment seeming like a tragedy. How could we have done this? How could we not have seen the value of what we were throwing away?

But is it even possible to perceive that value? Or does that only become apparent as time goes by? How much innovation do you resist just in case we’re wrong and regret it later? Maybe one day a nice tube television will become a collector’s item. Will that have meant that we should never have adopted flatscreen TVs? Or is it only because the tube TV passed out of common use and its numbers dwindled that anyone could look at it is an antique? Is there something inherent in being human that dooms us to embrace, discard, and mourn? Does this simply happen in our neural wiring, below the level of public policy or conscious thought?

Now sometimes, when I’m on about this sort of thing, some folks might say, none of this really matters, we know urbanism is good for people, good for small business, better for the environment, etc. We know there are other countries that still do it or didn’t abandon it completely. Who needs all this psychologizing and philosophizing? Or, more simply, what the hell are you talking about anyway?

Maybe that’s all true—maybe an observing, practical approach is all you need to get this right. Maybe there’s nothing mystical or metaphysical about it. Maybe being alone with your thoughts too much isn’t the same as being a thinker.

Be that all as it may, there’s another point I want to make here, which I don’t think I’ve quite been able to articulate before. I wonder if, ultimately, Americans can or will become even a more grateful urban people than the oft-exampled Europeans or East Asians? Many of those countries, of course, saw their cities bombed into smithereens. But they rebuilt and they never fully lost continuity with pre-car urbanism. They did to an extent, at least in Europe, but urban living never became a boutique lifestyle habit the way it did in America.

In America, on the other hand, we really did come close to destroying or greatly diminishing almost all of the old cities. And we didn’t have a war to blame, except the one we won. (It’s often speculated that we felt that after beating the fascists, we deserved to treat ourselves. Suburbia and the highways were a reward of sorts, and, not quite the same thing but related, a psychological hard break with the privation of the Depression and the war.)

We did essentially lose the concept of urban living for a few decades (not, of course, those of us who still lived in cities, often by necessity, but as a widespread cultural idea). As the earliest New Urbanists can attest, we lost the body of city-building knowledge that had once allowed us to build lovely cities and towns without a whole lot of difficulty. The default was also beautiful, which cannot always be said for the stuff we build today.

This makes me think of the parable of the Prodigal Son. That story rubs some people the wrong way—why would God reward the sinner who repented more than the upright person who never left (not that any of us are free from sin)? But that parable says something about human nature as well as God’s mercy. We’re loss averse; we perceive a loss of a thing as worse than simply not getting a gain of the same thing. To get back something you thought lost is, to our brains, a miracle.

Perhaps we are at the cusp of that moment when the aesthetic, lifestyle, and economy of the old cities is finally becoming mainstream once again. But mixed with that excitement is the weight of knowing how much we lost. To rebuild and resettle our cities now is like finding the lost son at the doorstep. Like seeing an old civilization of which we have a faded cultural memory rising again. It, too, would feel like a miracle.

Those places which never lost it may not be able to feel that; perhaps their cities feel subjectively to them like quirky Panasonic clock radios felt in 1990. Perhaps Americans can look at our surviving and reborn cities, rumbling back to life after over half a century of enforced stasis, with an awe, a gratitude, and a keen sense of how easy it is to throw away a thing of great value.

Related Reading:

Construction In A Small Town

Don’t Patch The Hole In The Wall

What If You’re the Placeless One?

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