What is Wrong With City Design in America?

The most important route to improvement is to connect the essay to the some other peoples' thinking. Writing 1,000 words about urban affairs without quoting, citing, or even mentioning anyone who has ever written anything about cities makes you sound like the last living boy in New York. The essay should represent the outcome of learning, not noodling. Pick a central idea, read up on it, respond to the literature, draw a conclusion.

Because I can't foresee where your learning will take you, it might be better to concentrate on substance when we get to the next draft. But a couple of points may be worth carrying into that process. The word "design" is doing too much work here. The implication is that cities are the result of a top-down process mimicking some form of divine creation, or that "scale" or "complexity" by their nature determine political and social structures. As my late friend David Graeber and his co-author David Wengrow show in their history of humanity, The Dawn of Everything, that's not really what the archaeological evidence shows about us since the Ice Age. Perhaps a couple of days with Robert Caro's The Power Broker would help to explore both the ways in which that form of dirigeist vision of how cities are made is both valuable and misleading. Jane Jacobs seems to have much affected your thinking, like spooky action at a distance. Perhaps it is time you really read her.

Another aspect of the idea of "design" is its implicit teleology. One could be forgiven for not realizing from your current draft that we destroyed more urban transit systems in the latter 20th century than we built, dismantling street traction and light rail systems as part of the "what's good for General Motors is good for America" system of restructuring capitalism that resulted in "car dependency" in the first place. Perhaps a visit to Mike Davis' City of Quartz or the essays of Joan Didion would be valuable.

It might be helpful to define "city." It might be helpful to undefine "America" as "the continental US" and to think of "America" as containing also Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Vancouver. Or to inquire whether Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, or Baku might have lessons to offer. Breathing the air of New Delhi and that of Reykjavik within 36 hours (as I have done) is perhaps another way to bring multiplicity of perspectives, including the biological, to bear.

What we learn to do here is to bring more than one voice, more than one way of thinking, more than one modality of art, to the task of lawyering—that is, to making things happen in society using words. The city, real as it is in Ken Jackson's astonishing Encyclopedia of New York City or Wallace's Gotham; or imaginary as it is in Italo Calvino, is the essence of human multiplicity. Yours is a great subject. I look forward to reading the next draft, which I'm sure will be worthy of it.