Craft Urbanism
Do we simply need time to get good at old-fashioned city-building?
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:
A Small Town With a Big Department Store
The Opposite of Home Improvement
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I think developers would love to build something “craft”- that’s why a lot of guys get into the business. But affordability requirements, parking minimums, two-staircase requirements get in the way of making that feasible.
I can think of a lot of nice housing proposals that were stripped and made generic by city requirements and public input processes demanding concessions until the original idea was just a shadow of itself.
I think the lesson is getting governments (federal, state, local, neighborhood associations) out of the way and removing some of their red tape could lower the threshold for development and opening a small business - this led to a craft beer boom a generation later, and replicating those efforts can lead to some urbanization and economic revitalization further down.
The thing is, we live mostly in linked metropolitan areas - so even if your personal neighborhood can have everything a kid needs, most adults will need access to the rest of the metro to work. Moving is a pain even when you're single, even when you're renting. But moving to another part of your metro for work when you have kids, a mortgage, or any other kind of roots is much tougher. So right away, you need to link the various places in your metro together, and whether it be roads, rails, bikes, or busses - it requires some government planning, funding and intervention. That's not bad, per se. But it does fundamentally make urbanism a different type of endeavor than home brewing.