Making Cities Civil

...Compared with 10 years ago, Atlantans have about doubled the amount of time they spend in their cars...

...Anyhow, politicians figured, let the government that serves developers the best reap the most in campaign contributions...

...Ninety-one years ago Frederick Jackson Turner, addressing a group of fellow historians in Indianapolis, told them two fundamental American ideals developed during the pioneer era: "One was that of individual freedom to compete unrestrictedly for the resources of a continent...

...How in the world did Toronto convince so many governmental fiefdoms to cooperate on a single mass transit project...

...In all of these places, the rules of the jungle seem to apply...

...Nevertheless, most of Kunstler's book tacitly seems to validate Garreau's point...

...That would have been impossible in any event, Atlanta was too culture-bound...

...It has set up the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, which has the power to build any kind of public transit system anywhere it wants, the power to kill local development projects, and the power to say no to more local roads...

...Those were happier days...

...But I don't think it is...

...Toronto, he said, had long ago ceded its most complex intergovernmental responsibilities—such as public transportation—to a consolidated form of regional administration...

...Turner said that night in December 1910, was a very delicate period of readjustment from a frontier society to a civilization...

...Motorists were going mad, literally, behind the wheel—one berserker tired of waiting at an intersection shot out the signal light with a handgun...

...The legacy of this trend has not been good for America, Kunstler argues...

...In my view," he insists, "Atlanta has become such a mess that really nothing can be done to redeem it as a human habitat...

...Do we just administer last rites to some of our most car-dependent cities and walk away...

...Maybe metropolitan Atlanta is indeed doomed...

...Maybe it is not widely enough shared...

...We are still adjusting...

...His bottom line: "With Atlanta, you can forgo agonizing over the future, because the present doesn't even work there...

...When it does go, Atlanta's way of life will change, and so will the way of life in most American metropolitan areas...

...They say Southerners have a keen sense of place and a fierce love of the land, but this is a lie...

...For the record, Kunstler does not have a terrifically high opinion of London...

...It was the only reasonable thing to do, he answered...

...Landowners will sell out in a heartbeat if the price is right, and no one will get too bossy about what you plan to build on your new expanse...

...It can justifiably be said that Haussmann's operations gave the old quarters new life," Kunstler observes...

...Look no farther than Dallas or Houston or Orlando or Atlanta...

...He remade Paris as one would create art, not from statistics or social service casebooks, but from an urge to capture the vibrancy of humanity itself...

...In places like New York City, centuries of cramped housing, jammed streets and chaotic growth finally drove home a vital lesson: An urban civilization requires vigorous rules, personal restraint, and a large measure of cooperation among people with varied interests...

...Progressives—at least in the South—still thought they could save their boomtowns from the consequences of mindless and explosive growth, yet preserve their cherished go-tohell attitudes about living and doing business...

...Huh...

...The local Zeitgeist never had much interest in cities...

...The average commute in Atlanta is now 35 miles per day, a figure that far outdoes Los Angeles...

...Kunstler says the city pushed the example of "car-crazy Los Angeles to its most ludicrous and terminal stage...

...On the city's east end were working-class tenements so miserably overpopulated that they surpassed the later slums of lower Manhattan...

...He went on to explain—in the way that a parent might lecture a particularly slow 5-year-old—that without broad public commitments across bureaucratic and political borders, almost no important projects would ever materialize...

...At some point it will hit bottom...

...But setting up the authority does signal a realization that land and its bounty are finite, and that with a tightly packed civilization comes rules...

...We aren't content to let cities be cities...

...As an editorial writer for the Atlanta Constitution at the time, I was actually with a committee from the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), which runs a subway system through two of the region's 10 counties...

...All new urban forms seem chaotic, he points out, but over time many organize themselves into a high degree of order and success...

...They are wrong, of course...

...We try to graft nature into them...

...Can the nation's great metropolitan areas ever become more than a joyless succession of edge cities—those bleak aggregations of office boxes that rise from asphalt parking lots in the middle of nowhere and help choke off the oxygen supply of older town centers...

...As we zoomed out toward suburban Scarborough Centre, the head of the Toronto Transit Commission casually mentioned that a single fare could whisk a passenger across 13 different political jurisdictions...

...Simultaneously we want to urbanize our countryside...

...But who is to know if we are seeing only the first scraggly growth...

...In short, the city was one huge blob of an urban crisis—an unfit place for business and, as Kunstler puts it, "an increasingly dubious seat of a modern civilization...

...Census Bureau estimates, just 4 per cent of commuters use public transit...

...But what do we do now...

...Until recently, though, much of America remained blissfully innocent of this realization...

...One retort often heard when MARTA tried to expand past Fulton and DeKalb counties was, "If blacks want to come out here, let them walk...

...The Paris that is beloved today is exactly that tapestry of narrow medieval streets aerated by the broad new boulevards supporting one another at appropriate hierarchies of scale...

...This first dawned on me about 15 years ago, when I accompanied a group of civic-minded Atlantans on a mission to inspect Toronto's mass transportation system...

...It didn't matter...

...There couldn't be anything wrong with the form of the city, the way it had crept over the landscape in a dynamic efflorescence of money, power and personal freedom, like a pulsating slime mold...

...Maybe, as Kunstler maintains, this wisdom has arrived too late...

...We will have to lose our illusions of endless bounty, finally acknowledge that the last frontier is gone, and scrupulously abide by a few modest rules of urban civilization...

...Atlanta being Atlanta, I would not expect the esthetic triumph Haussmann brought to Paris...

...Even the pitiable Atlanta Regional Commission—a toothless advisory agency—was widely suspected of plotting to rise up one day, play martial music on the radio, and impose a Soviet-style land-use plan on helpless suburbanites from the foothills of the Appalachians in the north to the noise-racked counties around Hartsfield International Airport in the south...

...Maybe it is, in a city like Boston, Kunstler allows...

...The problem was, an outsider in Georgia could be an official from the neighboring county two miles down the road...

...Eugene Talmadge—a racist demagogue of the 1930s and '40s—used to declare that he would prefer not to campaign in any town large enough to have streetcar tracks or sidewalks...

...the other was democracy...

...Once the frontier closed, he continued, the tensions grew worse...

...In Atlanta today—after major expansions of MARTA and a traffic problem that has exploded beyond belief—fewer than 7 per cent of the suburbanites in Fulton and DeKalb counties use the system's buses or trains...

...Atlanta was doing what every place in the country wished it could do, producing unprecedented new wealth...

...No matter...

...Won't people finally abandon their cars for more efficient modes of transportation when gridlock becomes a constant difficulty...

...Not once did it consider hitting the brakes...

...If Edge City were a forest, then at maturity it might turn out to be quite splendid," Garreau says...

...My little bubble of optimism burst on the spot...

...As the world's first great industrial city, it was a noxious pit of factory poisons for many years—a place where the rich tried to dilute the effects of foul urbanism with faux nature in locations like Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens...

...What the nation faced...

...Mid-19th century Paris, he writes, "was a rat-maze of poorly connected, narrow, disorienting streets, medieval in character, with a long accretion of tightly packed buildings falling into decrepitude...

...A few of us scolds on editorial boards and in university urban studies programs had been warning about this sort of thing for years...

...My first reaction was a fleeting irritation at these smug Canadians...

...Fear and loathing...

...It won't happen immediately...

...For all its pretensions of sophistication, metropolitan Atlanta lacked the civic culture that could save it from the ravages of unrestrained exploitation...

...But sooner or later, when we run out of room for new expressways, when we run through the last oil deposits left on Earth, when we run out of land for shopping malls the size of Connecticut, we Americans will have to make some extreme changes in the way we live...

...We had trekked to Toronto to study how that city had managed to seamlessly integrate its new suburban light-rail network into its older, more traditional central-city subway system...

...They could never duplicate Toronto's impressive achievement...

...That is apparently what Kunstler would do...

...In 25 years, the editorial explained, traffic volume will jump 60 per cent, while road capacity will grow by less than 10 per cent...

...Then, in 1853, Emperor Louis-Napoleon appointed one Georges Eugene Haussmann as prefect of Paris, and he set about transforming the cityscape...

...The pioneers who pushed America's frontiers ever westward hated government, but the establishment of democracy required government...

...Our fundamental American ideal of freedom based on infinite resources remains astonishingly resilient...

...Few suburbanites wanted it anywhere near their plush subdivisions and chichi malls...

...Atlantans, however, he fumes, could not so much as grasp their plight: "It went against their current politics, their whole belief system, really, which boiled down to the notion that Atlanta was the ideal expression of democracy, free enterprise and Christian destiny...

...Throughout metropolitan Atlanta, the U.S...

...I also knew the truth: The Atlanta delegation might as well go home immediately...

...Unfortunately, Turner noted, these twin tenets were packed with mutual hostility...

...The only real question is the magnitude of mayhem we create before that day arrives...

...Public transportation was viewed as an amenity for poor blacks and little more...

...Georgia has the lowest gasoline tax in the nation, Kunstler tells us, and the revenue can only be used to build more roads...

...I interrupted...

...Mothers with children were spending so many hours on chauffeuring duty that they qualified for livery licenses...

...This is big...

...So at the end of the 20th century there was metro Atlanta, hypnotized by its sudden wealth, roaring straight into the abyss of urban dysfunction...

...Disease flourished to the extent that births outnumbered baptisms," Kunstler says...

...Edge City's problem is history...

...The reason was starkly racial...

...He cites London...

...The people of Atlanta were clearly driving themselves crazy with driving...

...When I visited Toronto with the MARTA group, 75 per cent of that city's work force used the public transportation system to get to their jobs...

...It has none," writes Joel Carreau in his 1991 book, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, the work that coined the name for those awful traffic-intensive eruptions of office towers and malls that ring the rims of American population centers...

...We have learned this much over the centuries: If the human capacity for folly is endless, so is the human capacity for resurgence and survival...

...Georgians have no more willingness to give up their cars than they have to relinquish their phones or televisions, the Journal explained...

...By the late 1990s, he writes, Atlanta's traffic had become intolerable: "You dared not venture out anymore to a restaurant on a Friday evening in Buckhead, the Beverly Hills of Atlanta, unless you wanted to spend half the night listening to books on tape in your SUV Routine midday trips to the supermarket now required the kind of strategic planning used in military resupply campaigns...

...A recent Atlanta Journal editorial grousing about Governor Roy Barnes' transportation plan is an illustration...

...Its only plausible destiny, Kunstler thinks, is to become "significantly depopulated...

...Joseph Dolman, a longtime contributor to The New Leader, is a New York City-based columnist and editorialist for Newsday...

...Its citizens have tended to see it as what the future will be all about...

...And I would expect today's edge cities to take their rightful place among other urban fads that failed, such as urban renewal, high-rise housing for the poor and central business districts that suddenly "mailed" themselves...

...If urban redemption is possible in Europe, why isn't it possible in America...

...Nor did the local Zeitgeist have much truck with outsiders...

...His verdict, I believe, is way over the top—although it can't be proven wrong empirically...

...Then, as in Paris and London and Boston, civic leaders will begin to rebuild in a way that works...

...Yet more than 60 per cent of the state's investments will be "dedicated to transit, bicycle paths and sidewalks...

...And in scathing prose he makes a strong case that the "drive-in Utopias" Americans built over the last 80 years can't work...

...Every week 500 acres of raw land in the region is bulldozed to make way for suburban development...

...Their let-'er-rip attitude toward politics and business would not allow it...

...But I would expect its civic nervous breakdown to end...

...He probes the malignancy with a pathologist's precision and a comedian's irony...

...The authority won't make Atlanta more person friendly, and it won't make its expressways pleasurable...

...The folks who hated government had nowhere left to go, and the people who sought to establish democratic civilizations needed government more than ever...

...Beyond Paris, other chapters in The City in Mind describe how Berlin is making itself into an appealing place once more and how—yes—London managed (imperfectly) to come back from the dead...

...Under pressure from Washington, though, Georgia has already swallowed its natural distaste for government and done something extraordinary...

...Even if you could cram all of metropolitan Atlanta's cars and trucks and SUVs onto its expressways every day, and even if you could learn to love the slick, soulless architecture of those barren glass rectangles that line the service roads, communities that are completely car-dependent have a primary problem: They have to rely totally on petroleum—and petroleum is a notoriously troublesome resource, volatile in price and irreplaceable when it's gone...

...No county wanted to work with any other county to set up consistent landuse policies...

...No politician of the era dared suggest that Atlantans drive less...

...Estimates are that 97 per cent of us will continue using personal vehicles throughout the first quarter of this century," it said...

...Meanwhile, no outer-ring suburban county wanted to let MARTA roll inside its borders...

...I? HIS new book, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (Free Press, 272 pp., $25.00), James Howard Kunstler deftly describes the deadly coagulation of traffic that plagues Atlanta today...