Photo by ubackdrop, CC BY-SA 3.0
Political conservatism is all but extinct in cities, but the conservative impulse is alive and well. That is, a desire to prevent change in the name of preserving something that people find of value is still a powerful motivating force.
Historic preservation is an example of the conservative impulse.
NIMBYism is an example of the conservative impulse.
Anti-gentrification advocacy is an example of the conservative impulse.
In fact, it strikes me that cities are more conservative now than they were in the past. Previous generations were much more willing to engage in massive, radical projects of change than today’s residents and leaders. Not all of those previous projects were good to be sure, but many of them are what created the very cities as they exist today.
Think about, for example, New York City alone:
- The street grid of a largely uninhabited Manhattan was laid out in 1811
- The Erie Canal, a state project but one that tremendously benefitted the city, was finished in 1825
- The Croton Aqueduct was opened in 1842, and subsequently New York build a massive system of upstate reservoirs and tunnels to bring a huge supply of the world’s best water into the city.
- The city of New York as we know it today was created in 1898 by not just a single city-county merger, but by the merger of five counties (now the boroughs of New York).
- The first New York City subway line opened in 1904. This was the first of a vast network of subway lines, still among the world’s largest and most patronized.
- Then of course there are the vast Robert Moses construction projects
All of these were game changers for the city. When’s the last time New York conceived of anything comparable? True, new, rapidly growing cities need lots of new infrastructure and plans. Mature cities need less new infrastructure.
Yet today NYC does face serious problems related to housing supply, its transportation network, etc. But unlike in previous generations, no real solutions are forthcoming. Pretty much every proposal to address them is a small ball idea, apart from those originating with largely uninfluential bloggers, etc.. The era of daring to dream big and creating something audacious is over.
It may very well be that incrementalist solutions are in fact better. But that doesn’t change the underlying reality that New York and other American cities today are seemingly unable to pull off the types of transformative plans and initiatives that they did in the past.
Update: Alon Levy wrote some interesting thoughts in response to this post: Infrastructure for mature cities.
Aren’t New York City and State making relatively large public investments today in comparison to other places? LA seems to be making major new investments in rail, too. Which cities investing for the future? Isn’t the key getting a critical mass of people in a place to be able to visual benefits for themselves from public investment and development agendas?
Don’t know if you’re a “BIG” fan but I find the NYC waterfront greenspace enhancement coupled with flood protection – AKA, the BIG U – to be an example of audacious design on a grand scale.
BIGU.
Aaron, have you read the book “Arrival City” by Doug Saunders? It’s a book about how slums are self-made places of autonomy and opportunity for rural migrants in third-world countries.
https://www.amazon.com/Arrival-City-Largest-Migration-Reshaping/dp/0307388565/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502882631&sr=1-1&keywords=arrival+city
There’s a lot of stuff in the slums that wouldn’t and shouldn’t be tolerated in first-world countries let alone major cities – open trenches for sewage, illegal squatting, stealing from the power grid, etc. But I’ve always thought it would be an interesting experiment to carve up a large vacant property on, say, the West Side of Chicago into small plots, turn them over to DIY owner-occupants, overlook some of the more stringent building, zoning, retail codes and see what they do with the place (assuming it’s already on the grid). The book makes the explicit point that this is how a lot of American cities developed in their earlier stages.
Excellent comment, Harvey.
As bad as the favelas in Rio are purported to be, are they not better than the soulless, always underfunded, and far away public housing the Brazilian authorities were talking about building?
Check out “Granola Shotgun”. I don’t always agree with Johnny, but he has a perceptive eye and an interesting perspective!
With talk of closing Rikers Island there was a suggestion to use that land for extension of LaGuardia runways. This was not, of course, from the de Blasio administration. It is disappointing there is no consideration of factoring even the possibility of reclaiming Rikers into the Port Authority’s reconstruction of the airport.
There are three barriers to change in New York and many other cities. The first is legal. There are so many property rights and environmental studies involved that it would be nearly impossible to do a Robert Moses type project. For instance California’s high speed rail has run into serious NIMBY problems that would not have existed in another era.
Second is simply although the City collects a vast quantity of funds most of it goes to transfer payments either to the poor or to middle/working class government workers and pensioners.
Third, is for several reasons construction costs are among the highest in the world. So high to be prohibitive for many projects.
I want to point that there are two institutions flush with cash and with enough moral authority to have judges OK taking on their behalf. They have little problem transforming the city. I am talking about NYU and Columbia. NYU has transformed the West Village. Columbia literally bought a neighborhood to turn into their third campus which is only one subway stop and in convenient walking distance of their main campus.