Between Ruin & Repair

City of Yes, And… #12

For my final piece of the year—and my final “City of Yes, And…” paid subscriber bonus— I thought I would get into the backstory of last week’s alternate history essay, “Cities For All Mankind.” Ironically, the seed of the piece was planted in a city that my fictional high-speed train bypassed: Providence, Rhode Island, where I attended the Strong Towns National Gathering in June. There, I was on a walking tour with local developer and housing advocate Seth Zeren, who was taking us through the west side of downtown, an area that was subjected to midcentury urban renewal. Along the way, Seth made a comment that’s been echoing in my mind ever since: “We’re living in the ruins of a former civilization, with no idea how they built it.”

That comment put into words something I’d been intuiting from my study of urbanism over the past several years: that cities are the default shape of human civilization—and that we lost something human through the various policies we inflicted upon them in the twentieth century. While doing a bit of research after my visit to Providence, I came across photos of the city as it was: neighborhoods of historic streets, vibrant communities, places that were and might still have been—all swept away as the bulldozers blundered through, carving highways and clearing so-called slums. The idea percolated throughout the year as I wrote about urban renewal in New Haven, urban highways, and the destruction of single-room occupancy units.

“Cities For All Mankind” was an effort to imagine what the world might look like today if we hadn’t aggressively, through public policy, pursued a different shape of human civilization—if we had not committed, at scale, these crimes against urbanity.