Cities, aesthetics, and human community: Some thoughts on the limits of design

Abstract

Much has been written, especially in the United States, about the crisis of cities, about the many problems facing our largely automobiled cities. This is not the crisis of the late 1970s. It is not the crisis of cities burning, runaway inflation and cultural malaise. Rather, the crisis is described as one of sprawl, loss of farm and wilderness lands, increasing racial and economic separation, increasing demands on infrastructure, time lost to commuting, loss of financial resources, the waning of community, and an ever more fractured political life. I will begin by briefly discussing this crisis, and hint at the role of suburbanization in this process. I will then consider two possible responses: New Urbanism and Civic Environmentalism. In the end, I will suggest that of these Civic Environmentalism is a better response, better in large part because while the problems we face are problems of design and planning, they are neither exclusively, nor even mainly, such. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.