Fascinating Addison. I have the exact same problem bringing together the phenomenology of my hometown versus the metaphysics. In my mind, subconsciously, my hometown is a Platonic Form. My high school class "owns" it. It's changed over fifty years (go figure). We grieve that change because our town is no longer "what it used to be." Apparently, those who came before us do not matter either. It appears that my childhood friends, and we alone, define the Platonic form of my hometown. Well, phenomenologically, it "just ain't so." What a thought-provoking post!
If I love a tree when it is a young sapling, I should be bound to love it as it changes and even once it falls and decays, because that is natural, inevitable, aching, painful. It doesn't follow from that love that I should love a forest equally after it is clear-cut. Cities may have their nature, their ecology, but they're not inevitable: there is governance, agency, choice, contingency involved in how they change. Would you love lower Manhattan as much today if Robert Moses had won out over Jane Jacobs and the Lower Manhattan Expressway had demolished much of SoHo, Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park? But that was, once upon a time, a thing slated to happen. That it did not shows that the built environment is not purely natural in how it changes. I think it's right to say "you can't have the great good place forever", but there's a big gap between "things change" and "all changes are inevitable" in any city or community.
Good counterpoints - although I think urban renewal was far outside of the "natural" progression of cities, compared to more intensive redevelopment of properties over time. That is essentially how almost every city came to exist in the first place. Look at the two photos of Brainerd, Minnesota, for example, here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/21/why-decline-is-not-normal-2019
Yes, the replacement of this diner for the proposed apartment building does not *have* to happen, but more intensive development basically does. It's fine to shape that; I think it is wrong to deny it.
I'm down with antifragility as a concept, but it's only something that makes sense over long periods of time. In the short term, the decay of cities is just as natural as more intensive development, in terms of "this happens often, all things being equal"--but few people write as if this is as natural--and thus as much something to love or accept and wait our way through. (And sometimes cities do just disappear at long time scales, if what made them a city in the first place shifts really fundamentally...)
Wow, I loved this piece (and a number of related recent ones). As I've hinted at in other comments this is exactly the sort of feeling with how Annapolis has changed since the early 80s from a sleepy backwater place to a burgeoning city. Just sliding a bit farther on the embryonic to mature scale; same DNA (development pattern), just more intense.
Again, I'm not religious, but this metaphor is very poetic: "But the fact that it is sad to lose it does not mean that it was possible not to lose it, any more than the pain of death implies resurrection. I am a Catholic, but my belief in the resurrection is a belief in a miracle. It would, indeed, take a miracle for a tiny one-story diner to survive indefinitely in an exploding suburb of a major city. When we see urban places changing like this, we are not seeing a scheme or a plot or a conspiracy; we are seeing a process as natural, as inevitable, as aching and painful and beautiful as life itself."
Fascinating Addison. I have the exact same problem bringing together the phenomenology of my hometown versus the metaphysics. In my mind, subconsciously, my hometown is a Platonic Form. My high school class "owns" it. It's changed over fifty years (go figure). We grieve that change because our town is no longer "what it used to be." Apparently, those who came before us do not matter either. It appears that my childhood friends, and we alone, define the Platonic form of my hometown. Well, phenomenologically, it "just ain't so." What a thought-provoking post!
Great comment. Thanks!
If I love a tree when it is a young sapling, I should be bound to love it as it changes and even once it falls and decays, because that is natural, inevitable, aching, painful. It doesn't follow from that love that I should love a forest equally after it is clear-cut. Cities may have their nature, their ecology, but they're not inevitable: there is governance, agency, choice, contingency involved in how they change. Would you love lower Manhattan as much today if Robert Moses had won out over Jane Jacobs and the Lower Manhattan Expressway had demolished much of SoHo, Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park? But that was, once upon a time, a thing slated to happen. That it did not shows that the built environment is not purely natural in how it changes. I think it's right to say "you can't have the great good place forever", but there's a big gap between "things change" and "all changes are inevitable" in any city or community.
Good counterpoints - although I think urban renewal was far outside of the "natural" progression of cities, compared to more intensive redevelopment of properties over time. That is essentially how almost every city came to exist in the first place. Look at the two photos of Brainerd, Minnesota, for example, here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/21/why-decline-is-not-normal-2019
Yes, the replacement of this diner for the proposed apartment building does not *have* to happen, but more intensive development basically does. It's fine to shape that; I think it is wrong to deny it.
I'm down with antifragility as a concept, but it's only something that makes sense over long periods of time. In the short term, the decay of cities is just as natural as more intensive development, in terms of "this happens often, all things being equal"--but few people write as if this is as natural--and thus as much something to love or accept and wait our way through. (And sometimes cities do just disappear at long time scales, if what made them a city in the first place shifts really fundamentally...)
Wow, I loved this piece (and a number of related recent ones). As I've hinted at in other comments this is exactly the sort of feeling with how Annapolis has changed since the early 80s from a sleepy backwater place to a burgeoning city. Just sliding a bit farther on the embryonic to mature scale; same DNA (development pattern), just more intense.
Again, I'm not religious, but this metaphor is very poetic: "But the fact that it is sad to lose it does not mean that it was possible not to lose it, any more than the pain of death implies resurrection. I am a Catholic, but my belief in the resurrection is a belief in a miracle. It would, indeed, take a miracle for a tiny one-story diner to survive indefinitely in an exploding suburb of a major city. When we see urban places changing like this, we are not seeing a scheme or a plot or a conspiracy; we are seeing a process as natural, as inevitable, as aching and painful and beautiful as life itself."
Thank you!
Simple solution: it sounds like what Silver Spring needs is a Waffle House.