Thirty-Six: Foreign Cities (10-13-2022)
Still working on Thirty-Five.
Americans have no clue what is going on anywhere else in the world. The great advent of the internet connecting the New World to the Old did little to improve this. The physical distance between America and Europe is difficult to understand from maps alone, and even short-term travel to Europe does not alleviate the false sense of proximity culturally and temporally. A seven to nine hour flight between continents is normalized to the point that the engineering marvel and rapidity of travel is unnoticed. Months-long journeys between places are centuries past, but the distance is still the same. Instant communication, still not face-to-face, does not overcome the effect of thousands of miles of span. American worries about nuclear conflict in Europe, or trade and energy issues, seem distant to the daily considerations that Europeans make when directly faced with these situations.
For all of the US's cultural influence, it seems silly to talk about "Eurocentric" policies and phenomena. Europe no longer controls or creates new cultural items, and when it does, they are iterations or versions of American creations. American tastes have polluted Europe irreversibly, and its past is quickly waning from memory. A tweet went around its appropriate corner of Twitter posing the question of where "urbanists", here meaning people on the internet preoccupied with the losing battle of improving American urban and suburban design, derive their "radicalization", here meaning sensible position on the role of the car and access to goods and services, from. The dichotomy of Amsterdam and Tokyo as pillars of urban design seems silly, when almost any city in Europe meets the demands of US urbanists even if it is more car dependent than Amsterdam or Tokyo. Silliness continues in limiting the possibility of enlightenment regarding urban form only to exposure to ideal urban form. It should not, and does not, take a genius to look at any US city or suburb and see what is wrong.
Living short term in Europe, I've found in all the cities here a comfortable and traversable scale independent of their proportion of car to pedestrian. Where distances exceed walkability, transit options are abundant, even if they are not entirely clean or user friendly. No US city I've visited even touches the level of access available in even a small city here, not to mention my ability to reach them without the use of a car or plane (for now). Looking back, or even looking at the present and seeing the condition of American cities and suburbs, the amount of space dedicated to cars is disturbing, and the grotesque form that the public realm takes to facilitate motor vehicle transit is unbelievable. I always knew something was wrong, and being exposed to an alternative, especially and imperfect alternative, helps to further this feeling.
Where American armchair urbanists fall short is their belief that America can or will ever reach a level of development on par with cities like Amsterdam or Tokyo (orientalist, much?). America only acts in increments, and when smalls changes are made over long periods of time, the status quo always wins. Internet urbanists who notice this and propose guerilla or rapid extrajudicial action to rapidly further the effort of improving urban design seem overconfident in the possibility to win over millions with minor direct action. Urban policy is the result of complex bureaucratic machinery that is ultimately indifferent to any individual or even vocal but fiscally absent groups. I've talked before about how corporate and governmental organizations have now outgrown individual input, and act as autonomous entities where each employee is merely a neuron in a larger brain, making decisions and completing tasks that contribute to a larger whole they nor no one else can control.
Urban policy is not exempt from this technical dilemma. If walkability, transit access, and all-around convenience is an absolute necessity in your life, you unfortunately can do little to reshape a multi-trillion dollar entity to generate it in America. Why would you want to anyway? What exists in America that is so precious that the entirety of the country must be razed and rebuilt over the course of generations in the image of cities and towns designed by a different culture? American values do not equate to equitable design.