The Role of Government in Building Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Six]

In 1817, the governor of New York convinced the state legislature to spend $7 million to finance a canal from Albany to Buffalo. Eight years later, after thousands of workers had carved a channel through rock and earth, the Erie Canal was complete. The 350-mile canal opened the entire upper Midwest to shipping, and cemented New York City’s role as transportation hub for the nation, and as the country’s greatest city.

In 1919, the U.S. Navy, concerned that the country was losing the race in radio technology to Europe, created the Radio Corporation of America–or RCA. It was funded as a joint project between government and private business, and the Secretary of the Navy sat on its board. Later spun off as a completely private enterprise, it grew into one of the largest and most important companies in home and commercial electronics and communications.

In 1995, Denver opened its enormous new international airport, its cream-colored canvas peaks glinting in the sun. It was a big risk by taxpayers. But like New York state’s gamble with the Erie Canal two centuries previously, it was meant to move the Rocky Mountain metropolis into the position of a central transportation hub for the nation.

What all these actions or events have in common is government, government, government. In this chapter, I seek to make clear the role of government in creating both the architecture of place, and the related architecture of economics or wealth. In this antigovernment country, virtually founded on hostility to the enterprise, we tend to obscure government’s central role in creating the places where we live, the jobs we perform, and the money we spend. Government, whether it be a republic, monarchy, theocracy, or dictatorship, is more central to our lives than many of us acknowledge or understand.

From an urban planning perspective, it’s important to understand the role of government so we can more easily grasp the levers of power when we desire to make real changes.

Americans tend to think of government as something outside themselves, a kind of regulatory body that interferes with the working of both an economy and the development of places. According to this view, the shapers of cities and the creators of wealth are the individual actors: the developer, the house builder, the company owner.

But government–that is, us–almost always lays down the concrete slab that economies and places are built upon. Government not only creates the laws, and operates the courts and the police, it then lays down the roads and builds the schools. In a modern economy, it then proceeds to set up a Federal Reserve System, a Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and other more elaborate financial infrastructure.

I sense that most people do not understand this, and the reason can be laid at the feet of an insidious idea called “the free market.” We tend to think that places and economies just happen, built by the invisible hand of Adam Smith if by anyone. In our mind’s eye, we tend to see supermarkets and subdivisions proliferating across the countryside, driven by consumer choice and the decisions of banks to finance them. We tend not to see the government’s prior decision to build an Interstate through the area that made the whole thing possible.

The intersection of place and economics is often in transportation. The decision of what transportation system to build, something almost always done by government, tends to create both an economy for an area or metropolis, and a particular physical framework organized around that infrastructure. So when Denver builds a big airport, it also creates the loose physical structure of warehouses, offices, and shopping centers that proliferates around airports. When New York City built its subway system (which was nominally private but steered and aided by government), it also created the possibility of the dense networks of skyscrapers that would follow. The Interstate Highway System created both a new economics of transportation and a new lifestyle organized around suburban living.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We would understand government’s role in both places and economies if we understood better what government is.

Government, to put it unsentimentally, is “a system of authority,” from which all other forms of authority, including ownership of property, derive.12 In a democracy, that authority derives from the consent and will of the people. Managing this authority for the highest and best use is the central task of the people.

In this country, this understanding of political community has been replaced by rigid beliefs in the free market, without an understanding that the “free” market itself only exists through its creation and maintenance by a political state. The “free market” is a political act first. Politics comes before economics. By this, I mean the economic system we live under, in both the nation and the globe, rests on a foundation of political decisions that establish said system’s existence and form. Politics determines economics.

The capitalist system is a political act that creates a publicly defined set of rules enforced by the “system of authority” of government. Markets can be said to exist without governments only if we define markets as blind desire. “Free” markets exist only as created and underpinned by government. The polity creates the system of laws and courts and police that lets the “free” enterprise system operate.

The equations of economists, even at their most convoluted, seldom have a line saying something like “Right here there is a 10 percent chance that forces from a rival company will break through the factory’s defenses and shoot the CEO in the head.” That would be an actual free market, which we can see in operation in the drug markets nationally and globally. The illegal-drug cartels act little differently than France, England, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they warred to control markets, robbed each other’s ships, and fought to control supply lines.

The current global economy, so often held up as an example of the benefits of the free market, was not only created by technological advances like the computer or the telephone, but from the political arrangements that allowed their introduction and peaceful operation. It was politics that allowed for the laying of a transatlantic cable, and for the creation of a system of laws and courts that governs trade. Even mailing a letter to Europe relies on a slew of postal treaties worked out in the nineteenth century.

People may forget that we had a fully functioning global economy in the sixteenth century. England no longer seizes ships from France laden with goods from India because it and most countries have a series of political agreements that allow for “free” trade. These agreements not only prohibit the use of force, but they also provide a mechanism for adjudicating disagreements and for setting standards. The peaceful creation of wealth through a market economy is always based on the establishment of a prior political system. Peaceful global trade has emerged over the last two centuries because a system of political authority has emerged that creates the structure within which a global economy has to operate.

In effect, we have a world government. We can see it in action when the World Court at The Hague in Holland orders the United States to accept tuna caught in nets that harm porpoises, even though America’s own laws prohibit its sale. Sorry, says the World Court, but the system of global trade you agreed to prohibits your discriminating against other countries’ products on this basis. Pull at this thread and you find a vast structure, including things like the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the latter supervised by the World Court, which in turn reports to the United Nations. These institutions, though, should serve the interests of their polity and not just the short-term interests of individual businesses or even countries.

The gradual ability for governments to replace the rule of force with the rule of law changed the form of cities, as well as the form of trade. Historian Eric H. Monkkonen says that the emergence of the nation-state allowed new forms of cities and towns to develop. Before the viable nation-state, only settlements that could defend themselves were possible. This took the classic form of the city-state. When “the state and the city separated,” it allowed more specialized forms of cities and towns to emerge, which in turn allowed a greater percentage of the population to urbanize.13

The classic model of a free market, where businesses operate unhindered by government interference, is comparable to a perfect vacuum created in the laboratory. I use this analogy, though, in a way contrary to the usage of many economists. With markets, it is government that restrains the “natural” forces of power and violence from rushing in and contaminating the perfect vacuum of the free market. Another analogy is that of a soccer game. Government not only referees the game, judging when players are offside and so forth, but also creates the field, its parameters, and how you play.

Government is often thought of as a parasite on free enterprise, or at least as dependent on it. But the reverse is more true. To paraphrase architect and organizational theorist Ted Goranson, behind Adam Smith’s invisible hand is an invisible arm–government.14 Again, this should be obvious, but I suspect it isn’t. The standard mental model of capitalism is that this magic system of supply and demand operates by itself, without human aid or deliberate organization of any kind. These are basic tenets of Economics 101, handed down by the priests of the system, the economics professors.

If you want to look at how markets operate without government, just look at the buying and selling of crack cocaine, or of bootleg whiskey during Prohibition in the 1920s. Without government, the act of exchanging value becomes quickly mixed with the use of force to control a market or command a sale. Indeed, since government itself is a system of authority, a system of regulated force, it can be said that in its absence, another “government” quickly emerges that establishes through force a system of rules and regulations by which trade can occur. The Mafia can be compared to a private government that is competing with the established government’s authorized monopoly on the use of force and subsequent ability to establish rules and structures.

Russia and some of the newly emerging capitalist countries are having problems establishing a functioning capitalist system because they don’t have enough government, not the converse. Capitalism only operates where there is the rule of law, including a court system to keep a record of contracts and enforce them. It operates even better if government creates a transportation system, a clean water supply, and other basic public goods. The limited liability corporation is a foundation of modern capitalism that is completely a political creation.

“All liberal rights presuppose or imply the dependency of the individual on the collectivity and on the principal instrument of the collectivity, that is, on the coercive-extractive state. This is a truism and a banality,” but one that has been forgotten in the modern era, says Stephen Holmes, writing in The American Prospect in an article titled “What Russia Teaches Us: How Weak States Threaten Freedom.”15

As Holmes writes, it is ironic that in this era of calls for lower taxes what Russia suffers from is the absence of sufficient taxation. Total tax revenues in Russia are at about 10 percent of the economy, which is insufficient to create a public sector to establish the rule of law and a healthy infrastructure.16

Part of our misconception of government is due to our emphasis on the Bill of Rights, which, as Holmes writes, is really a spelling out of a set of “negative liberties.”17 They focus on being free from government. But essential liberties also come from government’s presence. What makes democracy so revolutionary is that it established the concept of being free to participate in government, that this system of authority, which is what government is, could be controlled by the people, the polity, the public.

The failure to recognize that a market economy is a political choice and creation first and foremost leads to a belief that an economy operates by itself. The “laws” of supply and demand magically lift all boats to their highest and best use, without the aid of human intervention, goes the standard fairy tale. Part of this confused belief system comes from economics being classified as a science, and the conviction that, because equations and numbers are used, it can be compared to physics or chemistry. But humans are different than falling apples or sodium combining with chloride. They are their own actors, and can combine and perform in a variety of ways, many of which no one can guess.

Lewis Mumford posits that with the industrial revolution, nations adopted a new religious belief in classical economics to replace the belief that an all-seeing, all-knowing father God had laid out an orderly and just path for the world.

“The most fundamental of these postulates was a notion that the utilitarians had taken over, in apparent innocence, from the theologians: the belief that a divine providence ruled over economic activity and ensured, so long as man did not presumptuously interfere, the maximum public good through the dispersed and unregulated efforts of every private, self-seeking individual. The non-theological name for this pre-ordained harmony was laissez-faire.”

The idea of Adam Smith’s invisible hand shaping prices and production for the common good is a marvelous model that is true in some situations. The problem is, most students of economics accept it as being solid as an axe. They then proceed to pick it up and wield it indiscriminately. But the market only operates efficiently and for the benefit of everyone when the products of a market can be converted into something that can be bought and sold for money. Saving a historic building, for example, might greatly enhance the wealth and overall appeal of a town, not to mention the daily lives of its citizens. But it is very difficult to “marketize” the view of a church by charging people for the privilege of walking by it.

Not only do markets not always maximize public or individual good, they actually often degrade it through the same mechanisms meant to produce value.

There are many, many situations where people, all pursuing their maximum self-interest, make things worse for everyone, themselves included. Our treatment of the environment is the most obvious example, and the one most likely to topple the laissez-faire theology. It is simply too apparent that, left to themselves, people and companies will pollute the air, water, and land to the detriment of all without some larger system of legal control. Traffic is another. Everyone trying to get to work quickly and easily by car creates a traffic jam where no one gets to work quickly. Yet another example is the widespread distribution of guns. Individual actors, trying to maximize their personal safety, increase their physical danger, because a more dangerous world is created by the sum total of the actions of everyone arming themselves.

What’s troubling is how a proper understanding of the role of government in our lives is being undermined by a steady barrage of libertarian and antigovernment rhetoric. This language obscures the real relationship people have with government. It’s like criticizing the boat that keeps you afloat.

The version of the Republican Party dominant at the end of the twentieth century has been tremendously destructive in this, and should be rightly held responsible for the misconceptions many Americans hold. Republican leaders like Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi frequently wield the motto that “You know how to spend your money better than the government.” According to this analysis, government is akin to a thief, robbing taxpayers of their hard-earned pay. If government should exist at all, then, goes this line of thought, it is at best a necessary evil, best kept small and minimal.

This theory obscures the fact that government creates the wealth the people hold in their hands and are now reluctant to give up. A dollar bill is signed by the Secretary of the Treasury for a reason. Money is a communication device produced by a political agreement, both literally and in a wider sense. Not only does government print the money, but it also creates the conditions under which money can be “made.” It also creates the infrastructure of wealth creation, like public education and transportation systems.

America’s tortured, confused relationship to government can be seen in our tortured, chaotic, and confused transportation systems. Whether it’s trains, planes, or automobiles, the confusion between public and private has produced the worst of both worlds. Government puts too much money into highways and then prices the use of them too low, and so they are massively congested. Government shortchanges passenger train travel, leaving citizens with a skeletal, impoverished system. Government has ceded control of the skies to commercial airline companies, even though these for-profit companies depend on a public system of airports and air traffic controllers. This has left air passengers often running a gauntlet of high ticket prices and lousy, take-it-or-leave-it service. In general, we are a rich country with a surprisingly impoverished and incoherent transportation system.

Much of this would change if we recognized government’s central role in the architecture of our lives. Once this is accepted, arguments about the size of government become less ideological ones and more practical ones. Whether government or private enterprise performs a task becomes a question of efficiency. It is often beneficial to limit the scope and role of government, but this does not change government’s essential relationship to our lives.

[Excerpt From Chapter Two]

The Nature of Place 

Before the car, or more particularly before the highway, the essential challenge of cities was to keep everything from being in the same place. The city was centripetal. Like a black hole, the nature of a city or town was to suck everything to one point. People needed to be near the railroad, the port, the factory to get to their jobs, and factories needed to be near the people and transportation links. This was why reformers championed public parks. Called the lungs of the cities, they were spots of greenery in the tightly packed clumps of buildings and streets. And it took real community effort to put them there. Valuable and scarce land, which could have been converted into homes and businesses, had to be set aside by the public. The tendency of the pre-automobile city to suck people to specific points only intensified with the transportation advances of the nineteenth century, which drew people, machinery, businesses, and money toward the subway stop, the streetcar stop, the railroad terminal.

Just the opposite conditions prevail today. The city is centrifugal. The city is more akin to a giant salad spinner, spraying growth out over the countryside indiscriminately. Growth still clusters around transportation sources, except that it is now the freeway off-ramp rather than the subway stop or train station. But the growth circle of a streetcar is measured in blocks because people have to walk there. The growth circle of a freeway off-ramp in measured in miles, because people drive there, and need places to put their cars at each end.

Consequently, there is no particular advantage to being right near one’s workplace. In fact, there is considerable advantage to being as far away from work or other necessities as possible. The person who locates himself on the fringes gets the advantage of bigger lots and more peace and quiet, while still being able to “raid” the jobs and commerce of the metropolis as a whole. Thus the city expands ever outward, with each person and developer reaching the short-term gain of being the farthest out.

The drive to establish parks is anachronistic now, because we no longer live packed in a block with no green space nearby. Now, most of us live surrounded by green space, from our backyards to the berms and shrubbery that surround the shopping mall and local gas station. We are enveloped in greenery, because the low-density environment has plenty of spaces for trees, shrubs, and spare land that is left as forest or fields. Now, a park is just about providing recreation, not relief from crowding and congestion.

The essential dynamic of cities and places has changed. The fundamental challenge of cities today is to keep everything from being everywhere at once. The modern push to establish growth boundaries can be compared to the drive in the past to establish parks. Each movement is attempting to check a fundamental tendency of the form in favor of the public good. The public good now concerns containment, whereas before it was the reverse. Kenneth Jackson, a historian of the suburbs, said, “The effect of the auto on the city is analogous to what astronomers call the big bang theory of the universe.”2 In the past, cities sucked inward. With the car, they exploded outward.

This big bang has increased exponentially the rate cities consume land. Urban historian Robert Fishman noted, “The basic unit of the new city is not the street measured in blocks but the ‘growth corridor’ stretching 50 to 100 miles. Where the leading metropolis of the early 20th century–New York, London, or Berlin–covered perhaps 100 square miles, the new city routinely encompasses two to three thousand [square] miles.”3

A news article about contemporary Atlanta, a particularly acute case, gives a glimpse of the dynamic. “Over the past six years, Atlanta has gobbled up more land than any metro area, anywhere. Each year, the region’s suburban boundaries grow by 38 square miles.-.-.-. As a result, commuters-.-.-. pile up more car miles each day, per capita, than residents of any U.S. metropolis, including Los Angeles. They also breathe the worst air of any city in the Southeast.” The fastest-growing county, Gwinnett, has tripled in population in sixteen years to 460,000. “Seen from the air, Gwinnett looks like a vast sea of cul-de-sacs–an estimated 9,000 of which are spread across the county.” The growth of Atlanta, the writer correctly observes, was fueled by three Interstates built in the postwar era that converge on the region.4

Victor Gruen, father of the first enclosed shopping mall, in Minneapolis, precisely describes the centrifugal nature of suburban development in a long piece, which he apparently writes with some regret, about the children he has sired. In a chart entitled “The Vicious Circle,” he shows an arrow from “Sprawl” leading to “Increased Use of Automobiles” leading to “Decreased Use of Public Transportation” leading to “Separation of Urban Functions” leading to “Increased Road Surfaces” leading back to “Sprawl.”5

The End of Place saddens us, I believe. We have had thousands of years living with “walls” around us in the form of streets and buildings. It’s only in the last fifty that most of us have been able to leave them. Now, like a prisoner yearning for his old jail cell, we miss the places that once involuntarily confined us. Although we chafed at our old constraints, we find now that we might need them. The car and the highway have allowed us to leave our old confines, but they also have meant we could not go back.

Is the End of Place an unavoidable consequence of the car? To answer this, we need to understand why one method of transportation is chosen or can be chosen.

[Excerpt From Chapter Three ]

Urbanism and Underwear 

Anne (not her real name) had worked at the small used bookstore in Menlo Park since 1967. During this time, she watched the downtown change around her. It used to be a place where the city’s politicians came to meet, a place where the average person came to buy a television, some furniture, or some shampoo. Downtown was the area’s commercial, political, and economic center. Then, hard times hit. The furniture and appliance stores closed or moved out to the malls. McDonald’s out on the highway replaced the everyday restaurants on Main Street.

Then, about a decade ago, things picked up again. New restaurants began to move in. Lots of them. The local supermarket, Draeger’s, opened an enormous upscale supermarket. Fancy boutiques blossomed. Menlo Park had come back. Only, things were different. Downtown had once been a place where you went to have your daily needs met. It was as comfortable as an old shoe. Now, it was fancy. Although she liked the downtown’s success, she wished-.-.-. that there was a place to buy something more ordinary. A smattering of older stores remained–a hardware store, a pet store, a dry cleaner–but their days seemed numbered. And all these restaurants! You could have too much of a good thing. So one day, Anne went and counted all the restaurants in this roughly two-block-long downtown.

There were thirty-seven.

“I just wish there was someplace to buy a bra or some underwear,” she said. “I’d trade a half-dozen of these coffee shops for one place to buy something practical.”

The trajectory of Menlo Park, from up to down to up again, is similar to that of the other downtowns of the Silicon Valley. They include Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and small shopping streets like California Avenue in Palo Alto. They have gone from ordinary building blocks of an economy, to outmoded appendages, to luxury ornaments. These old-fashioned downtown streets, many of them once centers of farming communities, are very alive now. They are also unnecessary. Their luck is that they exist in a suburban territory that can afford to keep them alive. They play a role for their areas, similar to what San Francisco does for the region, as beautiful antiques.

What role do these old downtowns play in this new city? They are the depository of place in the region. They are where you go to experience it. It is their franchise. As such, they punctuate the suburban monotony of the region. Every few miles, you come across another old downtown where you know you can get out, walk around–and of course find something to eat.

Eating out seems to be the main function of these new centers. They are one long dining table. In Palo Alto, the downtown is lacquered over with high-priced Italian restaurants, and more open all the time. On a Thursday night, lines stretch out of every other restaurant. In a world where people are young and work long hours, eating out is one of the main forms of recreation. For some reason, Italian restaurants threaten to suffocate you. Every other doorway offers aruguled this and balsamiced that. San Francisco is known for its French restaurants. In Silicon Valley, they love Italian.

What has happened is not simply the upscaling of an area. Something more structural has happened. The downtown of Menlo Park is now an appendage. Its businesses are able to survive precisely because they are unnecessary. You don’t go to Menlo Park to buy a pack of Fruit of the Loom, a computer, a television, or some shoelaces. You go to the mall down the road, or the warehouse-style power centers. Nor do you go to Menlo Park to see your attorney or take out a loan; those functions have moved to corporate office parks behind well-bermed lawns. The older downtowns instead have become like an art museum, a luxury that gives you a taste of a different time, and a welcome respite from your usual hectic surroundings. And as with an art museum, only the wealthiest and most upscale areas can afford one. They are luxury items, dispensable but nice to have around. They give young people a place to court with more atmosphere than the mall. But they carry no significant economic freight. If they were blown off the map, people’s palates would suffer but not much else. These old downtowns no longer function as cities, under my definition, because they no longer create wealth. Sure, their restaurants and pricey supermarkets have value, but they exist by taking the dollars that have been created elsewhere, and cycling them through. They are a secondary tier of an economy, not the primary one. If the chip plants and computer labs closed tomorrow, the pricey boutiques would go dark in a week.

It is true that some people can meet their daily needs in Menlo Park, but this is an example of the bifurcation of our society. The wealthy can afford to shop at Draeger’s. They can pay for the privilege of a supermarket within walking distance, and for an older, more personalized form of service. They can order steak for $30 a portion at Dal Boffo instead of a hamburger at a mom-and-pop cafe. It’s urbanism for the rich. The masses are left to the car and the Wal-Mart and the Food Lion. Anne may eventually get a place to buy underwear. But it would likely be a boutique lingerie store, with Aubade bras for $100 a pop. Not Hanes.

It’s significant that one place that does not have a downtown is East Palo Alto, home to the poor, who are the people most in need of an environment that functions without cars.

Taming the Forces That Create the Modern Metropolitan Area

[Excerpt From Chapter Seven ]

Let’s take a drive out of Portland, past the suburbs and the highways and the new homes, out past the growth boundary. You’ll find your journey a pleasant one. You’ll drive over rolling hills of farms and forests, until you come to small towns, sitting compactly in the countryside. These small towns, like Yamhill, Dundee, or Forest Grove, will be surrounded by new development that hugs the existing town. You will not be greeted by the usual display of scattered subdivisions, Pizza Huts, and strip centers that now rings most smaller towns in the country. Because of this, the downtowns of these smaller towns are more viable and alive than most.

This landscape is as much a part of Portland, and its success, as its bustling downtown. Because these small towns are limited in their outward growth, there is no way they can pluck the growth off the metro Portland area, by standing just outside of it and feeding off of it, like parasites. A newcomer to Portland cannot buy a house outside a small town in a new development within easy driving distance of Portland, a development that would doubtless be followed by other developments until a sea of sprawl was built up.

This landscape shows that growth can no longer be controlled by a city itself, or even a metropolitan area. It must be done by an entity larger than the city or metro area itself, likely the state. A metropolitan area cannot effectively limit its own growth, because there is no way to get outside of itself. It’s a Zen thing. A tongue cannot taste itself; a metro area cannot limit itself. Wherever it draws a growth boundary, a developer can always go just on the other side and build houses that siphon off the growth pressure. Only a state can limit this kind of parasitic development.

Legally, it makes growth control both more difficult and more simple. If effective growth control must usually come from a state level, then activists have the sometimes more difficult, but conceptually easier, task of persuading the state to manage growth. It’s ironic that states have generally shown little interest in urban management. It’s ironic because legally, states have the rights and powers to do so, if they choose. Legally, towns and cities are creatures of our states. They have their existence only by authority of the state constitution, which usually grants the legislators the right to pass charters which delegate some of the powers of the state to a municipality. Theoretically, the state could revoke these charters and control the actions of cities directly, from school boards to cops.

In Europe, the more controlled nature of growth is due in part to the more clearly subordinate status of cities. Their growth is controlled and ordered by a larger entity, usually the nation-state itself. It seems odd that the states in the United States do not exercise powers that are available to them.

It’s important to realize that the forces that shaped Portland and Oregon were both progressive and reactionary in nature. That is, policy makers did not set out to create great urban places, although some were interested in that. They set out to stop certain things. Mostly, they set out to stop the hills, farms, and forests they love from being turned into shopping malls and freeways.

That, to me, is the ultimate irony of Portland and Oregon. We urbanists from all over the country turn to the area to see how we, too, can fashion great urban places. But those places are largely an afterthought, almost an unintended byproduct. The leaders and people of Oregon set out to protect the streams, rivers, farms, and mountains that they loved.

“They [growth boundaries] were means to an end,” said Ethan Seltzer, director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University, who often explains the area to visiting journalists. “The point was to call an end to farmland development. The kind of press we’re getting is mostly about what we’re doing, not why. The why is the incredible landscape of the Willamette Valley.

“This is not a city that stands back and looks at its skyline and says, ‘What a great city!’ It’s a city that stands back and says, ‘Look at those mountains!'”

As Seltzer and others explained to me, it was a coalition of farmers and tree huggers that got the state growth control laws passed and have kept them in place. Governor Tom McCall, the progressive Republican governor who led the fight for the statewide planning law in the early 1970s, was a nature lover first and a city lover a distant second. The group that has been so influential, 1,000 Friends of Oregon, is bound together by its members’ deep love of nature. The Friends have become true lovers of urbanism as they have seen how that is a means to their end. They have come to love urbanism, I believe, but it was a discovery, not a goal.

Robert Caldwell, editor of the editorial page for the Portland Oregonian and a native, talks of often seeing “a cowboy” or a blue-collar worker stooping to pick up a piece of litter, or sharply telling someone else to do the same.

To me, this trait is cheering, but it is also saddening, for it suggests Americans are unlikely to unite around an urban vision. Cities are still too misunderstood, still too prone to inspire suspicion, for people to unite around a goal of streetcars, walking streets, and the diverse milieu of urbanism. They may like it once they get there, and even come to love it, but it is unlikely to be a strong enough goal to inspire the necessary work.

It also suggests that place, in the urbanistic sense, cannot be built from scratch, but only preserved, enhanced, or rebuilt. A Greenwich Village or an East Side or even a midtown can evolve, change, building on its essential form of streets and buildings. A Portland can come back, resprouting and reinvigorating its old homes, and building new ones again. But I’m not sure such a place can be built again. Cities may be a dead art form, or a limited one. It may be possible, but I’ve never seen it. I haven’t seen any collection of streets and buildings built after World War II that has a coherent sense of place.