Quote:
Originally Posted by philopdx
My point is that new creation in one geography will eventually necessitate the destruction of nostalgia. Does New York still look like the picture below? Should it? Why or why not?
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Regarding preservation... nobody here is arguing that originally late-19th century US cities should be preserved in amber, I don't think. But what would you say to a proposal to replace the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building with new office towers that were slightly taller and engaged more dynamically with the street? Or to tear down the Statue of Liberty to build high-rise apartments that included some affordable housing? What about removing historical protection from Greenwich Village, which has become a yuppie playground anyway, and in its place installing a regular grid of mixed-income subsidized housing, including Section 8? Most urbanists, I think, would agree that these proposals represent 'progress' according to a certain narrow definition... and would also be aghast. These places are integral to New York's history and identity. Attaching value to them is not to be dismissed as 'nostalgia'; I would call it humanism.
Incidentally, skyscrapers were not the only route New York could have followed. London has also, for the past two hundred years and more, been a thriving global capital of finance and commerce -- and until very recently, its skyline had nothing much to challenge the preeminence of St Paul's. Incidentally, the boom of skyscraper construction in the City has coincided with London becoming the most unaffordable location on the planet; before the early eighties, renting a flat was relatively cheap, and plenty of still-youthful hipsters can remember when you could afford to live in Hackney or Shoreditch. Anyway, progress isn't obliged to follow a single, preordained path.
Since you bring up New York, let's not forget: it was in New York that the antiurbanist planner Robert Moses and a bunch of racist, criminal developers were allowed to decimate entire neighborhoods like the Bronx; it was when they tore down Penn Station and threatened the Village with an expressway that people like Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford responded by formulating the principles of modern-day urbanism, the principles that made possible Waterfront Park, the Streetcar and many other things we love about Portland -- drawing on, you might say, nostalgia for the places twentieth-century planning had destroyed.
I'm not an opponent of increasing density, of building more housing, or of good architecture that is sensitive but not necessarily historicist. But don't confuse progress with hubris. Old Town is one of Portland's most
urban neighborhoods because of its unique scale and cast-iron building stock, its beautiful public spaces like Skidmore Fountain, and its seedy, countercultural history as a haven for Japanese and Chinese immigrants, gays, punks and drugstore cowboys. We should recognize that it has problems, including too many parking lots and a rather perverse concentration of human misery, and be optimistic that these can be addressed and the neighborhood improved. An urbanist is someone who values the city and wants to improve it; an antiurbanist is someone who despises the city and wants to annihilate it, even under the pretext of 'development'.
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