Continuity and Innovation
How do you decide whether a thing is fundamentally old or new?
In writing about the 15-minute city idea recently, with my review and then a looser follow-up piece here, I’ve kind of focused in on one of the tensions in that idea, which is whether it is fundamentally new (innovative, revolutionary, transformative, etc.) or fundamentally old (return, restoration, rediscovery, etc.).
Here’s the bit from the follow-up piece where I note the conceptual lack of clarity around this point in the book:
There’s another thing I notice, which I focused on in my review. There is a lot of conceptual lack of clarity going on here:
Right from the start, with the brief description on the book’s dust jacket and a series of blurbs from other planners and urban scholars, the exact nature of the 15-minute city is unclear. Is it a succinct slogan for an ancient, traditional idea? A transformative innovation? A return to old wisdom? A fundamental reimagining of our cities?
The 15-minute city is called an “academic concept.” The book flap mentions “returning” to a lost urban way of life. But it also refers to a “new” and “innovative” way to live in cities. One blurb mentions “restoring” proximity to urban neighborhoods, but then praises “innovative ideas.” Another nods to forgotten urban wisdom but then adds that the modern 15-minute city concept is a way to “interpret these basic human needs into concept, and translat[e] that concept into policy.” One refers to an “ecological revolution.” There’s a reference to the “circular economy.” One blurb acknowledges that the 15-minute city is “old-fashioned,” but quickly adds that Moreno has refreshed it with “cutting-edge scientific findings on urban networks and complex adaptive systems.”
There was another line I didn’t fit into here, from the book’s introduction by architect Jan Gehl: “The 15-minute city is a new, yet well-tried concept. In the ‘good old days,’ all the cities, big and small, were 15-minute cities.”
How the hell can something be “new, yet well-tried”? What a lot of highly educated left-ish folks don’t understand is how much of a stumbling block this kind of thing can be for people. It absolutely raises suspicion that if you can’t explain your ideas in clear language, then maybe they’re either bad or nefarious.
And I also received a fun, long comment on that piece that explained that conceptual confusion this way:
In my observations of progressive policy wonks (as we call them in Australian slang) is the absolute worst thing you can accuse them of is being ‘conservative’. They are so blind to the notion that the past is a) a useful record of things that succeeded and failed, b) people in the past are NOT morons and c) progress is only progress if it’s ‘revolutionary’ so they have to reinvent the wheel all the time to sell it… but they only talk to other progressives, otherwise they’d realise that their idea is not that revolutionary.
Example: Multigenerational households are the ‘revolutionary’ way to solve the aged care crisis! But only to people who thought it was a good idea to section off and warehouse the elderly and infirm to be cared for by ‘experts’, ie poorly paid carers on 12 hr shifts and a few doctors who couldn’t get a better offer. Meanwhile every Asian/Eastern European/Islander/ is laughing at them because they never thought it was a good idea to warehouse their elders away from families in the first place! They never used to be called ‘multigenerational households’ they used to be called families or just households.
That is just one example of how ‘progressives’ can’t admit to themselves that their ‘progressive revolution’ has actually destroyed something good and human and the attempt at engineering has failed miserably so they have to ‘progress’ with new words for a normal human activity and end up looking like idiots to normal people and conservatively dispositioned people (like me). It’s the chief reason I soured on public policy in my undergrad days and went deeper into philosophy and theory. Exasperation is one word to describe this idiotic merry go round and lack of humility to admit that sometimes the truly progressive thing to do when you’ve taken a wrong turn is to go back till you find the right road.
This is really, really interesting to me: how the really basically harmless, if a bit ego-driven, rebranding of common ideas with new terms can drive distrust. But I think it does, because it bakes the confusion over whether this is a rediscovery of old wisdom or a newfangled idea into the thing itself. Is it or isn’t it? Only the technocrats know for sure.
I’ve seen old-fashioned New Urbanist types say before that “modernism” in the 20th century broke with basically all of human and Western civilization. They’ll identify art deco, for example, as the final iteration of traditional architecture before the modernist styles completely broke with that series of styles stretching back centuries.
Sometimes the same is said about streetcar suburbs: these neighborhoods have enough traditionally urban DNA that they can be seen as a variant of the traditional city, while modern American suburbia obviously represents a true break with that way of building.
But what’s new, what’s old, what’s an iteration, what’s a break, is kind of a judgment call in some ways. It’s not always cut and dry. For example, is the institution Christ founded 2,000 years ago the Roman Catholic Church? That isn’t really a factual question. Were the French impressionists modern or traditional artists? At the time, they were viewed as a radicals or hacks.
My wife and I saw an exhibit on impressionism at the National Gallery in D.C., and I was struck by how, with over a century passed, impressionist art very much fits into the long development of traditional art before modern art completely broke with it. Maybe like art deco, or a streetcar suburb.
So whether a thing is continuous with what came before or represents a break with it is not only a judgment call, but may not be answerable until we can look back at it with more context.
So to go back to the 15-minute city, I guess I’m saying that idea is a mix of new and old. Maybe that’s the wrong question, and my conservative, anti-revolutionary tendency is just a little sensitive (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve argued with other conservatives over that time Obama talked about “fundamentally transforming” America—they thought he meant that literally, I always understood that, a la my commenter quoted above, progressives often talk that way no matter what they’re talking about).
Ultimately, the merit of an idea is in the idea itself. But the thing I keep coming back to is that plain, relatable language is never to your discredit.
Related Reading:
A City's a City No Matter How Small
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>>sometimes the truly progressive thing to do when you’ve taken a wrong turn is to go back till you find the right road.
Something that occurs to me is the idea that "you can never go home again". While it's undeniably true that suburbanism was a mistake, that the traditional human-centered development pattern was always the best for human flourishing, there's also the objective ground truth that this can't simply be reversed.
Rather, we need to build over what was mis-built. This will require new forms: Apartment buildings in excessively large/empty parking lots, maybe eventually towers to be built over big-box stores. While the old methods will absolutely be excellent rubrics for the next generation, parts of them are also obsolete.
But I think this only reinforces the point that we need to snap progressives out of their own hubristic idiocy, their insistence on renaming old concepts and selling fundamentally conservative and incremental visions as menacingly great leaps forward (allegory intended). To some extent, they can't help themselves. It's what progressives do.
Yet, on another level, perhaps conservatives need to embrace our own small-p progressivism ourselves. It's why I consider myself a con-prog: progressive values and mission at heart, but conservative principles of implementation. Conservatism must embrace the fact that change, regardless of how slow we might like it, is still a core to our worldview; if it weren't, we'd be regressives or staticists, not conservatives.
The best thing we can do is outsell the progressives. Part of the reason why they're progs, after all, is that they're shitty salespeople -- otherwise they'd be in sales instead of liberal arts.
I agree that there is a lot of conceptual confusion in the 15-minute city advocacy. And I am favorable to at least some version of the idea! The point being, if allies are not buying the arguments, you will definitely have a hard time persuading non-believers. My solution is to re-appropriate "neighborhood" as the 15-minute catchment idea. As far as what I believe is the most common interpretation of "15-minute city" among advocates, is what Sam Bass Warner, Jr called the Walking City in 1962, to which Kenneth Jackson and Elizabeth Blackmar are just two historians who elaborated on this. I am now critical of the Walking City Hypothesis. Most functions of neighborhoods are not dependent on the cities in which they reside.