A Reflection on Cities of the Future
Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil
fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological
innovation made its debut every month – cars, radio, movies, airplanes –
there was no practical limit to what
men of vision could
imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were
ridiculous.
Plan-Voisin
The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard
Jeanneret; 1887 – 1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of
Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed
to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace
it with rows of identical towers set between freeways.
Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every
time he came back with the scheme over the next forty years – and Corb
was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and
tragically, though, the Plan Voisin model was later adopted
gleefully by post World War Two American planners, and resulted in such
urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects of
Chicago and scores of things like it around the country.
Other visions of that early period involved Tom Swiftian
scenes of Everest-size skyscrapers with Zeppelin moorings on top,
linked to zooming air trams, while various types of personal
helicopters swooped between things. Virtually all these schemes had
one thing in common: the city of the future they depicted was vibrant.
We know now, here in the USA anyway, that this was the one thing they
got most wrong. By 1970, many American cities were stone dead at their
centers, especially the industrial giants of the Midwest. Ten years
later, the American city of the future was the nightmare vision of Blade Runner, an acid rain-dripping ruin fit only for androids.
These days, a new generation of mojo architect savants such as
Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas are retailing an urban futurism that
is basically warmed-over Corbu with an expressionist horror movie spin,
featuring torqued and tortured skyscrapers, made possible by
computer-aided design, clad in Darth Vadar glass or other sheer
surfaces, with grim public spaces exquisitely engineered to induce
agoraphobia. There’s more than a tinge of sadism in all this, though
Koolhaas is much more explicit in his many writings than the
less-voluble Libeskind about consciously surrendering to a zeitgeist of
cruel alienation. But these are also very rarified exercises among a
tiny group of mutually-referential fashionista narcissists, while the
general public itself – at least the fraction that thinks about
anything – only grudgingly goes along with it as a sort of drear
obeisance to the religion of art.
An alternate awful urban vision of the future, advanced by public intellectuals such as author Mike Davis (The Ecology of Fear),
is actually more about the city of the present: the third world
mega-slum as embodied by such ghastly organisms as present-day Lagos,
Lima, and Karachi. This is a vision of plain toxic hypertrophy with no
particular artistic or architectural overlay to it. These cities have
organized according to a simple logarithmic progression of horrible
conditions – more people, more pollution, more poverty – nourished by
cheap energy globalism, with the expectation that they will only
continue along that path and get worse.
Yet another vision of the future is supplied by the New
Urbanists, who have campaigned for a return to the body of principle and
methodology drawn from successful historic practice rather than
science fiction, politics, or metaphysics. That is, they rely on urban
design that has proven to work well in the past and is worth emulating –
by which I mean the relations of buildings to public space and with
each other, not the deployment of sewer lines and other
infrastructure. The New Urbanists are marginalized because their
reliance on tradition is considered sentimental and nostalgic.
Their work is viewed by the mandarins of architecture through the lens
of Modernist ideology, which, going back a hundred years to Adolf
Loos’s declaration that ornament is crime, has worked to
decouple contemporary practice from what they regard as the filthy
claptrap of history. Of course, Modernism itself has self-evidently
become historical in its own right, and the more this is true,
paradoxically, the more its defenders insist that history does not
matter. Whatever else this represents in the form of intellectual
imprudence, it at least promotes a discontinuity of human experience
which cannot be healthy.
The New Urbanists are also disdained for their modesty of
ambition. They are not interested in the biggest this or that. Their
plans are typically scaled to the quarter-mile walk and rarely include
super-sized buildings. The cutting edge holds no attractions for them
in and of itself. They want to create neighborhoods and quarters, not
intergalactic space ports. They want the streets, squares, and building
facades to provide decorum, legibility, and even beauty, while the
latest crop of Modernists seek to confound our expectations about the
urban environment as much as possible, in the service of generating
anxiety rather than pleasure. The Modernists use the lame adjective edgy
to describe their methods. It is supposed to signify excitement,
novelty, and especially innovation, but mostly they have managed to
innovate only new ways to make people feel bad about where they are.
The future direction of urban experience depends a
great deal on an understanding of history, and of recent history in
particular, because the hyper development of the past two hundred years
has followed the arc of increasing energy resources and, above all, we
are now facing the world-wide depletion of energy resources.
As the industrial age gained traction in the early 19th
century, so did the demographic trend of people increasingly moving
from the farms and villages to the big cities. Industrial production
was centralized in the cities and recruited armies of workers
insatiably. Meanwhile, mechanized farming required fewer farmers to
feed more people. The railroad, by its nature, favored centralization.
By 1900, cities such as London and New York had evolved into
mega-urbanisms of multiple millions of people. Around the same time,
electrification was generally complete and with it came skyscrapers
serviced by elevators. Over the next twenty years, oil moved ahead of
coal as the primary fuel for transport and, especially in the US where
oil was cheap and abundant, led to mass automobile ownership. That, in
turn, sparked the decanting of households into massive new suburban
hinterlands, and to the extreme separation of activities by zoning law
there, which climaxed – with interruptions for depression and war – in
the evolution of the late 20th century car-dependent metroplexes like
Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, and Atlanta. That is where things stand
now.
Now my own view is that we face severe energy problems in
the decades ahead and they will not be ameliorated by any combination of
alternative fuels or schemes for running them. This permanent global
energy crisis will have all kinds of consequences, most particularly
on our cities. These looming circumstances imply several major trends
which contradict conventional expectations, especially of continued
urban growth.
One certain impact will be the contraction of industrial
activity per se and of the financial sector whose instruments and
certificates represent the expectation of growth in accumulated
wealth. This alone will comprise a basic challenge to industrial
capitalism – apart from the sociopolitical strife that such financial
catastrophe is apt to generate.
I hasten to add it is a mistake to suppose that the US
industrial economy has already been replaced by a so-called
“information” economy or a consumer economy. In reality,
manufacturing activities have been insidiously replaced over the past
twenty years by a suburban-sprawl-building economy – and the mass
production of suburban houses, highways, strip malls and big box stores
is just a different sort of manufacturing than making hair driers and
TV sets. The sprawl industry also drove a reckless debt creation racket
and multiple layers of traffic in mortgages and spinoffs of mortgages
(such as the derivatives trade based on bundled, securitized debt)
which represents, at bottom, hallucinated wealth that in turn has
spread false liquidity through the equity markets and is certain to
affect them badly sooner or later. All this is what we have been
calling the “housing bubble” and it is now beginning to fly apart with
deadly effect.
Much of the suburban real estate produced by this process
is destined to lose its supposed value, both in practical and monetary
terms as energy scarcities get traction. So, on top of the sheer
distortions and perversities of the glut in bad mortgage paper, America
will be faced with the accelerating worthlessness of the collateral –
the houses, Jiffy Lubes, and office parks – as gasoline prices go up, and long commutes become untenable,
and jobs along with incomes are lost, and the cost of heating houses
larger than 1500 square feet becomes an insuperable burden.
All this is to say that the suburban rings of our cities
have poor prospects in the future. They therefore represent a massive
tragic misinvestment, perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources
in the history of the world. It is hard to say how this stuff might be
reused or retrofitted, if at all, but some of it, perhaps a lot, may
end up as a combined salvage yard and sheer ruin.
Another major impact of the coming energy scarcity will be
the end of industrial agriculture. Without abundant and cheap oil and
gas-based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuels for running
huge machines and irrigation systems, we will have to make other
arrangements for feeding ourselves. Crop yields will go down – a big
reason, by the way, to be skeptical of ethanol and bio-diesel
alternative fuel schemes based on corn or soybean crops. We will have
to grow food closer to home, on a smaller scale, probably requiring
more human and even animal labor, and agriculture is likely to come
closer to the center of economic life than it has within memory – at
the same time that mass production homebuilding, tourism based on mass
aviation, easy motoring, and a host of other obsolete activities fade
into history.
I think this will lead to an epochal demographic shift, a
reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and
rural places to the big cities. Instead, I believe we will see is a
substantial contraction of our cities at the same time that they
densify at their cores and along their waterfronts. A preview of this
can be seen in Baltimore today. The remaining viable fabric of the
pre-automobile city is relatively tiny and concentrated in the old
center around a complex harbor system. With little need for
industrial workers, vast neighborhoods of row housing built for them
are either abandoned or inhabited now only by such economically
distressed people that abandonment is inevitable. The pattern of
contraction may not be identical in all American cities.
In some it will be a lot worse. Phoenix, Tuscon, and Las
Vegas will just dry up and blow away, since local agriculture will not
be possible, and they will be afflicted with severe water problems on
top of all the other problems growing out of energy scarcity and an
extreme car-dependent development pattern. Cities in the “wet”
sunbelt such as Houston, Orlando, and Atlanta, will probably still be
there but revert to insignificance for the additional simple reason
that a lack of cheap air conditioning will make them unbearable.
It is worth keeping in mind that cities generally are
located on important geographical sites – harbors, rivers, railroad
junctions – and some kind of urban settlement is likely to persist in
many of these places, unless climate change drowns them. In recent
years, most waterfront property has been reassigned from industrial and
commercial uses to condominium sites, and greenways. This will not
continue. If we are going to have any kind of commerce between one
place and another, we will have to reactivate our waterfronts for
shipping – and not necessarily of the automated steel container
variety. Like virtually everything else in the coming energy scarce
world, maritime trade will have to be rescaled. It may even have to
rely on wind power again to some extent. These operations will require
wharves, warehouses, cheap quarters for sailors and all the other
furnishings typically required through history.
Those who are infatuated with skyscrapers are going to be
disappointed. I do not think we will be building many more of them
further along in this century. We will have trouble running the ones
we have, since most of the glass towers built after 1965 have
inoperable windows, and even the ones that have them would have to be
retrofitted for coal furnaces, and a less than absolutely reliable
electric power grid may make life in a twenty-fifth floor apartment
impossible when the elevators go out. In short, I think we will
discover that the skyscraper was purely a product of the cheap oil and
gas age. Exciting as they may be, we might have to live without them.
The process I have described will probably be messy. Social
turbulence should be expected. For instance, the urban underclass will
be squeezed even harder than the suffering middle classes, and they
already have a nascent warrior culture that could easily redirect its
energies from hip hop entertainments to real guerilla warfare if the
competition for resources became desperate. Economic distress in the US
is also likely to only aggravate unfavorable conditions in Mexico,
sending increased streams of impoverished migrants north. Meanwhile,
the faltering US middle classes may be so inflamed by the loss of their
entitlements to an easy motoring existence that they will vote for
maniacs and venture into scapegoating. I certainly expect the American
public and their leaders to mount a vigorous defense of suburbia, even
if it proves to be a gigantic exercise in futility and a waste of
precious resources.
We will be lucky if we can make the transition from our
current circumstances to a future of re-sized, re-scaled cities and a
reactivated productive rural landscape outside them, with a hierarchy of
hamlets, villages, and towns in between, and some ability to conduct
commerce and manufacturing. This would, in effect, be a reversion to
prior living arrangements, and to some extent it is a model proposed by
the New Urbanists – or at least a template they would understand as
fundamental. Many things might stand in the way of this. The physical
disaggregation of civic life in our small towns is now so extreme that
nothing might avail to repair it, especially since we will have far
less capital to work with. The suburbs running from Boston through New
Jersey to Washington have paved over some of the best farmland in the
nation’s most populous region and it may be centuries before it is
restored to productivity, if ever. Physical security may become so
tenuous that people will sell their allegiance for protection, or take
to living behind fortifications. In earlier periods of history when
societies got into trouble – for instance, the plague years in Europe –
rural places were beset by banditry and lawlessness, adding another
layer of difficulty to food production on top of the loss of the peasant
labor.
We don’t know how any of these things may actually play out. I
have not even mentioned the potential for geopolitical mischief, which
could skew the picture a lot more.
But the urban future isn’t what it was cracked up to be when we
were riding high, surfing the big waves of cheap energy in the
seemingly endless summer of oil. It won’t be fun fun fun ‘til Daddy
takes the T-bird away. It won’t be a Herbert Muschamp smorgasbord of
delicious, rarified architectural irony. The Koolhaas celebration of
alienation will not seem worth partying for. The metaphysics of
Libeskind and Peter Eisenman will stand naked in the transparency of
their phoniness. By and by, even the mega slums of the third world will
contract as the surplus grain supplies of the formerly-developed
nations are reduced to nothing and export ceases.
I often wonder what people will think decades from now if
they are able to view those old Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies of
the mid 20th century. Invariably these stories took place in a
Manhattan of sparkly new glass towers, and streets full of cars with
tail fins, and companies that ruled the world, and men and women who
had come back from a World War full of confidence that there was no
limit to what people with good intentions could do and nothing that they
couldn’t handle. We are their children and grandchildren and it is a
different world now.
