Only Connect

Congestion, Connection, and the Prose and Passion of Urban Life

I have an annoying habit of reading everything as a story about cities. Harry Potter is in part an epic about wizardly transit via invisible trains, flying Ford Anglias, and floo powder. The Great Gatsby tells a cautionary tale about suburban sprawl and auto-dependency. Even in fiction, authors can’t escape questions of place and connection: how people move, where they gather, and what separates them. In that sense, E.M. Forster’s great social novel, Howards End, is not merely a story of class and power in Edwardian England, but also one of early twentieth century urbanization. Published in 1910, the novel captures many of the themes we still debate in modern-day urban discourse: gentrification, automobility, affordability, the evolution of the city.

What gives Howards End its enduring power—at least as an uncanny urbanist text—is that it shows what happens when urban change outpaces our ability to build a shared moral and social life and we exclude the full swathe of humanity from our cities.

A strange but lovely book, the novel follows Margaret Schlegel and her family as they confront a changing London, one in which her family’s long-term but leased home, Wickham Place, is to be redeveloped into higher-density flats. Forster writes that the “Londoner seldom understands his city until it sweeps him, too, away from his moorings,” and Margaret suddenly finds herself noticing and bemoaning the “architecture of hurry” rising up to house a rapidly growing population. As she wonders about her landlord and the “quality of the men born” in a booming city, she stops herself: “That way lies madness. Thank goodness she, too, had some money, and could purchase a new home.”

Margaret’s acceptance of the redevelopment of her neighborhood is softened by the financial cushion on which she knows her family will land. As London rapidly urbanizes, not everyone is brought along into the future, and some are crushed by the weight of change. The titular Howards End, a country house whose ownership is contested both literally and symbolically, symbolizes the future of England and who will inherit it. The dilemma at the heart of the novel is that London’s moral evolution lags its technological evolution. And yet this is not an anti-urban book. Instead, it is a warning about who benefits from urban change—and who is left to absorb its costs.

The theme of the book is perhaps best expressed by Margaret’s famous exhortation:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

Cities, too, must connect the prose and the passion. The prose is the “rational”: the legal and institutional frameworks on which cities are founded—zoning codes, street layouts, and infrastructure that give the city its physical form. The passion is the “emotional”: how life in those places actually feels day to day, shaped by the spaces and proximities created by the prose. Margaret’s exhortation appeals to a kind of human-centric urbanism. One that recognizes the desire path that cuts a dusty line across the green expanse of a park, rather than officially prescribed paper plans that ignore actual human needs. One that nurtures the sidewalk ballet of Jane Jacobs, not the strip-mall stroads of auto-centric suburban sprawl or the soulless towers-in-the-park of Le Corbusier. When our passion and our prose connect—when planning is human-centric—they produce cities that exalt human life.

Yet connection has always come with costs. Connection breeds congestion, both vehicular and human. Congestion is, at bottom, a problem of pricing and geometry—but a vibrant city is ultimately a reflection of the value of the human connections it fosters. The question cities have grappled with for more than a century is how to increase the value of those connections while managing their costs.

Howards End obliquely explores one facet of this problem: the “architecture of hurry” that widens social distance even as physical proximity increases. An uncle addresses the issue early on:

“It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it.”

Forster is not warning against sprawl as such, but against the impulse to treat scale and expansion as virtues in themselves. What Howards End captures intuitively and morally in Edwardian England would soon present itself as a concrete policy problem elsewhere. Across the Atlantic, American cities were grappling with their own version of the same dilemma: how to manage growth, movement, and congestion in rapidly expanding urban centers. Indeed, the problem of congestion became, for American cities, the central problem of modern urban policy—and the effort to understand and manage it would shape urban decision-making for decades to come.

As Robert Fogelson documents in Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, the pattern of concentrating economic activity in dense downtown cores had already emerged by the mid-1800s, with transportation advances allowing residential life to spread outward. New transit technology—from the omnibus to the streetcar to rapid transit—brought people from their homes in outlying areas into increasingly congested downtowns every day, which made movement slow and sometimes dangerous. Early efforts to manage congestion focused on building height. Skyscrapers were blamed for crowding and disorder, even though they often alleviated congestion by concentrating activity vertically instead of spreading it horizontally. The nation’s first real zoning code—New York’s 1916 resolution—was an attempt to regulate congestion, including the mixing (or “congestion”) of certain types of residences and uses. Meanwhile, streetcars and commuter rail expanded urban footprints without fully decentralizing employment. Inevitably, some retail and entertainment followed people outward, creating competing nodes that siphoned activity from downtown without replacing its density or diversity. Into the early twentieth century, economic shocks and federal policies such as redlining and mortgage subsidies further weakened downtowns while reinforcing preferences for living beyond them.

By the time Robert Moses, Ed Logue, and other midcentury planners came to power, policy, economics, and technology had already thinned urban cores and drained downtowns of their vibrancy. They correctly sensed that downtowns were failing because people were no longer coming to work, shop, or linger in sufficient numbers. But they misunderstood what kind of congestion cities require. Treating circulation as a proxy for vitality, they sought to reintroduce activity by moving people through cities faster rather than by rebuilding the dense connections that make urban life durable. Motorways promised to reconnect what earlier choices had pulled apart, so the planners bulldozed highways through existing neighborhoods, creating space for cars while demolishing the “blighted” slums that tens of thousands of people called home. This, of course, only accelerated displacement and exurban growth, moving one type of congestion to the highways and another kind away from declining downtown streets. Because these planners held power at metropolitan scale, that misdiagnosis reshaped entire regions, often with devastating consequences.

The end of the urban renewal era did not mark the end of this logic, only a shift in how it was enforced. Where bulldozers once cleared neighborhoods in the name of circulation, low-cost and high-density housing types like SROs were increasingly zoned out of existence, while downzonings capped the number of people allowed to live near job centers. The tools grew less visible and less violent, but the underlying aim remained the same: to manage congestion by limiting connection. Over a century, planners designed policies to thin cities instead of better connecting them, choosing automobile traffic and decentralization over foot traffic and density.

As they would discover too late, a thousand square miles were not a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile—and they were much harder to connect.

These problems still confront us today. Remote work creates new opportunities for connection beyond place while undermining human connection within cities. Autonomous vehicles could be a connection solution or another congestion problem. Policies like New York’s congestion pricing are an attempt to manage the costs of connection by reallocating and repricing how people use urban space. Meanwhile, many American downtowns have not fully recovered from the pandemic: foot traffic remains uneven, office buildings remain underoccupied, and yet traffic congestion has returned. For many downtowns, the problem echoes that faced by the midcentury planners: too little human connection, too much of the wrong kind of congestion.

More than a century ago, Howards End warned that cities risk fragmentation when the prose and the passion of urban life get out of step with each other, when we fail to plan for connection. Planners repeatedly misunderstood the type of connections that made cities flourish and attempted to eliminate all friction, only to discover that they had eliminated the conditions that made urban life worth living. They misread congestion as a pathology of dense urban life rather than as a byproduct of the connections that fuel it. The task for twenty-first century planners is therefore not to banish congestion, but to understand it as a necessary consequence of connective value creation—and then to better manage its costs. The aspiration and end of our policy, then, should be to plan and build cities that exalt human life.

That’s the whole of the sermon: only connect!

Wishing you and yours a happy, healthy, and better connected new year!