Do We Have an Urban Agenda? No.

Interesting commentary by City Comforts on sustainablog's disappointment in the major political blogs to report either well or consistently on the environment, sustainability, and the built environment.

On a related matter, I have been meaning to blog on the lack of commentary on urban issues.  One of my recent entries was titled "Can Cities Affect Global Warming and Sustainability?", and I answered this question quite literally: "Yes."  However, if I had to answer the question of whether we (as a society) have an urban agenda, the answer is resoundingly and depressingly, "No".

The issue of an urban agenda, and vision, has fallen off our collective consciousness, and in the media, since the 1970s.  If you look back at any number of books or articles, the late 1960s and 1970s were two decades of intense anxiety and concern about the future of American cities, whether the issue was governance, finances, race, poverty, or urban renewal.

The haunting, sobering, shorthand phrase that we use to describe that era -- 'as the cities burned' -- evokes the numerous urban riots of the 1960s, including the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, and the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967, and the rioting following the 1977 blackout in New York City.  One only has to recall the names of the American mayors at the time to evoke their heroic efforts to hold their cities together.  Remember Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, enlisting the help of the one-and-only James Brown to broadcast on the radio in 1968, to help quell the violence after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.?  (A description and video are available here.)  Or how about John Lindsay, the patrician mayor of New York, touring urban ghettoes in the hot summers?

The great scholarship of cities also seems to have come and gone with the 1960s.  Remember Pat Moynihan before he was a senator?  He was once a young, upstart Harvard professor featured on the cover of Time magazine as an "Urbanologist", in a special issue titled "The Embattled Cities".  The cover is wonderful and the issue can be browsed here.  Reading Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford today, I find it inspiring and wonderful that discourse about cities reached such a high level that the two of them could battle it out for the National Book Award (with Mumford's The City in History winning it in 1962) -- and sad, because our discussions about cities peaked more than forty years ago.

A current urban agenda, in my mind, would be: first, developing political, social and economic systems that value the building and preservation of cities; and second, a consistent set of goals, frameworks, or viewpoints about how we achieve this.  The former is the fault of wider social forces and desires, the latter, the fault of the professionals and scholars of urban life.

The political issues we read about everyday are, in my mind, always eventually filtered into the built environment, whether it is in the form of trade disputes, a lousy transportation bill, a lousy energy bill, Supreme Court rulings on property rights, the elimination of community development block grants from the new federal budget, or so on.

However, physical environments, including human-built environments and natural ecosystems change relatively slowly at timescales that humans have a hard time perceiving, reacting to, or even understanding.  This problem is amplified further by all forms of media (including blogs), which tend to react to discrete events at increasingly shorter timescales.  I do really like reading particular blogs about cities, and City Comforts' political commentary is well aided by sharp eyes.  (In fact, I wrote so a few days ago here).

I respectfully have to argue with even the experts -- whether bloggers, journalists, scholars, i.e. those professionals with specialized knowledge, as identifed by Sucher -- that we lack fundamental and consistent insights into how we understand cities, such as the interaction between social forces, economics, and psychological experience.  Let's consider that hoary topic, sprawl: in the past hundred years, urban planning has gone from concerns about tenements, light and air, to streetcar suburbs, to at-grade crossings in cities, to suburbs, to sprawl, to smart growth.

What's our vision for a good, just, and sustainable city? Do we really know?  How should it work?  And once we've figured it out, how do we make people sensitive to the changes and continuous forces that shape their environments?

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