Sometimes, for whatever the reason, we tend to write less about the things most important to us (at least, important inasmuch as they affect our lives everyday), and for our family one of those things is living in a place that is decently navigable by walking / biking / public transit. We picked out current home with that in mind. If you search our address on WalkScore, it scores a bike score of 98, “Biker’s Paradise”, and so it is, at least when the world isn’t frozen over! (So that’s two or three weeks of the year in Michigan… or so it feels in February, anyway.)
Therefore it pains me a bit that US conservatives can be unfortunately reactive on this topic, and so end up in a bad place. Yes, some progressives would happily force you into a “15-minute city” and deprive you of your ability to own an automobile, if they could. But we shouldn’t react to that by favoring a world of asphalt, parking lots, and driving to get anywhere. Walkable and bikeable locales tend to be human-scale locales, and we are the pro-human people. That actually sets us in contrast to the progressive technocracy, which treats people as lines on a spreadsheet and seeks first of all to optimize machine efficiency.
This post is partially inspired by some comments by Edward Hamilton from yesterday:
I’ll talk about that Kruptos link in a moment, but if you’re curious, that second link goes here. (And speaking of public transit, last week my morning bus driver, who knows I teach at a classical school, wanted to talk to me about a Ray Bradbury book he had recently read!)
Put another way, I think US conservatives sometimes effectively make the mistake of treating something like the 1950s as peak culture. That may feel old-fashioned and traditional, but if you do that, I’d say your thinking is actually too modern, and quite progressivism-influenced. (And I wouldn’t just say this per urbanism, actually. I also think we err, for example, when we take this attitude of “we are the hard working people, you should be in the office 9-5 everyday with just two vacation days per year!” OK, a little hyperbole there. But I tend to think that, trying again to be pro-human, more vacation days would be good, you know. Actually a friend just passed along the book Four Thousand Weeks, but I haven’t read it yet.)
Now to be fair, plenty of conservatives do “get this” these days. Aaron Renn is one voice who has frequently written to the point that good urbanism is something Christians and conservatives should care about. Once upon a time I would have included StrongTowns in that list too, but they have, shall we say, a wider political appeal these days.
Or, to give one more name, Kruptos, also seen linked in that Edward Hamilton thread, to his piece here, “The Bikeable/Walkable City: the Example of the Netherlands”. It’s worth a read, and I appreciate that he says some of the same things, for example:
This idea that somehow people on the right need to commit to soulless suburbs and two-hour commutes is strange to me. Everyone seems to hate suburbs. But the moment you suggest that it might be more conducive to human flourishing to walk more, the hostile reactions generally fall into one of two categories: “You are not going to take my truck you commie bastard!” And: “Nobody wants to step over junkies and homeless people. I’ll drive thanks.”
Amen. (OK, some of you don’t hate suburbs, but still a good piece.) His piece is mainly about, what would it take to build like this in North America?, and I’ll divert you to his piece to read more. But if I may, a couple other snips that had me saying amen.
The idea of physical spaces that enhance our humanity and encourage the flourishing of our communities should be a conservative issue.
Amen again. And one more:
Perhaps the deeper truth of our built spaces is that in many ways we have substituted commercial and economic pursuits over cultural and moral pursuits. Everything is done to serve primarily economic ends. We build cheaply. We strive for efficiency over beauty or balance. We want to maximize economic value over social value. The first alternative would be to push back against these commercial values so as to emphasize social, aesthetic, moral and spiritual values. Cities can be beautiful and encourage human flourishing if we are willing to insist upon it.
I could make my usual complaint here about a growing church, runs out of space in current building, where do they go? Often, in the US, build a new megacenter with a huge parking lot on an interstate exit outside of the city. Why? Because it’s cheap and, we imagine, it’s efficient, it’s easy for everyone. It’s also often ugly and inhuman, at least in terms of how it fits into the overall environs. Anyway. I did appreciate Kruptos’ point that good urbanism often means building denser than, say, your typical US suburb, but it doesn’t mean building as dense as you possibly can - that can produce its own sort of inhumanity, after all.
The desirability of having your own backyard/frontyard, even if was only 10 feet x 10 feet, became much more evident during lockdowns. Reflexive anti-urbanism is in part probably simply the extremism you find on social media, but it does in part reflect what has happened this decade with lockdowns, encampments, and other urban problems.