Daily Blague

Back in August, I posted an entry about Colin Jones's Paris: The Biography of a City. Shortly thereafter, I received a letter from a gentleman who is participating in an urban-planning project for the Ile-de-France, the region of which Paris is the heart. My new correspondent concluded his most recent letter with a request.

I would be curious to know if, outside the town-planning community and specialised circles, there is any kind of public debate going on in the US on similar issues. What kind of look does the educated general public have on US cities today? I don’t know how interested you are in these issues of urban forms in relation to social and environmental issues, but I would love to know if by chance you have come across anything worth reading on these topics.

Today, I finally got round to responding.

Thanks for sharing your perspective on the Paris-banlieue divide.

Much of my admiration for Paris proper is a response to the complete lack of intelligent planning here in the United States. I believe that I understand certain special reasons for this (my hypothesis can be found here), and in any case there is a strong anti-dirigiste trend in the American psychology. How much longer we'll be abandoned to laissez-faire is anyone's guess. The educated American public does not seem to have thought beyond "the need to reduce energy consumption." It's a perfectly empty gesture, since turning out the lights and reducing the temperature a few degrees in winter barely a cosmetic "solution." I daresay very, very few Americans understand that rising oil prices will eventually make many plastics applications too expensive, a development that will have innumerable effects (packaging is the area I think about most). Our exurban sprawl is manifestly untenable in the mid-term, but nobody wants to hear that. We are, you might say, too busy being "productive." We have, if anything, taken too much to heart Voltaire's suggestion about the cultivation of gardens.

As you may know, American public education is financed largely by local property taxes. This not only explains why the quality of education in this country is so wildly uneven, but it also works against any regional spirit.

As for New York, I can only tell you that it is on the verge of falling apart. In fact it is falling apart, constantly, and being repaired on an ad hoc basis. But the plant itself is too old, and needs to replaced (I'm thinking of water mains and subways in particular). There is no political will for such projects. It doesn't help that our society has been so polarized by political manipulators.

In my haste to answer, I neglected to answer the gentleman's request for books on the subject. David Owen's fantastic article in The New Yorker last October, "Green Manhattan," certainly deserves mention (I didn't know that it was online!). And the work of James Howard Kunstler. Do any of you have further suggestions? I'd be grateful, as would my friend in Paris.

¶ The August entry on Colin Jones's Paris.