New and Old #111
America’s Anti-Urban Bias, Southern Urbanism Quarterly, Bob Chapman, February 13, 2023
When the first Earth Day event took place, there was no conversation about how the built environment could help the planet. The assumption was that it could only be a source of harm. As a result, animosity toward any kind of development was baked into modern environmentalism and, ultimately, into urban planning.
Why?
The hurried effort to launch by April 22 meant at least one very important thing was left out. All of the college and university programs in environmental studies that emerged in Earth Day’s wake failed to incorporate a crucial topic into their DNA: the built environment. In other words—urbanism, cities, and how the design of human communities affects the world’s environment.
Chapman quotes Steven Kellert, one of the founders of the School of the Environment at Yale. “We were creating a new academic discipline, Environmental Studies,” Kellert once said. “If we’d only had a few more weeks before the first Earth Day, we would’ve included human settlement patterns in the syllabus. We should have.”
This reminds me of something a classmate said back in one of my political science classes. We were discussing the idea of the Supreme Court as a weak link in our constitutional system, whether judicial review was really understood to be the court’s purview from the outset, etc.
“If the summer of 1787 hadn’t been so hot, and the Founding Fathers had eked it out for another couple of weeks, maybe they’d have given this a little more thought,” someone offered. In other words, even something quite deliberately designed might not truly be consciously designed in every way.
It’s sort of like this argument:
“Wait, I didn’t mean that!”
“But you said it!”
Read the whole thing. It’s a great piece on environmentalism and urbanism and the tensions that shouldn’t be there.
Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks, The Economist, April 20, 2023
At first he [North Carolina farmer Jake Morgan] was looking at “side-by-sides”—a sort of off-road utility vehicle. But watching a review on YouTube of one that costs around $30,000 made by John Deere, he saw a comment that said something like “Why don’t you just get a minitruck instead?” That is, a tiny four-wheel drive pickup truck, sometimes known as a “Kei” truck, mostly made in Japan to take advantage of laws there which tax smaller vehicles less.
This is a fascinating piece about tiny pickup trucks, and how regulation can create or suppress products, without the input of consumer demand.
Unlike new vehicles with onboard computers and complicated proprietary parts, Kei trucks are easy to modify and repair. In northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, people fit them out with tracks to drive on ice in winter.
It’s a picture of how much more textured, interesting, and dynamic American life might be if we allowed or encouraged the smaller scale—trucks, buildings, roads, retail, cities. Everything. I think there’s something deep here.
Urban planning is an inherently Catholic practice, U.S. Catholic, April 20, 2021
This is an interview with a Catholic urban planner:
Growing up Catholic in Chicago, urban planner Jamie Kralovec has made the study of cities his life’s vocation. For him, it’s a vocation that combines the practical discipline of urban planning with a deep Ignatian spirituality.
Kralovec attended a Jesuit high school and learned about the Jesuit order’s origins as an urban ministry. “This stuck with me,” he says. “The connection between the earthly city and the spirituality of realizing God’s call for us, of realizing justice and building the kingdom of God on Earth—I’ve always seen that naturally in the city.”
Some of it is rather abstract:
I’m not biased against rural places, but the Catholic Church is very urban. When you think about where so many of the church’s ministries are located and the work the church does on issues related to supportive housing, homelessness, immigration, and employment, so much of that is in urban areas. I think that Christian tradition lives in the city, and we can meet God in the city. We find God in the majesty of buildings and public spaces, but we also find God in persons and communities that are struggling.
And some is very brass-tacks:
Pope Francis makes a very insightful point that public transit is a way to reduce car dependence, but no one’s going to use public transit if the system isn’t very good.
It’s a fun read that takes a mostly standard progressive, YIMBYish view of planning and gives it a spiritual and philosophical backing.
There’s also this piece on Catholicism and New Urbanism, with this bit I love:
From my own experience of designing one church in a suburban part of Miami and my understanding of common practice, I find that these churches are very big. The big, suburban church that we designed had to seat 800 in the main sanctuary and then be able to expand to 1,000 or 1,200 for special occasions in the Church year. Of course, you have to have parking for all of those people. Then usually there is a small office component, and a community room, and possibly even a school. Consequently, the church campus is very large.
Even in their smallest permutations, these campuses require an enormous site and the isolation of buildings amidst parking lots, like other institutions in suburbia.
The fourth item today is not an article but a piece of music: a reggae riddim from 1967, by the Soul Vendors, a Jamaican reggae band.
Does it sound like a famous tune from a famous 1964 Broadway show? Enjoy.
Related Reading:
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On the church and parking, I just read Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise, and one of his accounts is of a neighborhood church development (actually an adaptive building reuse) being stymied by parking requirements in city planning. The church minister was trying to build a *walkable* church in an area where his congregants lived! It's ridiculous to force churches to have parking provisions based on attendance on major holidays (and thus unused 99% of the time).
Catholics are like Americans, they generally lean to the left or to the right.
The traditional orthodox most likely go to church regularly and see people as made in the image and likeness of God so consider children and growth a blessing.
Then you have the progressive Catholics, most likely in name only, and probably rarely darken the doorways of churches. They consider people and growth in general a scourge on mother earth (pagan) and fully support abortion, like the present resident of the White House and recent leader of the US House. These are a scandal to true Catholics.