The tragedy of suburbia
ted.com
ted.com
However, I did grow up in a small town that would be considered ugly by his standards. If some douchebag from upstate new york showed up and told everyone our town wasn't worth defending because there wasn't a euro-style plaza surrounded by cafes and pubs, he would have been told to go fuck himself. People get angry when someone says their home sucks... because they live there. I get irrationally mad when people dis the place where I've chosen to live (SF), even though it is hard to argue with their criticisms (too expensive, crazy people everywhere, smells like pee, tons of sanctimonious assholes, etc).
Now in Ann Arbor (semi-suburbia) by way of DC (kick ass mass transit, great neighborhoods, huge parks).
Take example: San Francisco, built mostly before 1920, and then SJ, or most of the peninsula, build mostly after the 50s. Which tourists ever say, I came here to see San Jose?
Even when I visited Kansas City, the oldest part has some good charm and apeal, and some character. As soon as you drove out of the oldest parts, you end up with this insane grid of streets and strip malls.
My problem with his speech as the same one you probably had with my comment. It's not so much correct or incorrect as it is one-sided and incomplete.
He calls suburbia ugly. I call cracked cement as far as the eye can see, decrepit buildings, urine stench, and steam rising from manhole covers far more aesthetically offensive than any Target. (I might take it over some Wal-Marts though.)
He totally glosses over the apparent values of suburbia. Our population is shifting to it in huge numbers, people must find it worth it.
There's clearly something to suburban living. Maybe people like to own land and drive their own car to work, rather than sit on a smelly bus or subway next to smelly people. Maybe they still like to derive the economies of scale that Target and Wal-Mart afford them (which they cannot in an agrarian society) without either farming their own food or paying $3k a month for a tiny one bedroom apartment in a smog-ridden city.
He doesn't mention the fact that with a good environmental policy we could (and I think in 25 years will) have Targets and still coexist peacefully with the Earth.
His entire speech is just one-sided opinion with lots of invective and no apparent reasoning or factual basis. He calls the area that a very large portion of Americans choose to live in "not worth defending".
That's pretty unusual for a TED talk. I'd consider his entire speech trolling. Maybe that's why his Wikipedia bio makes such conspicuous mention of his total lack of credibility.
There's no doubt that urbanism can be done badly. But when it is done well, it is an absolute pleasure. For example, I live in Paris, which is a highly urbanised city (obviously). Paris has very few parks, and very few private gardens (frontyards). But it is far and away more pleasurable to walk around Paris than to walk around, say, London. They have put a lot of effort into making tree-lined boulevards the defining feature of the city's streets. The very inner city lacks this, but makes up for it with a rich tapistry of shops, bars, cafés and restaurants. It took me about 3 years of walking around Paris (yes, you do wlk here, which is kind of the point!) before I got blasé about the whole experience.
i mean, it's still brilliant,it's just that today it's what I expect of a city, and if I don't get that expeience when walking about another city, I tend to write that city off as an option for where I should live.
Even still, I still have that primal human urge to look out my window and see trees. I think suburbanism can be done badly too, but is also very pleasurable done well.
If the folks in Clichy-sous-Bois lived in ugly low-density suburbs would they still feel the need to riot every two months?
The first thing to note is that there is generally a park somewhere nearby where the children can play. Not always, but most of the time. I imagine there aren't many families living in the areas without parks.
Secondly, for families with kids under the age of about 10 (when they can start to navigate streets on foot all by themselves), there's always the suburbs. But once kids are old enough to get around by themselves, I would think that they appreciate living in the city as much as I do.
Thirdly, places like Clichy Sous Bois are pretty much the exact worst solution to providing living space. It's like they've taken the worst bits of suburbia, and the worst bits of urban living, and mashed them together, taking great care that none of the good parts are included.
I've just edited that. Now it sais he's very credible.
To me it always just comes across as snobbery: some fashionable upper-middle-class guy criticising the unfashionable lower middle class for not being as tasteful as he is.
Sometimes it's a bit more sinister -- the criticisms which come from an extreme left-wing position always seem to carry a wish that the lower two thirds of society would stop buying the four-bedroom houses and huge TVs that they can now easily afford, and go back to being those picturesque poor huddled masses so that we can can plot revolution on their behalf.
But usually it's just boring old snobbery, in one of its few remaining socially-acceptable forms.
>[...] without [...] paying $3k a month for a tiny one bedroom apartment in a smog-ridden city.
Or maybe those morons just can't put two and two together.
http://www.citymayors.com/environment/polluted_uscities.html