What Does It Mean To Know A Place?

After changes upon changes, are we more or less the same?

I saw a thread on Facebook (first mistake) about housing (second mistake) in my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey. A long-term plan from some years back, which began with a Costco, is finally wrapping up, with work beginning on the housing part which was originally proposed (the Costco has been around awhile and is pretty popular).

The number of people saying things like “They’re bringing the city to us” or “They’re turning us into a city” or “I remember when Flemington was a quiet country town” or “I don’t want to live in a tiny box” or “You will own nothing and be happy!” is…sobering. I suspect these are people who bought their own homes a long time ago, and who do not have children of homebuying/apartment rental ages.

The sheer amount of abstraction in these comments—as though something as basic and everyday as housing is a stand-in or a rhetorical thing—is weird. I guess “abstract” is the nice way of saying “out of touch.”

But the feeling of a place you know well inexorably slipping away…I get that, and as much as I’m on board with pro-housing/urbanism/YIMBY/etc., there’s always a little part of me that asks something like, Are we defining the idea of community out of existence? Are we thinking only in terms of individuals and housing units, and not the sum of it all? Are we lumping people who like where they live for specific reasons in with NIMBYism, as if nobody can have any preferences about the place they live at all? How do you square the fact that distinct places exist with the sort of flattening impulse of the YIMBY movement?

There’s this part of me—the suburbanite who grew up around unselfconscious, universal NIMBYism—that wonders, does anybody really want more neighbors? Do they mean that, or are they just poking NIMBYs in the eye? Some folks, I think, believe that something that annoys them exists for no other actual purpose. That seems to be how a lot of people think about new housing—a personal affront to them and their community, not a thing that’s happening but a thing pointed at them. Paranoia is a kind of narcissism.

But I think that even this question, “Does YIMBY somehow imply communities don’t exist?” is not deep enough—I haven’t yet passed through “the final filter”—because it still assumes that there is such a thing as a fixed character to a place. And I don’t really think that’s true. Most of our towns and cities were built over time, with even the historic Main Streets often replacing earlier buildings which—had they survived into the 20th century—would themselves have been frozen in time as historic.

What we see is not the same as what a place is. We don’t see the entire process by which a place came to exist in its present form. NIMBYs are sort of analogous to creationists. They see the present form of a place as having been created exactly as such, designed consciously to be exactly as it is.

Think of the phrase “I know it like the back of my hand,” which someone might say about a process, but also about a place. It implies that a place is the same thing throughout time, that one can go back to. Are we against that?

The YIMBY tendency is to see the evolutionary process behind the present form, which makes it more palatable to redevelop and intensify. This challenges the notion that the present form was some kind of intentional, ordained end point, some supreme expression of a place’s inherent character. In this way, a community, a town, a place, simply cannot be reduced to its built form. It’s like closing a book in the middle. No physical place is ever the entirety or end point of what a place is. Maybe, in some way, this defines communities out of existence. But this is a much more natural state than its opposite.

If this is all too abstract, it got me thinking about a series of pieces I wrote several years ago, about Rockville, Maryland. The history of Rockville, an early D.C. suburb, is an excellent illustration of these questions of town character and the tensions around redevelopment and new construction.

Rockville existed since the 1700s, and later became the county seat. Its status as a D.C. suburb was cemented by trolley service into downtown D.C., which began in 1900 (though it had rail service in the late 1800s already). “In 1929, W&R ran 24 trips a day between 6:30 a.m. and 12:30 a.m. to connect Rockville and Washington.”

Then the trolley service was canceled in 1935, and in the early 1960s, essentially the entire old town of Rockville was demolished in a failed urban renewal project:

In 1962, a preliminary Urban Renewal Plan was drafted with goals to: prevent the spread of blight, permit rehabilitation and redevelop commercial areas. The impact on the city would be significant with the total renewal area encompassing some forty-six acres in the heart of downtown. One hundred families and individuals, along with 150 businesses, were relocated from the Mid-City area. Roads that had served the city for generations like East Montgomery Avenue, Commerce Lane and Sarah Street were rerouted or abandoned.

In 1984, Metro service came to Rockville; in 1995, the first phase of the Rockville Town Square, a New Urbanist-inspired mixed-use development, replaced the failed mall built atop the demolished downtown.

This is what I wrote about Rockville’s trajectory, and how I saw and see it:

It is almost as if places like this are awakening from a long slumber under the interlocking forces of suburban land use and car dependency, and picking up where they left off in the early 20th century. It is change, to be sure, but it is also a kind of continuity.

That is how I think about the question of new development in old towns. The same thing can look different in different times and places. It takes a humility to acknowledge that the precise moment you know a place is not its fullest and truest expression. This is why I see humility in urbanism.

I use this maybe odd analogy of the Eucharist a lot, because I think the idea of the sacrament—a thing can be truly made present without being visible, what looks like a piece of bread is not a piece of bread—is sort of a miraculous version of a thing in everyday life.

I wrote once about how I imagined the people who founded and built my hometown, hundreds of years ago, saying “Build this in memory of me.” That they would understand new development not as somehow at odds with the town, but a continuation of the project of building the place. A making present of their work.

I see, ultimately, what turned out to be a very brief moment in time during which we forgot this. The gradual but constant way in which places are built and sustained and changed. It was the new developments in my hometown which made me excited about the town’s history.

The activity was a chance to live the present version of the excitement and dynamism bound away in the history books, closed off to us. In the changing of the place precisely as I knew it was a sense of possibility, of being a participant and not merely an observer in the work of building. I reject the idea that we are merely the stewards of a vanished past, gripping a scarce thing with fear. I believe we can build great things now, and I hope we will.

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Related Reading:

The Ice House

Workers Of The Town, Unite On Brown

Ugly Buildings and Open Space

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