The New Beginning: Philip Bess

But what of your own lives as craftsmen and craftswomen? The future is unavoidably uncertain, but I think you can take comfort in the knowledge that good traditional building practices promote a number of inter-related goods: environmental, economic, moral, philosophical, urban, and spiritual. Allow me to elaborate.

There are environmental goods that follow from building traditionally. “Sustainability” is today’s buzz-word, but the most sustainable thing architects and builders can do is to make durable buildings that together make walkable, mixed-use towns and cities. Traditional buildings are durable in part owing to the quality of craftsmanship with which they are made, and in part owing to the materials out of which they are made—materials typically close to the condition in which they have been taken directly from the earth: stone, clay, wood, lime, sand, metals. These are the pre-modern low-embodied energy material elements of your respective crafts, and most people recognize that these materials—being from the earth and in something close to their natural material condition—when transformed and properly employed and maintained will both endure over time and will look good doing so. And when these building materials come from local rather than distant sources, the long-term sustainability of the built environment is enhanced even further.

There are economic goods that follow from building traditionally. Setting aside the macro-benefits of being an integral part of a complex society of production and exchange, simply at a micro-level both the skills and the work habits you possess will be always in demand in one way or another, at one scale or another. We may be facing economic hard times of indefinite length, but as traditional craftsmen, you are far better prepared than most to survive and even flourish in such an economic environment. This is no small point.

Here’s something you may not have thought about: there are moral goods that follow from practicing the traditional building arts. Practices such as yours are incubators of moral virtue, because they embody shared standards of excellence to which both practitioners and would-be practitioners aspire. As a novice being initiated into a practice, becoming a successful participant in that practice requires you to develop moral virtues such as honesty, courage, justice and prudential judgment. If you do not develop these character virtues, it will be impossible for you to succeed in your practice, not least because learning the requisite skills requires the exercise of such virtues. Don’t misunderstand: being a good person requires much more than being a good craftsman. But there is honor among craftsmen, and becoming a good craftsman necessarily entails acquiring certain virtues also essential to becoming a good person.

There are philosophical goods that follow from building traditionally, because when you fashion iron or carve stone, lay a foundation or plaster a wall, erect a timber frame or square up an opening, you have no time for and no interest in modern philosophy. Traditional builders instead naturally incline to Aristotelian metaphysical realism, and disincline to subjectivist notions of truth and beauty, which is the ideology of people unacquainted with craftsmanship and its full implications. You, however, know that matter is real; you know and respect its properties; you know what good work is. You know something true about the world.

There are urban goods that typically follow from building traditionally. As traditional builders in a world of slapdash construction, you few are a community unto yourselves. At the same time however, you are members of a larger community, for whom you are builders and makers of places. We call these built places towns and cities; and traditional builders typically come to acquire certain characteristics common to persons who live in towns and cities. The Greek word for city is polis, and Latin doubles down with the words civitas and urbs. Though the etymology is sometimes direct and sometimes indirect, it helps explain why those who live closely together in cities develop sophisticated divisions of labor that include not only builders and architects, but also police, why in their encounters with others city-dwellers are typically polite, why in both their shoes and manners residents of cities are polished, why city-dwellers are in fact civilized, and sometimes even urbane.

Finally, there are spiritual goods that follow from building traditionally. Notwithstanding the mundane purposes that good buildings satisfy, the highest purpose of the building arts is beauty. What can one say objectively about beauty in a culture where it is widely taken for granted that beauty is subjective? Whether painting or photography or music or sculpture or buildings, our encounter with something beautiful pleases us almost instantly. We have an intuitive understanding that beautiful things are well made; were they not, we would not understand them to be beautiful. Beautiful things somehow both embody clearly and reveal the essence of the thing they are. Beautiful things appear to us complete; we would never think of changing them, and they could not be altered but for the worse. Beautiful things not only attract us, they make us grateful. Beautiful things judge us; they change us, and make us want to be better than we are. Beautiful things elevate us.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Patrick Deneen, Philip Bess’s Pizza

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Who are the enthusiasts for megapolises?

I was reading this by Dr. Rao, in which he shows his familiarity with NYC. EJK loves the city, as does Pete Takeshi and Fujian Gal. When asked whether I liked living in Boston or not, I generally tell people that I don't, with the explanation that I don't like big cities in general. But I usually don't hide my disdain for New York City and all its pretension--that is, what the rich and powerful in that city believe their city to be. (The cultural capital of America, its economic center, and so on.)

I wouldn't lump major European megapolises with American megapolises, as if European cities were just as bad--they are admittedly a bit more humane and many even retain a connection with their past. I believe Amsterdam is very bike-friendly, and pedestrians are not unwelcome in cities like Rome. And generally public transit is better in European cities than in American cities. Still, there are questions about how many of those European megapolises are sustainable.

I have posted the critique of megapolis by E. F. Schumacher before. Setting aside the negative impact of megapolises on the environment, the critique of megapolises at the political level could perhaps be summarized in this way: with the loss of human scale comes a loss of autarky and self-sufficiency, along with true republican government and a destruction of community and the opportunity for civic friendship.

(I note that Dr. John Médaille does not seem to think that autarky is an important principle in politics:

As far as autarky goes, I think that needs some qualification. Man naturally lives by exchange, which poses a problem for autarky. Aristotle was thinking primarily about defense, since the polis was a step up from--and a response to--Greek tribalism. Defense of the city was primary, and for defense one must not be dependent on potential rivals for food and other necessities (Smith makes these the exceptions to free trade.) I take "autarky" in the sense that one must be able to produce enough to pay for what one consumes, which condemns the American economy as it presently is.

No man can be 'independent' and obtain all of the goods he needs to flourish; the same is true of the family, and hence Aquinas and Aristotle both argue that some greater community is needed. The perfect community, which is self-sufficient with respect to the goods that it needs for human flourishing, is the political community, the polis or civitas. Exchange within a community is taken for granted. The question is what sort of trade should exist between political communities, and is it wise for a political community to be dependent upon trade for such necessities as food? Aristotle's and Aquinas's argument is recapitulated by Dr. Médaille, and I don't see why this shouldn't remain the norm.)

Why do people enjoy living in megapolises? It isn't because of the negative qualities of megapolises. If it there is any group that enjoys the night life provided by cities, it is the young. Those who are older may cite the availability of cultural events--theater, musicals, museum exhibitions, as well as a plethora of high-class restaurants and other services catering to those with more money. Even if we consider youths who enjoy flittering around from one hot spot to the next, they usually do so at least with a few friends, often in a large group. While they lack ties to the larger community as a whole, their immediate circle of friends and the interactions within a very small group is enough to satisfy their social nature. How much more true should this be of those who are relatively "settled" in life.

As one gets older, one looks for some measure of stability. The appeal of novelty begins to wear off, and as we "grow into our skins," we seek a more fixed identity. We are not wholly defined by the places we may frequent, but being creatures of habit and custom, we do seek to make a home where we live, even in an environment that can be so inhumane. In German there is a word, heimat. (I first encountered it in Fr. Gamber's Reform of the Roman Rite who discusses it in the context of the liturgy and liturgical spirituality.)

Identity is often tied to self-expression; rarely is it founded upon something that we have received, except ethnic background. But in the United States even ethnic background may not suffice to influence our sense of identity, since we must appropriate the culture and make it our own, if this is to be something more substantial in the face of assimilation. (Not that assimilation is a bad thing or wrong, but if our claim to belong to a certain culture is to be true, we must adopt that culture to one degree or another, no? Simply eating Chinese food is not enough to make me "Chinese" culturally.) Though there is the voluntary or declarative aspect of self-identification that must be acknowledge--if someone claims that they are Chinese rather than American, culturally or ethnically, who are we to argue with them even if we can produce evidence to the contrary? If this self-identification affects their priorities and allegiances and goals in life, it is real to that extent, even if it is not consistent with their everyday behavior.

Is it a mark of modernity that we create ourselves by the choices that we make? (Or is it tied to postmodernity and existentialism?) Regardless of whether this has any affinity with historical schools of thought, it seems to be a useful way to understanding human psychology and behavior, not universally, but of certain groups and cultures. And so an inhabitant of New York City may identify with New York City in the abstract to some extent, but he is more likely to identify with particular places and people in creating his sense of identity and establishing his heimat. Some activities and the places where those activities are done are more integral to that identity than others. A fitness center where the activity is valued only for its utility to some other end, and not as a means of meeting other people, may be seen as being interchangeable with any other fitness center and thus not a significant part of one's local identity. A favorite Italian restaurant, which one frequents with friends or family, is different. Rarely do people talk about a chain or franchise being a favorite spot, unless it's a Starbucks, or some other spot where people can hang out. Do we not try to find something more personalized, something that is set apart from the homogeneity we normally encounter? (Even if what sets it apart is the fact that we enjoy it, not it in itself.)

I have my favorite spots in NYC, like St. Mike's or Our Saviour. Dr. Pinto likes Payard. I never got a chance to go to Congee Village. I did walk by One Police Plaza, which is always being mentioned in Law and Order, with Pete Takeshi and his two buddies one night. (What does it look like on the inside?) I don't care much for Times Square, but Union Square is nice. (Photos.)

Dr. Rao laments the loss of unique, local, family-owned businesses in Greenwich Village:

A good number of the abandoned shops still remain vacant, giving some spots in the otherwise all too noisy "hood" an unusual Ghost Town pall. Those that have been reoccupied have been taken up either by businesses catering to appetites unrecognizable before 1960 or seemingly insatiable desires for pharmaceutical products, banking needs, fingernail care, tattooing, and painfully boring or hideously revolting t-shirts. Many of these establishments, already themselves part of ugly chains, are destined to be gobbled up by more Godzilla-like enterprises---all intent on joining indissolubly together in massive shopping-scrapers what both the well being as well as the simple entertainment of men and women out for a walk really meant to be kept forever asunder.
When, exactly, was it (the sight of all such endless CVSs and wannabe Walmarts makes me ask) that we stopped "making fun" of what we once considered a Soviet calamity---namely, the need to make all purchases at one, dull, monster store, like G.U.M. in Moscow---and began to praise visits to such lifeless Leviathans as the grandest achievement of God's own free market? Probably at the same moment that the flattening out of male and female into a single, indistinguishable, hermaphrodite drudge ceased to be viewed as an Orwellian totalitarian nightmare and metastasized into a laudable pluralist goal instead. But, once again, as Chris Ferrara and I have often noted, there is no surprise in all of this. Both Marxist and Capitalist materialism are but flip sides to the same Enlightenment coin, their Cold War quarrel itself having been, in Dr. Jeffrey Bond's words, merely "an 'in-house' battle" over who could reduce man to a lackluster, one-dimensional, producing and consuming animal most quickly and most successfully. Our side won this lugubrious contest. But an efficient G.U.M. by any other name is just as soul killing, and my Village, like the rest of the world, is paying the price---by watching the lights go off in all the little nooks and crannies unsuitable to global market analysis and hated by ideologues, tyrants, and dullards of every sort.

Have family-owned businesses been able to compete in megapolises like New York City? (SoHo has its own website; what about the rest of Manhattan? Who owns the clothing stores and boutiques on 5th Ave.?) The political economy of some areas is such that permanence for individual business, much less the community as a whole, is very rarely achieved. That lack of economic permanence creates the necessity for mobility; American mobility is not always chosen for its own sake, especially for those under a certain income range.

Do we create only an illusion of community for ourselves by patronizing our favorite businesses? The human spirit seeks to cope and make the best out of a bad situation. Those who can't will probably leave or seek alternate, less wholesome remedies. And yet, is this not a community more of our mind and choosing? And, hence, not a real community? (Similarly, how easy is it for us to acquire new friends and abandon old ones as we switch jobs, dwellings, or our boyfriend or girlfriend?)

Intentional communities only seem to work within a religious context, and even then not all of them. Those who seek to resettle to establish a new Christian community should do so prayerfully, if they are abandoning natural ties and obligations that arise in natural communities. There needs to be a serious reason for those natural obligations to be disregarded in favor of new obligations--the community that one is leaving is too degenerate and a danger to his salvation, for example.

It seems to me that the little customs that we create serve as a coping mechanism, and enable us to ignore the bleakness around us when we reflect upon our lives. (Just like those denizens of the megapolises who wear mp3 players or other audio devices are constantly listening to them.) Is it any wonder that those of us caught up in our own world find it so easy at times to ignore the poor and the homeless on our streets? They're unpleasant reminders of reality. It's better to just keep walking and to look straight, focused on whatever we are doing or wherever we are going, so we can continue living in our own universe and pretend that everything is all right. James Howard Kunstler writes about 9/11 and the public's reaction to the administration's justification for the second Iraq war:

For my money, the "we were lied to" chorus only represents the obdurately self-righteous cluelessness in every band of the American political spectrum. We lied to ourselves. We continue to lie to ourselves every day. The US public barely understands the first thing about the energy predicament we're in, and what it means for how we live in this country -- or how we get along with the rest of the world -- and the news media tragically reflects that ignorance. We fantasize about being "energy independent" and still being able to drive to the mall three times a day to eat caesar salads grown on the other side of North America. Get this: we deserve exactly what is happening to us. We might as well keep on lying to ourselves to pretend that we are not descending into a dark phase of our own history. After all, the true basis of American life these days is to feel good about yourself no matter what you do.

A similar mindset takes hold when we try to find a solution to the problems that plague our locality--we seek quick answers and are prone to put blame upon our leadership, while ignoring how much of our lifestyle is to blame of those problems. The comfort that we seek can thus become a way of denying reality, while one is engrossed in the city. While we may seek to establish some links with others, even if they are weak, unstable relationships, how often do we fail to satisfy our desire for human contact by not following through on it, either out of habit or lack of consideration, or other [less valuable] priorities? We may be able to temporarily ignore the dark side of the city until there is some emergency or personal tragedy, when we feel t e loneliness, solitude, and lack of support such a megapolis creates. Despite the hustle and bustle and the flashy appearances, life in NYC is not very vibrant or enriching, and we have the witness of the poor and of their children in its public schools to testify to this, despite the protestations of those who have money and have access to endless diversion. (Singles with well-paying jobs, and couples who do not wish to have children or are seeking to postpone childbearing, for the sake of maintaining their way of life.)

Even if we live properly as Christians in a megapolis, engaging in spiritual and corporal works of mercy for those in need, is it possible for us to find some sort of natural heimat in such a place?
Our professional, civic, and personal relationships are open to too much flux. Is the situation in a contemporary megapolis worse than, say, urban Rome? Many Catholics have a solid foundation in religion and acts of sacrifice, either as individuals or in families. But what is lacking today are strong, tight-knit parishes, communities of agape. Because of fragmentation and mobility, we lack a strong "base of operations," within which we can live in charity and give witness and then expand outward. The ecclesial movements do what they can to compensate for this loss, but I don't think that the new evangelization must sooner or later confront the loss of the parish; otherwise Catholic Christianity in urban areas will die out, along with the urban society in which they are found. (The possible exceptions being those parishes that remain "ethnic," particularly those that are gathering places for Latin Americans and Latinos.)

That said, I do admit that I have an attachment to Hong Kong and Macau, in addition to some European cities; would I feel the same away about E. Asian cities like Seoul or Tokyo? I know I don't like Beijing--the pollution there is a major reason. Hong Kong and Macau would be more comfortable than Seoul or Tokyo because of Cantonese and the culture. It's also because of family ties to both cities as well...

Although I've never ridden on the buses, NYC does seem to have a good public transportation system and is pedestrian-friendly, like Hong Kong. Nonetheless, the New Urbanists and Classicists nonetheless would make a critique about the size of the buildings. What of our
'subjective' reaction to skyscrapers? More on that in another post.

New Urbanism is the Old Green.
Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature, by Douglas Farr
Farr Associates - sustainable urbanism and architecture
Urban Land Institute | ULI Austin - YLG: Meet the Speaker with ...
Doug Farr Defining Green Design AIA
The Good City - Books & Culture

Philip Bess: What is a city for?
Philip Bess: Cities shaped by love « the good city
New Urbanism and “The Good City” « Creation Project
Faculty - Our Community - School of Architecture - University of ...

Veritas et Venustas: Slow Food & New Urbanism

CNU XII: Chicago | Congress for the New Urbanism
Learn About New Urbanism | Congress for the New Urbanism
AboutNewUrbanism
Building the New Urbanism
Next American City » Magazine » Respect for the Human Scale
City Mayors: New Urbanism
Three Paradigms: New Ubanism, Everyday Urbanism, Post Urbanism
Kirkpatrick Sale: At What Size Secession?

via EB:
Let's fix the cities now? (Ecocities review)
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
This report contains the author's address at the Ecocity World Summit, April 25, 2008 in San Francisco. Richard Register, the Summit's co-convener and Ecocity Builders founder, responds to this report at the end.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Some lectures of particular interest, from Building Catholic Communities:

Philip Bess, E. Michael Jones, Milton Grenfell, Moderator -- "A Symposium on the Nature of Community"

Thomas Storck, "Community and Dwelling Space: Some Reflections from Catholic Doctrine and Tradition"

Fr. Dominic Lenk, OSB, "Saint Benedict: Himself, His Rule, His Disciples"

Andrew Sorokowski, PhD, "The Rule of St. Basil as a Model for Community Life"

John Sharpe, "Our Birthright of Responsibility: Real Property Ownership and its Restoration Today"

Milton Grenfell, "Beguinage: Cohousing in Medieval Flanders"

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Philip Bess, Why Architecture Matters, Part III: Urban Formal Order and Natural Law

pretty good stuff, though controversial:

It is the thesis of what follows that, given this understanding and characterization of both natural law and the Rural-to-Urban Transect, the proposition

Human beings should make mixed-use walkable settlements

is generally valid for all human beings in all times and places---and therefore constitutes a natural law precept. If this is true, such a precept would be binding in conscience for---and acted upon with prudential judgment by---all persons who act in accordance with right (practical) reason; and most especially for and by persons who understand themselves to be a part of the Aristotelian-Thomist intellectual tradition.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Philip Bess, Introduction: Why Architecture Matters

Introduction: Why Architecture Matters

Saturday, April 28, 2007

The City and the Good Life

The City and the Good Life

by Philip Bess

Philip Bess is a professor of architecture at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and the principal of Thursday Architects in Chicago. This article appeared in The Christian Century, April 19, 2003, pp. 20-23, & 26-29. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

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Western ideas about good cities descend from Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. From Athens we inherit two seminal ideas: that the good life is the life of moral and intellectual excellence, and that the good city is one that makes this good life possible for its citizens. From Jerusalem comes a third idea: that a city’s excellence is also measured by the care it exhibits for its weakest members. And from Rome we inherit the idea that a city’s beauty is warranted by and represents its greatness. This ancient view of cities, though it acknowledged the central role of commerce, was essentially moral and aesthetic.

Today’s common wisdom is different. It views the city as governed by impersonal market forces, and devotes little thought to the good life or to the relation cities might have to the good life.

The city is a central metaphor and theme in Christianity. Christian scripture depicts the end of the human pilgrimage as a heavenly city, the New Jerusalem; and the relationship between this world and the next was articulated paradigmatically for Christians in the fifth century in St. Augustine’s classic The City of God.

Systematic philosophical thinking about urbanism antedates Christianity, going back to Aristotle, who wrote some four centuries before Christ that the best life for human beings is lived in community with others, and most particularly in a polis. This "city-state" was typically small in scale, with flexible but definite physical and geographic characteristics, It happened also to approximate the size of subsequent historic towns and urban neighborhoods -- and for an obvious reason: it is an area that can be comfortably walked. Its size fit the embodied nature of the human person. Of the polis Aristotle wrote that it is a community of communities, "the highest of all, embracing all the rest . . . [aiming] at the highest good: the well-being of all its citizens."

The Christian might say that Aristotle is not quite right on this point. The church is the highest of all communities, for it aims at the truly highest good: people’s eternal wellbeing. Augustine addresses this tension in a way that became definitive for Christians. He contended that in its life on earth, the church is but a single member of and participant in that community of communities which is the earthly city. With respect to its divine vocation, however, the church represents and to some extent embodies the heavenly city. Pace Aristotle, the highest of all communities therefore is indeed a city: it is the City of God, of which the church is its earthly herald, symbol and sacramental anticipation. Christians recognize that on earth we have no lasting city but seek the city that is to come. Christians therefore possess a dual citizenship.

Aristotle argued that human beings are by nature social animals that thrive in cities. Historically, Christians have agreed, but maintain that human sociability reflects the inherent sociability of the one triune God. It is important therefore not to regard Augustine’s use of the term city as mere metaphor. Both Alasdair MacIntyre and Peter Brown (writing about the classical polis and Augustine respectively) have emphasized that in the premodern world human identity was bound up with particular communities and particular places. (This indeed was essential to the appeal of Augustine’s thesis: Christians belong to a city, a heavenly city -- God’s city.)

And it is worth noting that the modern disintegration of the traditional city, which I will shortly describe, coincides with the (now disintegrating) modern notion of the self as disembodied and ahistorical. We might recall that the frequently used metaphor "the church in the public square" derives from the historic presence of real churches on real public squares. The power of this metaphor diminishes as we lose and forget how to make real public squares fronted by real churches.

Urban social life as both reality and ideal became problematic with the rise of the industrial city. As recently as the 18th century Samuel Johnson could say of London: "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the urban setting became known as the site of disease, pollution, crime, squalor and ugliness. William Blake wrote of England’s "dark satanic mills," and Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times describes the prototypical industrial city of Coke-town in terms more hellish than heavenly.

Every urban reform movement of the past 200 years -- from England’s Hygiene Acts to America’s City Beautiful Movement to modern zoning laws to modernist architecture to the creation of public housing and the rise of environmentalism and historic preservation -- has been a response to the social and cultural problems created by industrialism.

Several of these reform movements -- such as the 19th-century urban parks movement, without which contemporary big-city life would be almost unlivable -- have made permanent contributions to our experience and understanding of good city life. Others have been more problematic.

Americans have largely succeeded in one area of reform: we have separated the noxious aspects of industrial production from city life, exporting them to regions outside the city or to other countries. But this has not meant that America has been making or promoting good cities. Since World War lithe U.S. has excelled chiefly at creating a pattern of development known as suburban sprawl.

The ubiquity of suburban sprawl has come to constitute a serious physical, intellectual and cultural problem of its own. This problem today is engendered and sustained by virtually every institution responsible for the creation of the built environment: the real estate development industry; the construction industry; federal, state and local regulatory agencies; the rule-of-thumb manuals of transportation engineers; the lending policies of banks; the professions of architecture and planning; the patrons of architecture; and above all the zoning ordinances that regulate where and how buildings get built.

What exactly is the problem with suburban sprawl? The Congress for New Urbanism has identified a set of interconnected problems, all related to the physical characteristics of sprawl. Suburban sprawl fosters disinvestment in historic city centers; excessive separation of people by age, race and income; extreme inequality of educational opportunity; pollution and the loss of agricultural lands and wilderness; record rates of obesity; and sheer ugliness.

New Urbanists are not environmental determinists; they are not arguing that suburban sprawl creates these problems all by itself. They do argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between the built environment on the one hand and people’s character and social relations on the other. As the charter of the New Urbanism says: "Physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework."

The very physical structure of suburban sprawl makes it virtually impossible for people of different generations and different incomes to live in close proximity to one another -- and not only live close together but also work, shop, play, learn and worship in the same neighborhood. The automobile-dependent suburb effectively demobilizes and disenfranchises those without cars and those unable to drive, notably children (whose parents must become chauffeurs) and the elderly.

To live in suburbia has become an American ideal; but it is a contradictory ideal, for suburban sprawl voraciously consumes the landscape that is the very substance of its promise. The suburban ideal simply cannot deliver on its promise of convenience, mobility, natural beauty, individual freedom and well-being for all. Its self-contradictory dynamic is evident in the way those who have most recently arrived in suburbia are often the people most vociferously opposed to its extension (the political phenomenon that has come to be known as NIM BY-ism -- "Not In My Back Yard").

The cultural ideal and reality of suburban sprawl are perhaps most insidious in the way they undermine the formal and cultural patterns -- the urban patterns -- by means of which human beings have traditionally sought to achieve the good life. The postwar suburban ideal caters to the illusion that unpleasantness in life can be avoided. Christians especially should understand that unpleasantness in life cannot be avoided.

In contrast to suburbia, the traditional city is a complex institution designed to address and transform the unpleasant aspects of human life by means of community, culture and civil society. To live in a civitas is to be civilized. To live in a polis one must learn to be polite, perhaps even to acquire some polish. Urbanites sometimes become urbane.

I am contrasting two formal paradigms of human settlement: the traditional town or traditional urban neighborhood and the post-1945 automobile-dependent suburb. My division of history at the year 1945 may seem extravagant or simplistic, but that year effectively represents the temporal demarcation between the routine creation of walkable human settlements and the creation of those that require mechanical transportation to perform the majority of life’s daily tasks,

With other members of the Congress for New Urbanism, I contend that the mixed-use walkable neighborhood is the sine qua non of urban design and that it ought to be a focus of both public policy and urban planning, whether such neighborhoods are considered in isolation or in relation to other neighborhoods. A neighborhood standing alone in the landscape is a village; several neighborhoods in the landscape constitute a town; many contiguous neighborhoods in the landscape together constitute a city or a metropolis. To make traditional villages, towns, neighborhoods and cities today -- like the places we love to visit (villages and towns like Cooperstown and Key West; small cities like Annapolis, Savannah and Santa Barbara; and big cities with distinctive neighborhoods like Boston, New York and Chicago) -- requires a conscious and conscientious rejection of the way we’ve been making human settlements since 1945.

We can identify at least four kinds of order in a good city: an ecological order: an economic order, a moral order and a formal order. A good city clearly is part of an ecological order -- it is a means by which humans live over an extended period in the natural landscape. If the city is made well, both the human animal and the ecological order of which it is part will thrive. If the city is not made well, both humans and the ecological order will eventually suffer.

The economic order of a good city is characterized by marketplace diversity and entrepreneurial freedom. Its purpose is twofold: to create and distribute the material goods and services necessary to the material wellbeing of the populace, and to create the surplus wealth, and hence the leisure, necessary for the various kinds of cultural endeavors -- music, art, scholarship, sport -- that are the hallmarks of civilization.

Just as important, however, is the moral order. The marks of this order are the existence of various religious, civic and political institutions that shape and restrain individual behavior. Such institutions seek to educate individuals in a variety of moral and intellectual virtues, and to promote regard for the common good. If these institutions are healthy, they promote and sustain a shared sense that the city is not only a marketplace but also a moral community, and that the market exists for the community not the community for the market.

The formal order of the city is what architects typically think about when they think about the city -- the pattern of buildings, squares, streets and sidewalks. Most people intuitively understand the relationship between the formal order of a city and its economic order, because they know it requires economic power to build significant buildings. The relationship between the formal order of a city and its moral order may be less obvious but is no less significant, for every formal order reflects and embodies some moral order (whether it’s admirable or decadent).

The traditional view of the good life in the West is that it is lived in community. In the traditional city, that moral view is embodied in its formal order. A counterpoint to that view is evident in the formal order of the automobile-dependent suburb.

European architect Leon Krier, the most influential traditional urbanist of our time, has compared the traditional urban neighborhood to a slice of pizza. A neighborhood is to the larger city what a slice of the pizza is to the whole pie: the part contains within itself the essential qualifies and elements of the whole.

In the case of a city made of neighborhoods, this means that a neighborhood contains within walkable proximity to one another places to live, work, play, learn and worship. Within the legal boundaries of a postwar suburb, by contrast, the elements of the "pizza" are physically separated and at some distance from one another -- as if the crust is here, the sauce over there, the cheese someplace else and the pepperoni way out yonder. A suburb may have places to live, work, play, learn and worship, but these activities are confined to single-use zones that are typically distant from one another and require access by car through a pedestrian-hostile environment. By analogy, a postwar suburb has all the ingredients (in Aristotelian terms, the material cause) of a pizza, but it is not a pizza precisely because it does not have the form of a pizza. A postwar suburb may contain the ingredients of a city, but it is not a city precisely because it lacks the physical and the social form (the formal cause) of a city.

What are some of the key features of the formal order of traditional towns and cities amid the neighborhoods of which they are constituted? Cities are composed of a private-economic realm and a public-civic realm which are distinguishable but mixed together in close proximity.

City form is made out of blocks of buildings that define a public realm of streets, along with plazas or squares typically fronted by civic buildings or focused on a centralized monument (Figure 3). Plazas are hard-surfaced, while squares are usually green spaces. Plazas are more common in European cities, squares in Anglo-American cities. Neither are common in those parts of America built since 1945.

Virtually all urban streets connect; cul de sacs are rare. Although there is a recognizable hierarchy of streets according to traffic capacity (and hence size), urban streets always accommodate pedestrians. American towns and cities often line their streets with trees; European cities tend to limit trees to boulevards and avenues.

Primary urban streets carry large volumes of car traffic, but unlike suburban arterial streets they have on-street parking, which protects pedestrians, and wide sidewalks, which safely and comfortably accommodate people on foot (Figure 4).

Secondary urban streets are narrow, and usually permit parking on one or both sides (Figure 5). They allow traffic to connect to major streets, but their narrow width requires cars to move slowly, creating an inherently safer pedestrian environment. Lanes or alleys constitute a third kind of street, essentially a service street for garage access, utilities and trash collection.

Private buildings relate to the street in a consistent and disciplined manner (see Figures 4-5), and are used primarily for commerce and for dwelling. Such buildings front and give spatial definition to streets, and often shelter a mix of uses. Buildings used primarily for commerce may also have residences above the ground floor, and buildings primarily intended as residences may also shelter small offices or businesses.

Good towns and city neighborhoods provide a variety of housing types, often (unlike suburbs) on the same block. In addition to various kinds of detached single-family houses, there may be row houses, apartment buildings, coach houses, and apartments located above stores. The consequence of this concentrated mix of housing is that the young and the old, singles and families, the poor and the wealthy, can all find places to live within the neighborhood. Think of the low-rise, high-density character of neighborhoods in Paris, London or Charleston, or any pre-1945 American town or city neighborhood, which are characterized above all by a beautiful, walkable, convenient public realm that more than compensates for their small building parcels. Small ancillary buildings are typically permitted and encouraged within the backyard of each lot. This small building maybe used as a rental unit of housing or as a place to work; it may also be properly regarded as an example of private sector affordable housing.

Schools are within walking distance of the homes of students and teachers.

Good cities provide parks of various sizes throughout neighborhoods for both passive and active recreation.

Prominent sites are reserved for civic buildings and community monuments. Buildings for education, religion, culture, sport and government are sited either at the end of important street vistas or fronting squares or plazas.

Civic, commercial, residential and recreational buildings and uses are located within pedestrian proximity of one another -- typically a five-to-ten-minute (one-quarter-to-one-half-mile) walk, This is the historic physical and anthropological measure of good urban culture. This rule does not presume that everyone who lives in the neighborhood necessarily works in the neighborhood. Nor does it mean that people will or should cease to have cars. It does mean that a significant reduction in car travel is possible, and that residents who are too young, too old, too poor or too infirm to drive a car remain able to live independently within the community.

The formal characteristics of traditional towns and urban neighborhoods are easily learned by attending carefully to the most beloved cities and neighborhoods in the world. Nevertheless, making such neighborhoods today is very hard, not only because we have largely lost the requisite cultural and social habits, but also because in most places zoning laws (which mandate segregated uses) and street design regulations (which are crafted exclusively to make streets efficient for cars rather than also safe for pedestrians) make it literally illegal to build such environments.

Can the art of traditional urban design be renewed? And can we learn once again to be happy in traditional towns and cities -- not only as a moral antidote to individualism, inequality and the misuse of environmental resources, and not only as an aesthetic antidote to suburban sprawl, but also for the sake of the genuine goods and pleasures (including both communal belonging and individual freedom) of traditional urban life? These are the questions that have been taken up over the past ten years by the Congress for New Urbanism.

The CNU includes architects, planners, developers, engineers, government officials and ordinary citizens committed to revitalizing and promoting traditional urbanism. As New Urbanists came to realize that existing zoning ordinances, street design manuals and housing industry practices were all impediments to making traditional towns and neighborhoods, they began developing new kinds of zoning ordinances; found sympathetic traffic engineers to help write a different set of street design standards; renewed the practice of creating high-quality pattern books to guide home-builders; and learned how to persuade lending institutions of the economic advantages of financing traditional neighborhoods. The result is that there are now more than 200 New Urbanist mixed-use projects under construction in the U.S. and throughout the world, and hundreds more being planned (though this remains but a fraction of new construction taking place).

New Urbanism has aroused vocal opposition from both the political left and the political right. For the left, New Urbanists are too closely involved with the marketplace and too content with "conventional" aesthetics. New Urbanism is alleged to be just a prettier version of suburban exclusivity ("Disneyesque" is the preferred term of opprobrium), and out of step with the ironic postmodern zeitgeist. For the right, in particular the libertarians, New Urbanists are too closely allied with government regulatory control.

These criticisms are category mistakes. The fact that both opposition to and support for New Urbanism come from across the political spectrum suggests that current political categories may not apply. New Urbanism is arguably nothing so much as a classic Tocquevillian democratic "association" active primarily at local levels of community and government. New Urbanists work both substantively and procedurally to fight precisely those tendencies toward individualism that Tocqueville recognized as the most serious threat to the culture of democracy, for which free associations of citizens were the primary remedy and of which suburban sprawl is arguably our culture’s foremost physical embodiment.

If the New Urbanism has an Achilles’ heel, it is that its projects do not yet measure up to its own professed objectives. New Urbanist "greenfield" projects in particular -- mixed-use developments built on previously undeveloped land -- for the most part have yet to coalesce into genuine towns and neighborhoods (though given their physical infrastructure and the passage of time they probably will do so, unlike their sprawl counterparts). Moreover, because New Urbanist developments remain rare, and because they have undeniable market appeal, they tend to be expensive.

This discrepancy between the ideals and the reality of New Urbanism is due in part to the fact that New Urbanist proposals to date are mostly being pitched to and driven by the housing market. While it is impossible for New Urbanist projects to succeed outside the market, it is clear -- even to New Urbanists -- that the ideal of mixed-use, walkable and above all economically and generationally diverse human settlements will not be realized solely by market forces.

Since good towns and cities manifest and promote a moral order as well as an economic order, churches obviously have an interest in the form of cities and a potentially important role to play in the revival of traditional urbanism. It is worth noting that that New Urbanists derive their ideas about public space and formal order in large part from traditional cities in which churches and their ancillary institutions have been key players. Church communities continue to erect buildings -- for worship, for education, for health care, for dwelling -- that are potentially important components of traditional neighborhoods. Moreover, churches are a kind of community in which at least in principle (unlike in suburbia) membership is not primarily a function of class or age. The church therefore would seem to have much to offer the New Urbanist enterprise out of its own long intellectual and spiritual traditions -- not least a serious and sophisticated view of human nature and human community, a pastoral mandate to serve rich and poor, and a long history of urban and architectural patronage.

At the same time, the lessons about place and character that the New Urbanists are relearning are lessons that churches also need to relearn. All too often churches unthinkingly comply with the cultural presuppositions of suburban sprawl. This compliance is evident in new church buildings located in the midst of large surface parking lots; in the frequent attempts by older neighborhood churches to tear down adjacent buildings to provide parking for a suburban constituency; in well-meaning but misconceived programs that create housing for the elderly or low-income persons as concentrated enclaves rather than components of walkable mixed-use neighborhoods; and in their almost complete indifference to the aesthetics of a shared public realm.

What can churches do both to save and be saved, urban-istically speaking? Churches could assume a more significant role in neighborhood building by rethinking church development procedures in at least two areas. The first has to do with the size of new churches. Many new evangelical megachurches and Roman Catholic parish churches are so big as to be intrinsically anti-urban. A new church building required to seat more than about 700 people will almost inevitably be situated in a parking lot rather then amid a walkable neighborhood -- and that’s a problem for urbanism.

The second, related area has to do with land use. A new suburban church complex typically occupies six to 15 acres on which will be located a church building, perhaps an associated school and a surface parking lot -- and that’s it! In contrast, my own Chicago parish church and elementary school are located on two city blocks that together take up ten acres, but those blocks include -- in addition to the church and school -- over 100 dwelling units in a variety of buildings two-to-three stories tall, more than 15 businesses, and nearly 200 on- and off-street parking spaces for the public. My parish church is a genuine neighborhood center, in contrast to new suburban churches, which function (in terms of formal order) as the center of parking lots.

Of course, new suburban churches don’t have to promote densities at the scale of a Chicago neighborhood in order to promote better human settlements. Figure 6 shows how a 700-seat church and a 400 student elementary school (with a gym) could occupy a ten-acre parcel of land that could also accommodate some small-town-sized single-family building lots, a block of row houses fronting a plaza and a public square, and a short block of mixed-use buildings fronting the square. With accessory buildings (coach houses with garages below and a small living or work space above) permitted on the single-family house lots, this design makes room for 41 private development parcels, allowing up to 70 dwelling units and four ground-floor shops; off-street parking for 82 cars; on-street and plaza public parking for 216 cars; and additional Sunday parking available for up to 90 more cars on the perimeter lanes of the property. The parcel is also laid out to allow street connections to future development adjacent to the property.

A development approach such as this also has the potential to help congregations finance their building projects by forming partnerships with developers to build the non-church portion. (It is also likely to require a change in the local zoning ordinance -- but there are plenty of good New Urbanist designers around to assist congregations and parishes in this endeavor.)

For such a project a congregation need not presume that all members will live in the adjacent homes, or that everyone who lives in the adjacent units will be a member of the church. Nor would such a development in any way constitute a complete neighborhood. But it could be the nucleus of a complete neighborhood, one which has a church community at its enter, and the potential to promote growth in an urban rather than suburban sprawl pattern (much as the most beautiful parts of contemporary London grew in the 17th and 18th centuries around small residential-square developments). This model is only suggestive, of course; there are many legitimate strategies for how church communities might come to promote and reclaim a better physical presence in the earthly city.

I have been arguing that good cities are an essential component of the good life for human beings, who are made in the image of God, and that urbanism -- for good reason -- is a privileged symbol in the Christian imagination. Post-World War II suburban sprawl is the antithesis of good urbanism. To the extent that we Christians simply accept the premises of suburban culture, we compromise both the substance of our faith and the effectiveness of our evangelical efforts. Churches will better contribute both to the good of the City of Man and to our witness to the City of God by promoting the formal order of traditional urbanism.

Civic Art and the City of God: Traditional Urban Design and Christian Evangelism

Civic Art and the City of God: Traditional Urban Design and Christian Evangelism
Philip Bess
Professor of Architecture
Andrews University

The New Urbanism:From Aristotle and God to Baseball

An interview with Philip Bess, now of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

The New Urbanism:From Aristotle and God to Baseball

Local Liberty interviewed architect and author Philip Bess on the moral, aesthetic, and political significance of the new urbanist movement. Bess is author of Inland Architecture: Subterranean Essays on Moral Order and Formal Order in Chicago and City Baseball Magic: Plain Talk and Uncommon Sense about Cities and Baseball Parks. He teaches at Andrews University; his Chicago architecture firm is Thursday Architects.

LL: Why has the New Urbanism—please define this movement—been so attractive to a fairly broad spectrum of people? What does this say about the failure of the prevalent urban architecture and planning?
PB: This is not an entirely uncontroversial definition, but New Urbanism is really nothing more than traditional urbanism advocated and pursued in the legal and cultural context of post-WWII sprawl. The essence of traditional urbanism—and inter alia, of New Urbanism—is entirely Aristotelian (in reality if not necessarily theory): the city [polis] is a community of communities that exists to promote the best life possible for its citizens, both individually and collectively. Hence, this view of cities assumes that the best human life necessarily entails both individual freedom and communal belonging and obligation, and recognizes both of these as goods necessary for the good life for human beings. Nevertheless, it has also been
recognized that these goods also exist in tension, and each is subject to corruption: freedom can become license; communal belonging and obligation can become tyranny. So the first point about New Urbanism (in contrast to the view that has grown since the rise of the Industrial City from the mid-18th century and now prevails in much of contemporary culture) is that it views urbanism positively, as something that human beings will naturally do in order to live a good life.
The second point is that traditional urbanism has recognizable formal characteristics that are directly related to the physiology and comfort of the human person, viz.: a mix of uses—housing, commercial, civic, recreational—arranged within easy walking distance (about a half-mile diameter,which translates as a ten-minute walk from edge to edge, and a five-minute walk from center to edge) in networks of streets and blocks that form a public realm of squares, streets, and civic buildings, and a private realm of houses and commercial buildings (and frequently buildings that combine both of these private functions in one, on different floors). Such a formal environment—approximately 150 acres—is about the size of the smallest communities that Aristotle would have recognized as a polis; and is the size both of what we would recognize as a small town or an urban quarter or neighborhood, larger towns and cities being made up of lesser or greater accumulations of these mixed-use neighborhoods. This is the pattern of all great cities and small towns in Europe and the United States; and has its analogues in non-Western cultures as well.

New Urbanists view modern transportation technologies as extenders of the freedom of human beings, but not as replacements for the traditional mixed-use formal order of town/neighborhood/city. Now the reality of post-WWII sprawl culture is this: that it has through its zoning ordinances and street design regulations made illegal the creation of mixeduse traditional urban environments that before 1945 were both legally and culturally normative. Thus what is new about New Urbanism is its promotion of traditional urbanism—not uninformed by the positive technological achievements of modern society—in the legal and cultural context of sprawl.

Why is this so attractive to so many people? There are no doubt many reasons; but I will suggest it is due in no small part to the fact that good traditional urban neighborhoods are both convenient and beautiful, whereas sprawl suburbs (as opposed to, say, 19th century railroad suburbs, which are formally just another version of traditional small towns) are typically both inconvenient and ugly; and that traditional urban neighborhoods really are conducive to common life and the common good, while at the same time affording individuals as much privacy and even anonymity as they like. It is freeing (and even more importantly, good) to be able to perform daily tasks in a beautiful environment that can be traversed without the necessity of an automobile for each of those separate tasks. And there is a reason why words like "civility," "polite," "polished," and "urbane" are all derived from root words meaning "city," which is that for most people throughout most of human history urban life really has been and is the way of life most conducive to human well-being.

As to what this says about the failure of modern planning: it has to be understood that modern planning is first of all a reflection of the positivist and Cartesian bureaucratic sensibilities that characterize the modern world; and second of all that it has been implemented not by market forces alone (or even primarily) but rather by post-war governmental housing and transportation policies that favored sprawl development over traditional urban development.

That said, it is undeniable that these policies had and continue to have significant popular (and hence political) appeal; and I attribute this to one of the darker cultural tendencies of the general good of democratic politics, which is that democracies of their very nature tend to encourage what Tocqueville famously identified as "individualism" (of which sprawl is precisely the physical embodiment), which he correctly recognized as a corrosive threat to democracy itself; and about which I will say a little more below.

LL: Is there something peculiarly American about the New Urbanism, and how would you relate it to American political and social traditions? We certainly see architectural and design atrocities abroad—what about good ideas for us?

PB: There is in my opinion something peculiarly American indeed about New Urbanism; and it goes directly back to Tocqueville's observations about American tendencies to individualism and how Americans tend to pursue matters of the common good and in the process fight this individualist tendency: through free associations.The CNU is derided by critics from the left as tools of market interests, and by critics from the right as harbingers of Big Government; but New Urbanists are nothing if not a classic Tocquevillian association formed and impressively organized to promote the virtues of traditional urbanism. Jennifer Hurley, a fellow New Urbanist private sector planner from Philadelphia, recently described succinctly and eloquently the way that New Urbanists work:

New Urbanists have developed a methodology for dealing with obstacles: co-opt specialized fields, look to history, and develop new solutions....

When New Urbanists had trouble getting good places built because of rules by traffic
engineers, they learned basic traffic engineering, found sympathetic traffic engineers to become New Urban road design experts, and re-wrote the standards. When New Urbanists were disappointed in the quality of built places, they looked to history and renewed the practice of using pattern books to guide builders. When municipal officials refused to approve new urban developments because they did not meet zoning codes, New Urbanists developed entirely new kinds of codes.

And sociologist David Brain notes another feature of the practical consequences of New Urbanist efforts to build community consensus by means of the intensive public design workshops known among New Urbanists as "charrettes":

[T]he New Urbanism represents a fascinating and pragmatic effort...to re-build the
public sphere by way of re-creating the techniques of place-making. It's actually a perfect reversal of the trajectory of technical specialization, bureaucratization, and modernist statebuilding that has taken place since the Progressive era, quite in line...with the contemporary convergence between certain left wing political theory and the revival of interest in civic republicanism. [Of interest to the social theorist] is that New Urbanist practice represents a tangible and practical manifestation of what have been little more than broad notions and wishful thinking among some political theorists.

This convergence across political lines occasions interesting methodological debates
among New Urbanists; but is in fact a good and salutary thing in that it underscores how New Urbanists themselves embody one of the essential features of traditional urban life, viz.: the city as a community that embraces debate about its common life as essential to the vitality to the community itself. Critics may deride New Urbanists as just another "special interest group;" but the New Urbanist point is that the city is precisely that larger community that embraces all "special interests" and attempts (literally) to civilize them.

As to "architectural and design atrocities abroad": the culture of modern architecture is largely in intellectual, academic, and professional disarray on both sides of the Atlantic; and sprawl is not one of our better American cultural exports. As a largely but not exclusively American phenomenon, New Urbanists tend to take as our preferred models for American contexts the best cities and small towns of America: Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Charleston, Savannah, Annapolis, Cooperstown, Nantucket, Key West, Santa Fe, Santa Barbara, etc.—though I would hasten to add that virtually any place in America that has an intact pre-1945 neighborhood or town center could serve as such a model. But the issues at stake with regard to American cultural exports (including sprawl) include not only
political freedom—a great good—but also the goods (including communal goods) toward and in service to which that political freedom is to be directed. Many Americans cease our philosophical commitments with the advocacy of freedom, but we shouldn't stop there. New Urbanists are pressing the question about what really are the best ways to order the public realm; and are doing so as responsible citizens in the context of democratic political processes of self-government.

LL: What are the principal promises and pitfalls you see in the New Urbanism? Does it necessarily require more or less government regulation? What are their best ideas, their worst?

PB: The principal promise of New Urbanism is that it will succeed in helping to create a cultural (and following that a political and legal) climate for traditional urbanism in the United States.The principal pitfall is if New Urbanists think that this goal will be accomplished quickly; or if they think it can be achieved simply by making better physical environments (and a legal environment in which they are permitted), which is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for good urbanism. The danger is if New Urbanism is satisfied simply to occupy a specific market niche—which I suspect a refined and sophisticated real estate market would be only too happy to supply—and becomes just another aesthetic choice for that class of people that can afford to buy a living environment as art.This would be tantamount to a retreat from the issues of communitybuilding and justice and environmental responsibility that are so prominent in the New Urbanists' own founding Charter.

The reality is that there is a reciprocal relationship between cultural character and the physical environment. "We shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us," said Winston Churchill famously; and, I might add, vice versa. Sprawl is a (perhaps unintended) flower of a long modernizing cultural process that has produced great goods for the United States and the world; but a process that has also produced a kind of therapeutic individualism that formidable and sympathetic (and culturally conservative) contemporary thinkers like Philip Rieff, Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, and others have aptly characterized as an impossible and incoherent culture. There's no reason I can see to think that a revival of communal sensibility—and eo ipso, of urban culture—is not a long term cultural
project that will require both all the communal cultural resources at our disposal (especially Tocquevillian/American free associations, including churches: see below) and careful attention to that balance between communal obligation and individual freedom that has always been the ideal of the mainstream Western political tradition.

Regarding the need for more or less government regulation: the paradox of the New Urbanist political agenda—and given our current cultural situation, it's a necessary paradox—is that the urban and architectural order of the great cities of the past was largely a consequence of shared cultural habits of city-building. There were laws and codes; but these tended to be minimal. Those traditional city-building cultural habits have been lost, and replaced by a modernist/positivist/ bureaucratic structure of law that over the past two-to-three generations itself has engendered a new set of cultural habits. The paradox of New Urbanism is that what it seeks is to relearn and restore the habits of good urbanism; but that in order to do that, it must first change the legal environment to make traditional urbanism even possible. (Again, changing
the current legal environment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good urbanism.) So the New Urbanists of necessity DO stress the need to establish a regulatory environment conducive to good urbanism. But the way that New Urbanists in fact press this agenda is not in the "top down" manner that its critics claim, but in fact is exactly the opposite.

The New Urbanists, primarily through the charrette process, seek above all to build local consensus in specific places on behalf of good urbanism; and then to fight the larger existing prohibitive legal structure with specific alternatives for which there exists a significant political constituency—i.e., New Urbanism is arguably democracy in action! And if New Urbanists also succeed in getting some larger regulatory framework changed to become more sympathetic to traditional urbanism?

Well, that too seems to me part of the workings of democracy, and consistent with the recognition that what new Urbanists are trying to change is the culture.

As to the best ideas of New Urbanism? Well, as a traditional urbanist (and looking at the CNU Charter), I have yet to see the CNU as an organization officially embrace a bad idea; and they have a very good track record of either fashioning good responses to the arguments of their critics, or of embracing those arguments and incorporating them into their own critique of the culture of sprawl. As to the worst of their ideas? There is a kind of default secularist liberalism evident among some my urbanist confreres; but this seems to me more attributable to the mental habits common to those on the left than to anything inherent in New Urbanism itself.

LL: What should be the place of churches and other religious institutions in New Urbanist thinking?

PB: I think religious institutions should be of great importance to New Urbanism as part of a vital civic realm.The formal order of towns and cities also manifest and promote both a moral order and an economic order, so churches clearly have an interest in the form of cities and a potentially important role to play in the revival of traditional urbanism. It is worth noting that that New Urbanists derive their ideas about public space and formal order in large part from traditional cities in which churches and their ancillary institutions have been key players. Church communities continue to erect buildings—for worship, for education, for health care, for dwelling—that are potentially important components of traditional neighborhoods. Moreover, churches are a kind of community in which at least in principle (unlike suburbia) membership is not primarily a function of class or age. Religious communities therefore would seem to have much to offer the New Urbanist enterprise out of their own specific intellectual and spiritual traditions—not least (in the case of Judaism and Christianity) a serious and sophisticated view of human nature and human community, a pastoral mandate to rich and poor, and (in the case of Christianity) a long history of urban and architectural patronage.

At the same time, the lessons about place and character that the New Urbanists are relearning are lessons that many religious communities also need to relearn. All too often religious communities unthinkingly comply with the cultural presuppositions of suburban sprawl.This compliance is evident in new religious buildings located in the midst of large surface parking lots; in the frequent attempts by older neighborhood churches or synagogues to tear down adjacent buildings to provide parking for a suburban constituency; in well-meaning but misconceived programs that create housing for elderly or low-income persons as concentrated enclaves rather than components of walkable mixed-use neighborhoods; and in their almost complete indifference to the aesthetics of a shared public realm.

The First Amendment guarantees of nonestablishment and free exercise have historically provided ample room for physical expressions of religious faith in the civic realm; and to the extent that New Urbanists are serious about the trans-generational and inclusive character of cities as an ideal, religious institutions should be seen and should see themselves as allies.

LL: The EPA has an office of "Smart Growth." Good or bad idea?

PB: This is a tough one. Why the EPA rather than the Department of the Interior or HUD? The Charter for the New Urbanism in its first article says that "The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge."

So implicit in the New Urbanist view of things is that the bureaucratic division of these issues is an inadequate response to the inherent inter-related complexity of the problems. That said, I think New Urbanists are generally happy to leverage whatever kind of political influence they can in order to forward their agenda.

I am not enough of a scientist or ecologist to claim competence on issues such as "environmental protection" or the virtues of biodiversity. New Urbanists are adamant in opposing radical environmentalist suggestions or claims that all species have rights except human beings. But although New Urbanists are interested above all in creating human habitats, they recognize that human beings have an interest in not fouling the natural environment; an interest in environmental "sustainability' if you will. And there is a clear potential convergence of Conservationist and New Urbanist agendas in this respect: preservation of the natural and/or agricultural landscape is better promoted by compact human settlements with distinct boundaries between the settlement and the landscape (i.e., by traditional towns and cities) than by suburban sprawl; and the former are also both more convenient for their inhabitants and generally more attractive places to live. This raises the issue of to what extent it should be public policy to promote traditional urbanism in lieu of sprawl (and vice versa); and at what levels of government such public policy should be pursued.

At present, it would be a major achievement for the New Urbanists to be able to compete on a level legal playing field; and most New Urbanist objectives are pursued at local rather than state or federal levels of government. But there are major issues—open land conservation and transportation (whether cars or alternatives such as rail) in particular—that are at least regional and arguably national in scope. I am as occasionally frustrated by bureaucratic administration as anybody; and I'm willing to entertain alternative suggestions for addressing at regional and national levels issues pertaining to the common good. But there are issues—and land use issues are among them—that do pertain to "the general welfare," and that therefore need to be identified and addressed as such. Should that be done through the EPA? I don't know....

LL: Philip, you have written quite a bit about baseball stadiums. Is the desire for old-style baseball parks (Jacobs Field, Coors Field, and Camden Yards, for example) related to New Urbanism?

PB: I think so, but only indirectly. I've tried for almost twenty years (and with only varying degrees of success) to use baseball parks to make an argument on behalf of architecture and urbanism. The argument goes something like this: the primary symbolic import of architecture is not as an emblem of its "age" or its structural "honesty," but rather as a symbol of its commissioning institution; and ultimately, of the legitimate authority of the community represented by that institution. I've chosen to focus upon ballparks as an example of this once intuitively understood but now largely forgotten sensibility because there truly is a "community of baseball" of which baseball parks are and remain tangible architectural symbols. Nevertheless, the community of professional baseball is now in my opinion every bit as disarrayed as the community of architecture; and stadiums have become weapons wielded by the professional sports industry to extort public monies that are justified by both the sports industry and public agencies by appeals to what remains of this communal sensibility about and affection for baseball and other sports.

That's my one-paragraph critique of the stadium boom of the fifteen years. To the extent that stadiums such as Camden Yards, Jacobs Field, and Coors Field are located in urban rather than suburban locations, I think this is an improvement over the generation of stadia that were built in the 1960s and 70s. But there are two huge differences between the former and the ballparks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park that they are supposedly emulating. First,Wrigley and Fenway are both much smaller in scale (and hence more intimate) than the newest generation of urban stadia. Second (and more importantly),Wrigley and Fenway are located in traditional mixed-use neighborhoods, whereas the new downtown stadia are located where they are to be a destination component of a downtown "entertainment zone." In other words, the former were (and are) components of traditional urban neighborhoods. The latter still reflect the suburban cultural bias that cities are good places in which to be entertained, but only poor people and chumps would actually live there. But I take it as evidence of the truth of the New Urbanist thesis that 1) Wrigley and Fenway arguably remain the two most popular venues not only in baseball but in all of professional sports; and 2) the value of residential and commercial real estate in their neighborhoods is very high and continues to appreciate. Good urban neighborhoods are expensive; and the reason is because people like living in them. The way to make traditional urbanism less expensive is to make it less rare.

LL: Thanks very much, we look forward to future contributions to Local Liberty.

Two responses at the Claremont Institute: 1, 2

Campus Magazine review of his book Till We Have Built Jerusalem.

Cathedrals for a New Century: Church Architecture at the Beginning of the Third Millennium

New Urbanism and Communities of Faith
Philip Bess
Professor of Architecture, Andrews University and
Principal of Thursday Architects in Chicago, Illinois

bio info

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