New and Old #171

Friday roundup and commentary

What Young Fogeys get wrong about housing, Unherd, Travis Aaroe, July 4, 2024

Unherd is one of those sometimes-interesting right-wing/anti-woke-ish online magazines. At least, that’s my impression of it. This here fits the interesting category: it’s basically a quasi-anti-urbanism piece from a European/British point of view. Specifically, it critiques the conservative framing of YIMBY as a “return to an urban past” as being kind of facile, and not really how societal changes work. Okay, I’m listening.

After listing the highs and lows of Renaissance Italian cities, Aaroe writes:

Yet to a certain kind of urbanist and architect in 2020s Britain, the salient feature of the cities of the Italian Renaissance is that they were walkable. Saying no to the tyranny of the vehicle, the citizens of these places opted instead for interwoven quilts of local and communal belonging. Milan under the iron rule of the insane torturer and patron of the arts Galaezzo Sforza was in fact a “15-minute city” of human-scaled vernacular buildings and pedestrianised Great British high streets. Shops, housing, employment, open spaces: all sat happily within walkable and cyclable distance.

You see the concealed argument he’s making: calling an old city a “15-minute city” is projecting a newfangled idea into the past, sort of like speculating that Shakespeare was gay or whatever (not that that’s “newfangled,” either). When really, it’s backwards: “15-minute city” is trying to adapt an ancient idea into modern advocacy and policymaking language.

This is a little more interesting:

That the city states of Italy might ever be identified with settled torpor is the result of a longstanding intellectual current in English life. This is young fogeyism — the conservatism of the literate middle classes which, for one reason or another, is estranged from those forces that made Britain a modern country: the Reformation, industrialisation, and parliamentary supremacy.

In other words, urbanists read a sort of quaintness, almost pastoralism, into old cities, which is inconsistent historically with how they functioned and why they arose. Interesting.

Aaroe, unfortunately, misses a chance to cite Russell Kirk, who called the car a “mechanical Jacobin” all the way back in 1962!

For the young fogeys of the 2020s, the car is nothing less than the Revolution on wheels: breaking up social bonds, reconfiguring the towns and cities in their image, destroying Britain’s stock of Georgian and Victorian buildings, and causing — that old chestnut — atomisation.

That date is important: unlike a young person today, someone in the 1960s could still remember life before the total dominance of the car. Russell Kirk wasn’t just thinking up a figure of speech; he was actually describing something he had seen.

There’s a lot here, and it’s apparently in good faith and some of it is worth thinking about. He asks, for example, what “low-traffic neighborhoods” mean for tradesmen and other people who need a vehicle to do their actual work, like plumbing and electrician jobs. It seems easy enough to say, “Just let them drive easily, then,” but maybe it actually isn’t—maybe there are some irreducible costs and frustrations in trying to remake classical urbanism in the modern world.

My largest pushback would actually be this: most of what Aaroe writes is within bounds for arguments among urbanists. Disagreeing with some of the views of this one particular faction he calls “young fogeys” doesn’t put him, as he seems to think it does, on the outside. So many critics of this or that thing “urbanists” say are placing themselves outside the fold, thinking their disagreement is fundamental, missing that we’re a diverse bunch.

Give it a read.

On Pilgrimage and Package Tours, The Hedgehog Review, Tara Isabella Burton, Summer 2024

The myriad articles of pilgrimage—badges, relics, travel guides, conch shells—came increasingly to be seen as expensive tourist trinkets at best. At worst, they were fig leaves the indolent and the licentious could use to justify their months and years away from home: the early-modern equivalent of a perpetual spring break. New Protestant paradigms, in which God was to be found not on the road, or even in the churches and gravesites that marked the road’s end, but in one’s own soul, wheresoever that soul’s body was to be found. The beliefs that had long impelled pilgrimages came to be seen as increasingly outmoded forms of superstition….

Yet in the twenty-first century, at least, pilgrimage is having a renaissance, often fused to the economics and aesthetics of secular adventure travel, as well the spiritualized paradigms of wellness and self-care. Spain’s Camino de Santiago—which saw its first politicized resurgence in the mid–twentieth century under the propagandistic Catholic dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco—has reinvented itself as a destination not only for Catholic pilgrims but for hikers, bikers, backpackers, and the ever-increasing ranks of those categorized as “spiritual but not religious.” In 2019, a prepandemic record was set when almost 350,000 hikers received their certification of completion, granted to those who finish the final fifty-odd continuous miles of the trail in a week. Of these, 60 percent denied that their motivation was religious—at least by the conventional standards of organized religion….

Travel, at least the kind of travel so often coded as “real” or “authentic” (as opposed to, say, the family resort vacation, the Instagram trip, or the perfunctory list-ticking of the much-derided “tourist”), is already treated as a kind of secular pilgrimage in which we find out who we really are only by untethering ourselves from those elements of our identities too closely linked to habit and home.

Tara Isabella Burton is a really interesting writer. I won’t spoil more. Read the whole thing.

The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop, The Atlantic, Ian Bogost, February 14, 2024

I was impressed by Young's account of the attention that goes into every detail of the bins' design, but the whole affair felt like it might be accelerating the problem in the way that adding lanes to a freeway can create more traffic than it alleviates. If the cabin designers are always trying to expand overhead bins to accommodate larger and more numerous carry-on bags, then surely passengers will respond by choosing and bringing ever bigger bags.

Okay, now that’s interesting: increasing the capacity for carry-on bags will mean more travelers bringing more of them, which means it will remain just as hard or even harder to get an overhead space for one. Or as Lewis Mumford put it, about highway capacity and traffic congestion, building more lanes to ease congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.

I was intrigued when I saw this piece, because I’ve flown a few times this summer and have almost needed to check my carry-on the gate a couple of times. I noticed that a lot of people had a carry-on plus a big personal item. Lots of couples had two carry-ons. We did. I have almost no leg room by the time I stuff my massively overstuffed backpack under the seat in front of me.

Anything to avoid paying for a checked bag and waiting at a baggage claim carousel. Anything to not have my bags lost or damaged. And it seems that increasingly everybody does this. Plus, it looks like almost all of the carry-on bags technically exceed the maximum dimensions, though unless you’re lugging a steamer trunk nobody ever seems to check the measurements.

Bogost has no true solution, nor do any of the people he interviews, but several suggest we should simply pack less. There is a sort of panic you feel as you stuff a bag. I always feel the need to bring a second pair of “nicer shoes” that I never end up wearing, for example, and by the time a trip is over I’m thinking about how we probably could have brought one fewer pieces of luggage. If everybody did that…

You Need More Neighbors, D Magazine, Matt Goodman, April 9, 2024

[Joe] Minicozzi’s firm, Urban3, looks at the taxable value of land 1 acre at a time, showing how zoning and land use drive cities’ revenue. He explains it this way: you wouldn’t ask how many miles a car travels on a tank of gas. You want to know how far it can get on a gallon. Similarly, a Walmart might represent a lot of taxable value, but it also occupies a lot of land. In Dallas County, Minicozzi found that a Walmart represents, on average, just $600,000 in taxable value per acre. That’s because all those parking spaces aren’t worth much, and the building itself is designed to last only about 15 years. It’s a smart strategy to keep taxes low. Good for Walmart; bad for city coffers. 

I’ve watched Joe Minicozzi present before, and he’s great. He describes how putting three or four floors and businesses in the bottom—like an old Main Street—yields far more revenue per unit of land than the spread-out stuff we typically build in suburbia. Why is it like that? It’s not magic. It’s commerce. It’s efficient land use. Minicozzi doesn’t say everything we build should be as efficient or financially productive as possible. Rather, he says he wants to empower cities to make the right zoning and planning choices for their finances based on his findings. He’s as much a consultant as an advocate.

And whatever you think of what we should be building, can you agree this is no way to do it?

“What we’ve got” is a set of zoning rules that have not been addressed holistically since 1967, when about half a million fewer people lived here. As Dallas grew and developers struggled with the outdated zoning, the City Plan Commission and the Council were forced to make ever more exceptions and adjustments for one project after another. The workarounds are called “planned development districts” or PDs. Some are complex and the result of years of planning, such as PD 193, 2,600 acres that encompass Oak Lawn and Uptown. The smallest is PD 1034, a .092-acre parcel at Prairie Avenue and Junius Street in Old East Dallas. We now have more than 1,000 PDs, and they cover about 17 percent of the city’s land mass. 

Not counting those pesky PDs, which have multiplied beyond the city’s ability to analyze them, 42 percent of Dallas’ land is zoned to accommodate only single-family residential homes. Townhomes and duplexes are allowed on only 2.2 percent of Dallas’ land mass. 

Give it a read.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #30

New and Old #31

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