American cities are retarded. Perhaps that sentiment could stand to be further explained. I use American in the most casual sense, in reference not to the continents but to the United States of America in particular; I use retarded in the most literal sense, in reference to a progress being hindered or halted. Keeping those definitions in mind, we have what amounts to the premise of Benjamin Schneider’s new book The Unfinished Metropolis, albeit expressed in a way the author gives the impression of being unwilling to do even in his own head. The proportion of Americans with passports has lately crept up to 50 percent, but even among the half who’ve never gone abroad, many will by now have at least an inkling that their major cities haven’t kept developmental pace with those of Europe and Asia. Comparative deficiencies in public transit and “walkability” have often been lamented, but the lack of less measurable qualities like appealing public spaces and an ambience of life on the street could similarly be ignored only by a die-hard urbanophobe.
Schneider, a die-hard urbanophile who did two years of research visiting a couple dozen major cities both inside and outside the U.S., takes it as his journalistic mission to explain why that happened and what can be done about it. Each resulting chapter of this book takes on one aspect of the American city’s grand retardation. Zoning laws influenced by “the cult of the single-family home” grew increasingly rigid in the twentieth century, making it impossible to build enough housing either to endure a modicum of affordability, let alone to offer the poorest an alternative to life on the street. The auto industry’s lobbying turned once-lively streets into the exclusive property of motorists encouraged to drive them at higher and higher speeds, which not only distorted them out of human scale but also made them inconvenient, even dangerous, to so much as cross. The money that paid for robust prewar streetcar and passenger rail networks dried up, never to be replenished, and the vast postwar freeway system (along with the oversupply of parking dictated by the assumption of universal automobile use) did grievous, possibly irreparable harm to the cities through which it ran. As suburbs prospered while downtowns bled out, the ostensible cure of “urban renewal,” with its misconceived high-rise housing projects and its isolated civic and cultural centers, usually proved as bad as the disease.
Read the whole thing at Substack.