Review: The Celebration Chronicles: Life in Disneyville 140
| The Celebration Chronicles: Life Liberty, and The Pursuit of Pr | |
| author | Andrew Ross |
| pages | 340 |
| publisher | Ballantine Books |
| rating | 10/10 |
| reviewer | Jon Katz |
| ISBN | |
| summary | An unflinching look at Walt Disney's dream of the model community |
What happens when one of the world?s richest and best-known corporations decides to build a prototype community of the future?
In "The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney?s New Town," sociologist Andrew Ross recounts his year living in an apartment in Disney?s new Florida town Celebration, witnessing the combustible mixture of corporatism, utopianism, media, technology, urban planning and politics with middle-class American life.
By and large, it was time well spent. If you care about technology, the nature of the mega-corporation or urban planning, this is an important and surprisingly touching story. Ross delineates the impossible expectations and inexorable pressures on even the best-intentioned modern corporation, as well as the genuine yearning of ordinary people to live in the kind of place Walt Disney invoked in his sometimes creepily cheery theme parks.
Disney reigned in the age of the corporate plutocrat, when moguls not only made money but could use their powerful companies to advance particular political or social interests.
Thus, Bill Paley made CBS News a great news organization mostly because he wanted to. Today, his stockholders would never let him spend money for anything as foolish and wasteful as good journalism. Nor would IBM?s shareholders look kindly on the discarded patriarchal traditions of Big Blue. It?s a rare corporate mission that lasts more than a year or two.
But the old Disney company was always something of a laboratory and playground for its founder?s fantasies. Horrified at the suburban sprawl that engulfed his beloved Southern California, Walt conceived of Disney Land in part as an antidote and a respite. Though it?s easy to jeer at the Mouse and its many tentacles, it?s dishonest not to acknowledge how many millions of people love the things Walt Disney built, and have been drawn to his creations and visions. Disney?s theme parks are about the closest thing America has these days to a universal cultural experience.
More than anything, Disney said he wanted to build a place where people were free of cars, smog and noise and were drawn into contact with one another; where a sense of community and personal contact could be restored. And perhaps most significantly, where the power of technology would be carefully harassed for the common good.
In his mind, Disney Land and Walt Disney World weren?t mere amusement parks, but prototypes of new kind of communities. He was a classic technological utopian, unwavering in his conviction that technics could solve the world?s problems. He imagined that the innovations he pioneered - from monorails to highly advanced waste disposal systems - would move beyond his parks, into the wider world. Disney gave his engineers and futurists nearly free rein, and their accomplishments captured the public imagination in a much deeper way than their real-world equivalents - epochal periods like the Space Age - ever did.
EPCOT was, in fact, to be the world?s premiere showcase for innovative new technologies. Disney had dreamed for years about this Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow; he hoped to build it for 20,000 employees who would run his giant new resort complex in central Florida.
The pedestrian, not the car, would be king. The city?s retail center would be encased in a giant bubble, surrounded by concentric zones allocated to high-density apartment housing, green belts and recreation (playgrounds, churches and schools). Surface transportation would be clean and electrical, garbage whisked away by underground systems, a sense of community encouraged by architectural design, community gathering spots and activities, and lavishly funded schools.
Disney never got to built his city of the future, of course. His vision turned out to be mistaken: the Space Age collapsed abruptly and inexplicably, and the defining technology of this era has been the computer and the Internet, not inter-galactic travel.
His idea was probably doomed, anyway, as the nature of corporations changed dramatically. Companies like Disney are no longer run by powerful decision-makers, autocrats who can muscle through tough decisions, but by amorphous analysts, lawyers, boards of directors and stockholders.
The modern mega-company has neither the mandate nor the attention span to invest in long-term innovation and creativity; the CEO who worries about anything but short-term profits will soon be looking for work. Most large corporations specialize in acquiring and divesting themselves of things other people have created.
Thus, Disney?s worst fears came true. His successors, led by his brother, junked his elaborate plans (never fully disclosed) for a modern city and turned EPCOT into a giant corporate exhibit center and international food court.
But the idea didn?t die completely. It just ended up taking a different form.
In the late 80?s, Disney CEO Michael Eisner, as big a monomaniac as Walt, revived a chunk of Disney?s idea when he gave the go ahead for the construction of Celebration, a meticulously -designed (even the "downtown" retail outlets are chosen by Disney execs) town the company is still constructing for 20,000 people in the swampland south of Walt Disney World. The stampede for houses was so intense that the company chose residents by lottery.
From its Victorian downtown to its obsessively- groomed parks, Celebration is the ultimate planned community. All its "antique"-styled homes are wired for Net access and the town boasts a progressive school, hospital and high-tech infrastructure. Some of the world?s best architects were hired to design its public and residential buildings. Yards were kept small and houses close together so that neighbors would be forced to run into one another and form connections. Elaborate regulations govern everything from paint colors to lawn care.
Celebration also quickly became a focal point of the New Urbanism movement - a philosophy that calls for a mix of old and new housing styles and seeks alternatives to the sprawl, traffic, strip malling and social isolation engulfing much of America.
It?s still way to early to know whether Celebration can work, but Ross - who?s director of American studies at New York University - encountered plenty of problems during his year-long stay. People still drove miles to discount chain stores for better prices and wider selections that the aesthetically-pleasing but non-utilitarian Celebration retail district offers. The innovative school was, from the first, bitter controversial among parents.
Since the town was never incorporated, but part of the Disney empire in Florida, town officials were appointed by the company, not elected. (Disney is not into representative democracy. According to the amazing agreement the company reached with state officials, Walt Disney World is operated more like the Vatican then a business operating under local and state laws).
The mother corporation inspired a bizarre love-hate relationship with residents, who accorded it almost mythic powers and had ridiculous expectations that it would keep their homes and their town as meticulously clean and efficient as its theme parks. Real life, of course, is vastly more complex than the Magic Kingdom and subject to a different set of economic laws.
But the modern corporation isn?t into anything for the long haul. After intense and creative early involvement, the Disney officials who worked on Celebration all moved on, and pressure grew for profits rather than experimentation.
Although Disney architects designed every detail of Celebration, the corporation took little responsibility for the work of the contractors who actually built it. There were widespread complaints about the poor quality of housing construction - leaky roofs, crumbling walls. Hit-and-run journalists delighted in poking fun at Mousetown and pounded Celebration whenever anything went wrong.
From the first, the company feared that digital connectivity might prove too empowering for its uneasy residents, so the town?s computers network - one of the most touted elements of Celebration early on - remained primitive. The town?s rural, central Florida neighbors remained suspicious and hostile.
Meanwhile, disenchanted residents found themselves in an awkward spot, says Ross. Many invested their life savings in their expensive homes and didn?t want bad publicity to endanger their investments. Ross has taken the deepest look yet at Disney?s experimental town. His writing reflects the fact that he was an outsider, a self-professed writer and visitor who never seemed to completely permeate the town?s carefully constructed veneer. But what he did get to see was plenty interesting.
"The Celebration Chronicles" is a fair-minded and intelligent look at this strange community. Ross avoids the temptation to paint Disney as callous and evil, but he also fails to give us a vivid picture of what life there is really like for the mixed (old and young, married and single, gay and straight) demographic community forming there. Celebration residents are quoted, but life there is not really captured.
Celebration is ultimately a sad, even hopeless story. Clearly, many Americans are unhappy with the noise, enforced mobility and disconnection of contemporary life, even as they rush to malls to save every penny they can. It?s depressing that an entertainment conglomerate is the only prominent entity in the America that has taken any bold step towards addressing these concerns. The federal government has largely opted out of urban planning, and most corporations are too volatile and bottom-line driven to persevere through ambitious, even radical undertakings.
Here was one of the bolder efforts in modern times to return some sense of community and beauty to a country whose home dwellers are forced to choose between declining urban environments that are either declining or ascending so quickly as to price out the middle class, and ugly and increasingly congested suburban ones. Celebration, an effort at a better middle ground, deserved more support scrutiny than either Disney or the media has provided. To that end, "The Celebration Chronicles" is compelling reading and long overdue reporting.
Reading this surprising and original book, it?s hard to avoid the feeling that the real and most insurmountable problem Celebration faces is that the iron-willed, single-minded bully who conjured it up and whose ghost hovers over every one of those carefully-manicured lawns - Walt himself - wasn?t around to push his dream to fruition.
Purchase this book at Amazon.
Sheesh (Score:1)
-awc
What's with all this Katz-bashing? (Score:2)
If you know beforehand that you won't like it, why do you read it?
nit nit nit, pick pick pick (Score:1)
*shrug*
I don't care, as long as I get to ride the Haunted Mansion.
I've been there (Score:2)
Celebration's neighbors aren't rural (Score:1)
The town?s rural, central Florida neighbors remained suspicious and hostile.
I live near Central Florida and have driven by Celebration a few times. Its not far enough away from Orlando to have rural neighbors -- Celebration is part of the city's huge suburban sprawl.
Anyone who is interested in the original plans for EPCOT's city of tomorrow should visit www.waltopia.com [waltopia.com].
Re:I've been there (Score:1)
You've been to England, then (!). Seriously though, I thought Mr Katz' article was interesting and well-balanced and I can't work out why he and his articles attract so much vitriol.
Lose the MS-ASCII!! (Score:1)
Go to Singapore... (Score:2)
You want to see a meticulously controlled society modeled and planned to create some sort of rich u/dis-topia using technology look no further (or no closer I guess).
It was Gibson, who in an Article for Wired a few years ago called it "Disneyland with the death penalty."
Re:Sheesh (Score:1)
Not "even" in the same league? How many people can say they are? Chomsky is no lightweight.
Re:Remember Sokal? (Score:2)
Thank you, Jon Katz, for a fine review (Score:2)
Well, as a certifiable Katz-basher on some other topics, fairness demands that I speak up when he turns out some good work. I felt that I got a good sense of what this book was about, and why I might care, and why it is important. The Celebration Chronicles is now going onto my "must read this someday" list.
Notice that the review did not mention "Columbine", "porn", or "geek" once. :^)
Thank you, Jon.
Re:I've been there (Score:2)
There are an amazing number of zoning and construction restrictions to get houses to fit into the 'style' that the town planners wanted. For instance, each house must have a tin roof (for that beachcomber look) and each one must have a unique white picket fence design. And they do.
There is one house, IIRC built by an architect who disagreed with the board though. There were slightly less restrictions then, and he built his house as a protest, exploiting every hole he could. They've closed the holes behind him, but his house, Darkside (each house must be named, BTW) does stand out from the others.
It is really expensive, and most of the houses there are vacation houses, owned by either a single family, or a group of families collectively. Many are available for short-term rental by other vacationers, which is how most of the people who keep homes there recoup their investment. Relatively few people actually live there full time, and the place is VERY small, and VERY dense.
I've been there several times though, which is easy, since I used to live in Tallahassee, which is not far away. Seaside's nice for a vacation, but there's too many tourists now; Panama City Beach and Destin are a bit more fun, anyway.
As for Tallahassee, where I live, you'd hate to live there, but it's a generic town, undergoing a bit of urban sprawl, and it's not all that expensive. You can always get a doublewide, you know.
However, FL is a crappy place to live, culturally. And you don't want to live anywhere south of Gainesville, other than Tampa/St. Pete, or the Keys. Orlando is solid Disney tourists and Miami is LA-East in terms of how it's laid out, how much fun it is to live there, etc.
Dark side of the New Urbanism (Score:2)
The New Urbanists are a set of architects and city planners who believe that America lost its soul when it moved to the auto-oriented suburbs, from Levittown right up to the Antelope Valley
New Urbanists believe that encouraging small, close-knit, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods with neo-traditional architecture is one of the keys toward restoring that social structure.
I'm not convinced, and if anything, Disney's experiment in Celebration shows that this ideal can have a dark side. Still, there are many other examples that are not run by The Mouse; in fact other communities often eschew the corporate influence that seems endemic here. That doesn't mean they don't (for instance) have a Starbucks -- but it may mean requiring a franchise operator to be a resident.
The school at Celebration has been one of the touchiest problems they've dealt with. Florida law didn't allow them to run a private school here, so they had to accomodate many state laws and found they couldn't do some innovative things they wanted. Say what you will about Disney; they do care about education. It's the parents, ironically, who've objected to the direction the school has taken.
This experiment still has much to teach us
Here's an article on Celebration [funandsun.com], with several photos.
Here's a visitor's overview of Celebration [lawrence.edu].
Sources for a dissertation on Celebration [sjsu.edu].
New Urbanism and Celebration [impactpress.com].
Re:Singapore (Score:2)
Agreed. I was there when I lived in Jakarta (it seems most westerners live in Jakarta only because it's half way between Singapore and Bali), and while Jakarta has its (very distinct) hellish aspects (try breathing) at least it is a living hell, not the dead, faceless, mall-on-every-block, shopping-zombie hell of Singapore...
Re:Lose the MS-ASCII!! (Score:1)
Re:Remember Sokal? (Score:1)
Disclaimer: I'm using the word "deconstructionist" incredibly loosely here. Really, I'm thinking of those sophomoric relativists to whom I have trouble attributing a coherent view; whoever they are, *you* are clearly not among them. If I had a better term, I'd use it.
It was called Social Text and it's actually a reasonably important (in that circle) lit. crit. type journal. Sokal wrote an article which involved him pulling a bunch of deconstructionist-sounding things out of his ... err ... well, out of his stinky sphincter, applying things deconstructionists say to some quantum-mechanical phenomena, making it sound as if some of the main deconstructionist contentions were being verified in particle accelerators and the like. Of course most of what he said didn't make sense, even if you speak PoMo.
The article, and a lot of the fallout, were really a lot of fun to read, especially the editors' backtracking (uh, we thought it was sophomoric and trite, but it came from a physicist trying to grok our deep stuff, so we published it).
But then I don't know if it's *that* Andrew Ross.
Celebration is NOT unique. (Score:2)
Celebration is ultimately a sad, even hopeless story. Clearly, many Americans are unhappy with the noise, enforced mobility and disconnection of contemporary life, even as they rush to malls to save every penny they can. It?s depressing that an entertainment conglomerate is the only prominent entity in the America that has taken any bold step towards addressing these concerns.
Jon, please read up on the New Urbanism, especially the work of Andres Duany and his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Celebration is just one corporate-influenced interpretation. Others have been done with less autocratic standards and more attention to variety in the architecture, from the Duany Associates community Seaside Florida (location of The Truman Show) to newer developments in Seattle, San Francisco, and Atlanta. This dialog is far from complete.
The federal government has largely opted out of urban planning, and most corporations are too volatile and bottom-line driven to persevere through ambitious, even radical undertakings.
As well they should. Urban planning is by necessity a local process; the only thing that the feds or corporations can do is direct it away from the community's interests.
Here was one of the bolder efforts in modern times to return some sense of community and beauty to a country whose home dwellers are forced to choose between declining urban environments that are either declining or ascending so quickly as to price out the middle class, and ugly and increasingly congested suburban ones. Celebration, an effort at a better middle ground, deserved more support scrutiny than either Disney or the media has provided.
Again, I share these frustrations over modern social values -- but Celebration is only one data point in this movement. To some extent, it's already become received wisdom among urban planners and some developers, who have adjusted their approaches without creating wholly unique communities.
The history of such experimental communities is replete with failures or at the very least failures with regard to (often very unrealistic) expectations.
Re:Please explain MS-ASCII ? (Score:1)
That's what they are: what makes us mad is that it makes pages created with Word (and, for all I know, FrontPage) look really stupid when viewed on a non-MS platform. It's all part of MS trying to 'extend' a standard on its own initiative, mainly for the purpose of extending their grip on PCs. It's maybe not so much the appearance as the fact that the question marks give you a view of the tip of the monopolist's iceberg ...
One point of contention with this review (Score:1)
Re:Dark side of the New Urbanism (Score:2)
Re:Lose the MS-ASCII!! (Score:1)
(What the heck, dump him anyway. His stories are boring and certainly not geeky enough.;) I didn't read through it)
Mascots (Score:1)
Of course, OSes with cute little penguins are OK.
/* this is a joke */
Re:Please explain MS-ASCII ? (Score:2)
As long as you view the file on a Windows(tm) system, all looks fine. But if you happen to be using Unix(tm) or Linux(tm), it doesn't understand the funny character code and renders it as "?".
I must agree that Jon really should fix this one. Speaking of which, anyone know what happened to his attempts to embrace Linux?
D
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It's a small nit, but someone's gotta pick it (Score:2)
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Re:What's with all this Katz-bashing? (Score:1)
On the other hand, I don't see anyone else doing what he does for the /. community. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't have this kind of commentary at all. And that's telling, isn't it?
Re:Please explain MS-ASCII ? (Score:1)
It's not just Netscape (Score:1)
Re:Please explain MS-ASCII ? (Score:1)
Re:Lose the MS-ASCII!!... [Katz is an MS-Tool] (Score:2)
Re:Please explain MS-ASCII ? (Score:1)
Re:Parents pull kids out Celebration's schools (Score:1)
I for one would say that if the educators in Celebration are smart enough to try new things, keep what works and dump what doesn't then they are doing a good service for that community.
Thanks for the info Jon.
Great things are grown, not made (Score:2)
Social Text is ridiculous; Sokal spoofed them well (Score:1)
For those interested in the whole affair, look up the paper's title in Altavista. Here's some of Sokal's commentary on the spoof [nyu.edu].
Tallahassee (Score:1)
As for Tallahassee, where I live, you'd hate to live there, but it's a generic town, undergoing a bit of urban sprawl, and it's not all that expensive. You can always get a doublewide, you know.
You're really being far too gracious to Tallahassee. It's the armpit of Florida, both socially and geographically.
-Andrew
Re:Please explain MS-ASCII ? (Score:1)
Hell, even the Token NT Machine in this room displayed the marks as ?. Nice to see Microsoft so carefully adhering to the standards it shoves into the community.
Unrealistic Expectations (Score:1)
While I'm not a huge fan of national (or multinational) corporations in general, Disney has had the rather unusual experience of being bashed for decades because they are Disney. There's very few corporations that have reached the status of cultural icon, and Disney is perhaps unique among that handful--their primary "product" is stories and experiences for children. Generations of Americans have grown up on Disney.
Because of that, it seems people have unrealistic expectations for everything they do--too high and too low, depending on how the viewer regards them. This is how a movie like Pocahontas can be fiercely attacked for being "insufferably politically correct" and "stereotyping Native Americans" at the same time. Never mind that Dances with Wolves was starkly black-and-white in its presentation of "Indians good, White people bad" in a way which Pocahontas avoided--Kevin Costner can do what Disney can't. (At least until "Waterworld," but we digress.) As for being an unrealistic portrayal of Indians, as Mel Gibson put it, "it has a talking tree in it, for God's sake."
With Celebration, I think people have had similar sets of unrealistic expectations. If the town had been set up by another major company with comparable resources--AT&T, say--it probably wouldn't have been subject to the same firestorm of criticism, and on the flip side, it probably wouldn't have attracted people expecting it to be nearly utopian. Pocahontas is just a movie, and Celebration is just a planned development.
Personally, I wouldn't mind living in Celebration's apartments. Sure, you'd probably have to buy some things from stores along U.S. 192, a couple miles away. So what? Unless you're working in its modest office park (or in retail), you're commuting to work anyway. And I like the idea of living near a pretty central park area within walking distance of a grocery shop, bakery, bookstore, coffee shop, movie theatre and four restaurants.
It's not Utopia, and it's not something that couldn't be duplicated elsewhere, and maybe duplicated better. But despite that, and despite the inevitable problems with a community like it (it's not the first "New Urban" town but it may be the first on its scale, and certainly the first with the level of media attention it gets), Celebration does work, and if it inspires other places to try similar development, I think it'll only be for the better.
Re:Lose the MS-ASCII!! (Score:1)
Agreed... (Score:1)
>>geographically.
Any town that considers a (pre)school like half-ass U to be a university....
Hell, I've thought for quite a while that Florida should cede everything north of Gainesville to georgia and alabama and be done with the panhandlers.
OTOH, the panhandle probably DOES provide a buffer zone that keeps the georgians and alabamans from penetrating too deep into civilized Florida.
I live in Orlando, and it has the POTENTIAL to grow into a decent, large city, ala San Fran or Boston. The only problem, is that while other large cities in the US, Orlando's growth has been explosive only within the last few decades. Orlando, therefore, has yet to build the mass-transit infrastructure as New York or Boston have, or the telecommunication infrastructure San Francisco can brag about.
Before Disney came to Orlando, it was just another dumpwater redneck town like any other (excepting Orlando and Gainesville) inland Florida town. If for nothing else, we should be thankful for Disney's civilizing influence.
Question marks still!? (Score:1)
Moronized HTML? (Score:1)
Go figure.
Matt
Thoughts on the New Urbanism (Score:2)
At first, the idea seems cool. But remember this: For some reason, people have chosen overwhelmingly to live in suburbs, not in cities. Why? I don't know the full story, but I can give you a few useful guesses.
First, people want to feel they have some land to call their own.
Second, people want to feel safe, and that means living with people similar to themselves. For an idea of the strength of this desire, I refer you to Claritas, the "You are where you live" market research folks.
Third, people like their cars and don't want to take public transportation because of its tremendous inflexibility.
The first move in producing the New Urbanism is to block off sprawl by making development illegal outside of a certain ring. Then, they change zoning to allow for more development within the ring. The result is more apartments and fewer single family homes; exactly what people hate. The secondary result is that land becomes much more expensive inside the ring. As the population increases, more and more people find themselves priced out of single family homes, and even apartments become dear. The final result is far more traffic, and therefore much more traffic congestion - exactly what the New Urbanism claims to want to avoid. Actually, to them, this is an excellent result because it forces you to shop at local stores instead of driving to the supermarket, and to use public transport instead of driving your car. An interesting reference for this is Randal O'Toole's article in Reason magazine.
If that's what you want, this is fine. But I don't think it's what the bulk of the public wants. At present, I believe the public doesn't fully understand the implications of the New Urbanism, and it certainly has been well promoted.
Of course Celebration and Seaside are both "from the ground up" developments, and should be able to overcome the problems associated with taking a whole city and switching it into a new mode. Before thinking they are realistic prototype communities, take a look at home prices there. Ouch. Both communities have average home prices in excess of $ 400,000. This is a lot for South Florida; I was there a couple of years ago, and you could get a nice waterfront home (on the intercoastal, not the ocean front) for $ 279,000, and a typical boring suburban home sold for $ 150k. I'm sure these communities will make plenty of money for the developers, but I'm not convinced that they are sound investments, nor that they are any kind of prototype that will help us solve our nagging housing affordability problem. In fact, we have seen that the New Urbanism is going to make housing more expensive overall; there's no way to avoid that and still capture the supposed benefits.
This is not to say that our current world is perfect, or that we shouldn't continue to try and improve it. But this kind of top-down vision strikes me as dangerous. The works of Christopher Alexander are an interesting ancestor of the New Urbanism which adds the inherent desire for flexibility and freedom to the mix. I think his own top-down ideas are just about as impossible as the New Urbanism, but I really like his bottom-up, incrementalist thinking. By all means check out 'A Pattern Language' and 'The Timeless Way of Building'.
D
PS Discouragingly enough, Disney has used lousy contractors before, and with similarly dismal results. They had a joint venture with a contractor to develop and sell some land. Customers, relying on the solid gold character of the Disney name, flocked to the venture. The contractor couldn't build homes fast enough, and wound up cutting corners. So when Hurricane Andrew came, the homes self-destructed. Oops. (This information is from Carl Hiiassen's book 'Team Rodent').
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view from the outside looking in (Score:2)
Re:I've been there (Score:1)
I then realized that you probably went to FSU and have an excuse for your ignorance.
Love it or leave you little troll
Re:Celebration is NOT unique...Pullman (Score:1)
The company, company housing, company stores, company schools and company churches, etc. were the only resources allowed in the town. During the 1880's, repeated wage cuts and rents and prices in the town that kept steady or rose, led to a strike in 1894.
http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/disasters/p
Related URLs (Score:2)
Anyway, here's Randal O'Toole's article I wanted to reference:
http://www.reason.com/9901/fe.ro.densethinkers.
You can visit Claritas, home of "You are where you live" at:
http://www.claritas.com/
or look up your zip code at
http://yawyl.claritas.com/
D
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Re:Great things are grown, not made (Score:1)
There is alot of discussion on this article and there are an awful lot of people all over discussing this topic, but the conversation most often begins and ends with 'planning' meaning 'how do we control this or that'
Strong, healthy, sustainable systems require the planning of a gardner more than an engineer. This applies with computer systems as well (you mention the Net as a perfect example) The mantra of simplicity and extensibility that is (not often enough) heard in computer systems design is very close to designing components that work and play well with others and can grow organically.
Disasterville USA (Score:1)
of "Shockwave Rider" or is it just me?
Anything so far removed from reality that actually needs to create something so artificial as Disneyville practicaly defines a civilisation that is doomed. Good luck USA, you'll need it.
Agreed (Score:1)
Still ready to flame the man at a moments notice, tho', if he throws out any more of that opportunistic butt-licking shite I've seen before!
: )
Re:Please explain MS-ASCII ? (Score:1)
Evidently, Microsoft can't even get compliency with it's own products and specifications!
Any ideas why this would be happening when it's supposed to work with Winblows?
Good article. Found a funny typo (Score:1)
"And perhaps most significantly, where the power of technology would be carefully harassed for the common good. "
Should probobly have read,
"And perhaps most significantly, where the power of technology would be carefully harnassed for the common good. "
Bah, humbug! (Score:3)
That said, Celebration et al aren't exactly fixing the problem. In fact, they're contributing to it.
I'm one of those urban-by-choice folks who feels incredibly strongly about the issue, but the problem I have with both the standard suburbs and "planned communities" like Celebration is they are carefully orchestrated to keep so-called "undesirables" out.
Now, if someone's breaking the law or creating a huge nuisance, I don't want to live with that either, and I'm going to call in the local law enforcement to deal with the issue. But speaking from personal experience, I've had very little in the way of problems since I moved to the city I now live in, in a supposedly "bad" neighborhood. I had much more trouble in the suburb I grew up in and in the college towns I went to school in.
The USA has a long history of thinking that moving someplace else will solve all your problems. Hell, it's how this country was founded.
The more intelligent response seems to me to be, wherever you live, to get to know your neighbors, set up some kind of Neighborhood Watch program, and realize that not everyone on your street is going to be the same color or religion or anything else as you. And just learn to deal with it! *sigh*
Old news. (Score:1)
Where Katz got the idea to write about it doesn't concern me. The idea that people think its a "good idea" to let a company control what theyre able to buy, hear, or listen to is what really scares me. Makes me wonder how many years before Disneyland succeeds from the Union and declares itself an independant country. Theyre halfway there -- They already have their own police force and judicial system.
Bowie J. Poag
Re:nit nit nit, pick pick pick (Score:1)
In my oh-so humble opinion as a math (and previously computer science) major who has no editorial training past the requisite college classes, good content without form is as bad as good form without content. As someone intimately familiar with the ways different people think, I don't expect everyone to be precise grammaticians and spellers, but computers and friends can go a long way to shoring up our own weaknesses
I know a lot of people harp on this, but damnit he's a professional writer; why is his writing worse than mine?!?! I don't expect CmdrTaco to get his spelling and grammar right (since until recently this wasn't his job, and by now it's part of his style
As for what the words mean , I submit that it's a review of a somewhat interesting-sounding book. It sounds like I'd like the book, and the review seemed pretty good, giving me enough background on the book and information from the book that now I'd like to read it. What's more, I bet that it's a book that, if I had been aware of it previously and known nothing more than the subject matter, I'd still liked to have read it, so it's actually not an Op-Ed piece masquerading as a review (as some have perhaps argued).
Re:Thoughts on the New Urbanism (Score:2)
There seem to be two kinds of cities, the kind that people WANT to live in, (Manhatten, Boston/Cambridge Ma, Seattle, and others that don't come to mind) these cities tend to be too expensive for the average person to live in, with the suburbs of these cities being much more affordable.
The other type are run-down cities that nobody wants to live in. People choose the burbs in this case as well.
The other factors are bigger houses, lower taxes, lower auto insurance, a place to park, a yard/garden, quiet (no constant traffic/subway noises), a perceived lower crime rate. etc.
Not just a matter of race (Score:2)
It isn't only racial minorities that people were trying to move away from, it was also religious minorities. For a while, being Jewish or even Catholic in a WASP neighborhood was every bit as "bad" as being black.
And even more than that, flight to the suburbs is an attempt to get away from that which is "different" from you, in whatever way you find that "difference" disturbing. Maybe you've got no problem living next door to black people, but gay couples freak you out. Etc. *shrug*
Celebration and such may fix the dependence on cars and similar environmental factors, but otherwise it's just adding to the problem. Then again, this country was founded on people who thought moving away from neighbors they didn't like would fix everything.
Urban planning has to be interactive, not passive. (Score:1)
There's something that can be said for a community of like-minded people getting together and leaving management to a like-minded group of managers, but a really cool place to live has to be one that you get involved in. If a developer is putting up a building or mall you don't like, go to the DCLU meeting and tell them what needs to be changed! Attend those community meetings. If you're too busy to be bothered, you probably deserve what you get.
Jeremy
Shallow, one-dimensional thinking. (Score:2)
High price a sign of success (Score:1)
Regarding the fact that the prices of Celebration homes are higher than in the surrounding areas: This strikes me as a sign of how spot-on the New Urbanism is. After all, if the idea of living this way didn't appeal to these people, they wouldn't be paying more for the priviledge, right? The appeal of living this way is also apparent in the rapidly rising housing prices in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc...if a large number of people with money didn't like city living, they wouldn't be paying a premium to live there.
You speak of New Urbanism as a "top-down" approach to planning, but neglect to note that the rush to suburbia was also a "top-down" decision. In the late '40s, with a huge influx of returning war veterans and fears of a return to the depression, the need to bulk up demand for goods was quite apparent. Thus, the zoning laws were created that made mixed-use residential impossible to make. Thus was created the notion of single-use areas; residential here, commercial there, industrial over there, with people driving like crazy between them. This was a new thing then (as was the notion of everyone having a little slice of green, instead of sharing it), and it was very much dictated from above.
The past 50 years have shown us how vastly inefficient this way of thinking is, and that inefficiency is manifested in longer commute times, loss of suburban air quality, and severely strained water/electirical/sewage systems, not to mention social effects. I think the New Urbanism, or some variant of that, is a welcome change from the current state of affairs.
On a personal note, i grew up in the affluent suburbs of San Francisco (Orinda, just over the Berkeley Hills), and i couldn't wait to get out, for many of these reasons. When you can't drive (like when you're a kid), suburbs are basically home-based prisons. Just this weekend i celebrated living 10 years in San Francisco, a city i love to my core, "My Cool, Grey City of Love" [creative.net] (George Sterling)
mahlen
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
--Samuel Butler
Re:I've been there (Score:2)
However, I did not go to FSU. I'm _from_ Tallahassee (arguably a worse thing). If I had stayed in Florida I'd've gone to UF. But instead I escaped and went to school up in Massachusetts.
Guess this means the Gates' manor... (Score:1)
Chuck
Disney as a sovereign nation (Score:1)
If they were smart they'd open casinos and sell duty-free tobacco and cigarettes.
Re:Thoughts on the New Urbanism (Score:1)
>But remember this: For some reason,
>people have chosen overwhelmingly to live in suburbs, not in cities.
>Why? I don't know the full story, but I can give you a few useful
>guesses.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that the creation of the suburbs as they
exist now was a completely 'market-driven' process. In fact, it was not. After World War II, many
subsidies were put in place that made suburban homebuying attractive. First, the construction of the
interstate highway system. Second, the government gave away construction patents that made new home construction significantly cheaper.
Re:Agreed... (Score:2)
Don't be silly. Florida doesn't have a culture at all. My part of the state, the panhandle, has been a backward, rural area practically forever, and we likes it like that. We wouldn't know culture if it bit us on the ass. When Tallahassee was trying to find a motto for a tourist campaign, my favorite suggestion was "Tallahassee: Exits 28, 29, 30 and 31"
When I tell people I'm from Florida, they immediately ask about Orlando or Miami. I've begun to tell people I'm from South Georgia, since it's far more accurate.
However, everything south of Gainesville is still new, and is only habitable due to the miracles of Air Conditioning, Malaria Control and the US Army Corps of Engineers. (Although that last one is turning out to be a major fsck up) The penninsula has not had the TIME to develop any kind of culture with which it can show up the panhandle.
Miami (which effectively includes everything up into West Palm) had a very small culture for a while, and then it promptly died. What's left is a huge urban sprawl that is *very* similar to Los Angeles. I don't think that anyone who's really dealt with Miami much likes it. I can't stand the place.
Tampa/St. Pete are okay, but not amazing. The Cape area, on the opposite side of the penninsula is even deader. St. Augustine (which is very old) and Daytona are about as far south as I'd like to go on the Atlantic coast.
Orlando however, is just awful. Boston and San Francisco have hundreds of years behind them. They have histories, and until this century people from all classes actually lived there and raised families there, and their kids grew up and usually stayed. Orlando would be nothing more than orange groves and probably landfills if Uncle Walt hadn't shown up. While they've brought the wealth and population increase associated with civilization, all that you've got to show for it is a jillion tourists and a town that's more or less faceless because who's going to develop anything nice in Orlando anyway? No one'll care, and no one'll ever be interested in seeing it. The only public works project that's important to Orlando is, I'd guess, the airport. It's the only damn visible thing to the hordes of people that come through the place.
Boston, NYC, SF, etc. became neat cities for the sakes of the people who lived there. It was just incidental that it attracted other people. Their wealth was acquired through various industries and persuits that didn't depend on tourism. Tourists can be appeased with a Potemkin village because they don't have time to dig deep. And that'll never be satisfying for real.
Re:Thoughts on the New Urbanism (Score:1)
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that the creation of the suburbs as they exist now was a completely 'market-driven' process. In fact, it was not. After World War II, many subsidies were put in place that made suburban homebuying attractive. First, the construction of the interstate highway system. Second, the government gave away construction patents that made new home construction significantly cheaper. And finally, banks redlined certain in-city neighborhoods, making them difficult to maintain and improve, while greenlining suburban development, making it easier and cheaper to buy there.
So we do not know that people would naturally have flocked to suburban living, because everything was skewed by these policies. We can debate what policies we ought to put in place now, but it is a mistake to think that because people live in the suburbs now, that is the 'natural' state of affairs.
Re:OT: WILL YOU PLEASE "DE-MORINISE" YOU HTML????? (Score:1)
Re:High price a sign of success (Score:1)
Dumbass Quotes Spoil Signal/Noise. (Score:1)
As long as you use the fucking ?smart quotes?, a good fraction of the comments will be about what a standards-violating IDIOT you are, not about the article?s contents.
You?re an idiot.
Rob?s an idiot for not running the demoronizer on your so-called HTML.
I?m a bigger idiot for spamming the comments without reading the article.
But if you do something annoying -- like write an article on a wiffleball bat and tap someone on the head with it -- expect the reader to react to the style not the content.
Did I say you?re an idiot?
Don
Re:High price a sign of success (Score:2)
I don't see a great suburban conspiracy here. I don't see government, zoning authorities and so on trying to rope people in and imprison them in suburban homes. I see several factors that made suburbia popular:
- Virtually everyone would like to own their own home.
- Most people would like a little outdoor space to call their own.
- City life was crowded, nasty, brutish and short. Because people had to be crammed tightly together, disease spread more easily than it did now.
- With people of different social classes living close at hand, crime became a significant problem.
These factors were all mentioned in a book that vigourously advocated the New Urbanist vision. Zoning laws came about because the residents of these places wanted to protect them from becoming like the city.
Now, I understand your dislike for suburbs - as you point out, they are virtual jails for people without cars. But I think that the suburbs cannot be successfully reformed until the reasons for their success are understood. I'd like to see planners take a more balanced view, considering what's good about suburbia as well as reacting to what they find distasteful.
What the high prices in New Urbanist communities indicate are that many of the elites of our country like them. Certainly in the case of Celebration, the Mouse's cachet helped as well. This does not mean the ideas would work on a citywide scale, where people with $ 10,000 incomes have to be accomodated as well as those with $100,000 incomes. People with the high incomes feel authentic fear of those with low incomes. If you visit a low-income slum (as I have), you'll see that there are reasons for this prejudice.
Incidentally, my own personal taste is for the Hollywood Hills or Malibu, neither of which are traditional suburbs. They are also as expensive to live in as Celebration. If not more so.
D
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You can build an Interstate ... (Score:2)
People still picked suburbia out of their own free will.
I don't know anything about the redlining, though. What was the banks' reason for it?
D
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Thanks! (Score:1)
Re:You can build an Interstate ... (Score:1)
I'm not talking about force, I'm talking about market-distorting practices that made suburban homebuying much more attractive that it would be in a purely 'market-driven' society. The government made suburban houses cheaper, and built the highways that made it convenient to live there and work where you pleased. The banks made it easier to buy land and homes there, and made it hard to improve the existing cities. Unless money is no object, the rational homebuyer is naturally going to find suburbs more attractive than the city, at least economically. And as others have pointed out, the postwar GI bill gave many families the opportunity to buy a house after the war than before, provided, of course, that it was sufficiently inexpensive.
Why redline? Well, it was made illegal in the mid sixties by Federal Civil Rights legislation (that's that all the 'Equal Housing Lender' stuff you read about in real estate ads comes from). I'm sure you can figure it out from there.
Re:Great things are grown, not made (Score:2)
What he says is that, if the members of a community collectively agree on certain "patterns", the community can then be built flexibly and spontaneously using them. The difference between this and zoning laws is that the patterns are extremely flexible. No two buildings constructed through the patterns are alike, because the patterns and the way they interact change depending on the building's use and the site on which it exists.
His scheme would absolutely prohibit any kind of development where buildings were designed as interchangeable units.
I think he's right in most of what he says, but I also believe his ideas to be totally incompatible with the way we build now.
D
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John Brunners ShockWave Rider (Score:1)
Decades before Gobbson, Sterling, And the other "cyberpunks" there was John Brunner with a clearer vision in the 60's of things than most folks living in the 90's have.
Stand On Zanzibar, ShockWaveRider, The Sheep Also Look UP.....Rather than plod thru another marketing spin piece by Jon Spencer Katz go read some real stuff.
Re:view from the outside looking in (Score:1)
Re:It's a small nit, but someone's gotta pick it (Score:1)
Except, as useful as the Demoronizer is, the question marks have nothing to do with any Microsoft product. Instead, they come from the king of incompatibility, a Macintosh.
Like I'm one to complain, of the ten computers I use on a regular basis, three are Macs, four are WinNTServ (work), one is W2KAdvServ (with the unix goodies,) one is W95a (my stable windows system,) and one is Debian 2.1. Plus the Palm V, and the Solaris I use once in a while.
Re:I've been there (Score:1)
The problems the school is having are legendary.
Then there's Orlando itself. All the big-city hassles without the big-city culture. It's worth noting that most of the Disney employees I talked with candidly, live NORTH of Orlando, where property values are a bit more in line : South of Orlando, you can get a house cheaply, but not in an area that has the good school district (Dr. Phillips, I think was the name). So if you earned less than say, $100k, you better go shopping for a house in the North side of Orlando, where you have decent schools in areas where the property values are not so astronomical. But then you must contend with one of the worst engineered highway systems known to man. Orlando has one main highway going North-South, I-4, and no public transportation to speak of. So, if you live on the North side, and work on the South side, you have this absolue HELL of a commute.
Plus the humidity, hurricanes, lighting, Very Large Bugs, alligators, oppressive Toll road system, air conditioning cranked down to 33 degrees in most buildings. I decided to stay in the midwest. (later, I moved to California).
But, Disney, the Man, remains one of my idols.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
black pots, kettles, and the Florida peninsula (Score:1)
I find it ironic that the heaviest criticism of Tallahassee and the panhandle (which can be very different things or one and the same, depending on how you look at it/them) came from someone out of Orlando
In my book, even ass-backwards culture outranks no culture at all -- for me, Tallahassee was pretty okay. In fact, I'd say Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Tampa/St. Pete are some of the best places to live in Florida (but not necessarily in that order), although for the net-savvy crowd that Slashdot is (mostly), the overall level of technical sophistication in Florida is a bit on the low side. Obviously, there are exceptions to this
Re:Federal Government (Score:1)
aaaak!
This is why, when I was moving to California, I went up to the pilot's cabin and told him: "faster man! faster! I MUST escape!"
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
black pots, kettles, and the Florida peninsula (Score:1)
I find it ironic that the heaviest criticism of Tallahassee and the panhandle (which can be very different things or one and the same, depending on how you look at it/them) came from someone out of Orlando
In my book, even ass-backwards culture outranks no culture at all -- for me, Tallahassee was pretty okay. In fact, I'd say Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Tampa/St. Pete are some of the best places to live in Florida (but not necessarily in that order), although for the net-savvy crowd that Slashdot is (mostly), the overall level of technical sophistication in Florida is a bit on the low side. Obviously, there are exceptions to this
Re:Parents pull kids out Celebration's schools (Score:1)
The worst thing that happens to most college grads is they end up in some smarmy sales job.
Non college grads live in constant fear of working at McDonalds for the rest of their lives.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
Re:It's a small nit, but someone's gotta pick it (Score:2)
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Planned communities are eerie (Score:1)
Examples in cinema and television being the apartments and luxurious paradise offered in The Devil's Advocate. The factory-oriented town in the Simpsons run by a evil world-dominating mougul. The covenant bound neigborhood in the X-files with creatures in your lawn.
Utopia is a very frightening thing. For, with peace, and serenity, comes loss of control, and bondage. Independance and utopia are two different things that never go together.
A somewhat appalling example of this would be Aldous Huxley's "A brave new world". The complete brain-washing, and caste system, the organization, segmentation, and structurization of a chaotic entity are what make it seem so off.
A city or a town is a thing that cannot be created. It has to evolve, it is a mixture of old, new, dirty, clean, rich, poor, colorful, bland, ugly, pretty. It is an eclectic mixture of everything that urban and human life has come to represent.
With streets criscrossing in haphazard manners, and strange people. Collages of colorful billboards, and signs, franchises, chains, and stores. Capitolisim breathing.
I suppose perhaps that's what strikes the wrong note in most people when it comes to planned communites. The subconcious equation of control over citizens with socialisim or similar forms of government.
I've lived in communities that are segmented, structured, laid down by hand, and controlled by a governing body. They're called military bases. They are cold, silent, un-giving, and gray repetitive landscapes of industry, unity, and control.
In stark contrast is the human element, vibrant, breathing, families, picnics. Picnics on a barren airstrip near a seawall, with jets screaming in off the inland sea onto the airstrip. A mother and two daughters working their gardens at the foot of a massive fuel farm. Garden plots supplied by the base of course.
I'd rather live, where freedom can be seen every day. Where the people across the street build their flower-bed into what appears to be a fortress. Where a guy paints his house in vibrant victorian candy hues of pink and blue. Where you don't see 2.3 children, two minivans in every garage, and soccer practice with shake & bakes for dinner.
Suburbia was the late 80's and early 90's vision of peace, unity, serentiy, and freedoms. Suburbia, has evoloved into another utopia. Governed by silent icy cold covenants, where dogs bark in the twilight hours, echoing across meticulously groomed lawns, and gray sided houses.
Unity, planned community, utopia, and things like celebration freak me out. I hope I captured that feeling I can't quite place my finger on in this writing.
Re:The reason people moved to the suburbs... (Score:2)
At any rate, I think the real reason to move to the suburbs was to get away from the perceived dangers of the inner city. Imagine if there were no blacks, but there were white gangs who were running around making life hazardous. Would people not move out under those circumstances as well?
Now, I will admit there was some racism in that suburbs tried to prevent blacks from moving in. This was due to fear. If there had been white gang members terrorizing the cities, I am convinced that the same thing would have happened. Suburbanites would have tried to pass laws preventing gang members from moving in.
I would call that "justified fear" as much as racism.
D
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Justified fear? (Score:2)
I don't think so. Try unjustified fear.
And yes, some of it is based in racism. Like my mother asking me if there were any white people in my neighborhood. Um, the only marauding gang of young men, black in this case, that I've encountered were the ones who pushed my car out of a snowdrift during the godawful blizzard we had in March.
Some of it is just based in irrational fear of "the city." There is no reason for my boyfriend's mother to believe there is a high likelihood of someone in a large group of people getting mugged in a city park on a Saturday afternoon, but well, it's "the city." And that kind of BS really pisses me off.
People scare too easily, what can I say?
Zippy comic grew up in planned community (Score:1)
Re:It's a small nit, but someone's gotta pick it (Score:1)
Re:You can build an Interstate ... (Score:2)
Well, no.
You're not going to convince me that people didn't stay in the cities because they could get houses loads cheaper in the suburbs. If that was all it was, homes in the cities would shrink in value until they were competitive. I've found a remarkable equivalent to this in my explorations of Los Angeles - as prices in the Hollywood Hills skyrocketed, prices in the nearby but not as nice neighborhoods did likewise, to the extent that an equivalent house in both areas costs about the same now!
No, prices adjust themselves quite nicely. The historical problem with the city is fear - and if you think that's entirely unjustified, talk to some of the property owners who lost millions in the 1965 and 1992 riots in South Central.
If you want to make the cities popular again, eliminate the fear. This process, too, is going on quite successfully in Los Angeles - in Silver Lake, the arty folks started coming in, and the yuppies followed. So now Silver Lake is pleasant and affluent, while it was all but a slum 5-10 years ago. Venice, near the ocean but with a fearsome reputation for crime problems, went through the exact same process in the early 90s. Crime is down, professionals are in, the area is safe again.
People aren't as scared of the city as they used to be. That's why cities are undergoing a revival now. But that doesn't mean there weren't good reasons to leave at the time suburban expansion started.
D
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Re:black pots, kettles, and the Florida peninsula (Score:2)
Tallahassee and the panhandle definately have a certain presence. They've been around long enough to have acquired a personality, and it's not a half bad one. I had thought that I was pointing this out in my earlier post, but perhaps it did not come through as clearly as I had intended. But the personality of the area is not quite the same as culture, which I was interpreting as something more along the lines of 'high culture.'
However, Tally broke some round number in the 1990 census. This has caused a whole bunch of chain stores to move into town. They're really turning the place into the same generic Anytown USA hellhole that I'd like to avoid.
Personally, I'll always rate north Florida above south Florida. The only good places south of Gainesville would be Tampa/St. Pete and the Keys. Key West has been suffering in recent years, but since hardly anyone outside of the state is aware that they're a whole chain of islands, the others are still pretty cool, or were the last time I was there. Kinda wish that they hadn't put in the highway - now you have to go to the Dry Tortugas to get away from it all.
Orlando and the West Palm/Miami sprawl though.... man, I wouldn't mind melting some icecaps to get rid of them. Just blocks and blocks and blocks of strip malls and identical, poorly built houses. Huge surface roads and even bigger highways. It's a nightmare, IMHO. What gall an Orlando poster has to criticize anyone on culture!
I think that a couple of the reasons that Florida is having so much trouble attracting tech companies are these: First, the tourist market overshadows everything else, with the possible exception of farming. (which we are consistently losing to California, because they tend to have slightly better weather)
Second, there is a crappy school system. UF is good, and FSU and UM probably come in second, but everything else is awful. And there are no private universities to speak of, partially because everything's still very new, and partially because we have a lot of AARP members that fsck up our taxes, etc. because they have no interest in it: they're retirees from out of state.
You can't deny that the Valley would have been as successful if not for the good technical schools out there. In Boston we've got Harvard (for managers) and MIT (for geeks) and a zillion other schools, coming out of the woodwork. This situation is not likely to change anytime soon, so a lot of technical people from Florida tend to leave. Lord knows I never thought I'd live in Massachusetts, of all places! (But I'm moving, so instead of living with a bunch of Yankees in MA, I'll be living with a bunch of tree-huggers in WA ;)
Re:Social Text is ridiculous; Sokal spoofed them w (Score:1)
And that, my friend, is a lesson the editors of Social Text should have learned in school.
Re:Sheesh (Score:1)
Re:Parents pull kids out Celebration's schools (Score:1)
Just go ahead and trust your kids' education to what modern public schools say is sufficient. My daughter will need people who can be easily manipulated (by playing to their inflated need for ego stroking, developed through self esteem training) to be flunkies and gofers.
Yesterday's schools may have turned out people who could operate a lathe. Today's students need training in order to work at the Gap. This is not progress.
Re:Governments and Markets (Score:1)
In other words, those very subsidies that encouraged suburbia were put in place not only so that certain persons or groups could make lots of money, but also because a lot of people wanted them. Certain other people figured out to give that to them, hence greatly profiting themselves financially, politically, or both. For better or worse, that's how it works in the U.S.
Re:You can build an Interstate ... (Score:1)
Of course money is not the only thing, but it is something people take into account. The conditions were in place so that, after World War II, given two objectively equivalent homes, the one in the suburbs would be cheaper than the one in the city. And your discussion of fear does not explain why the suburbs were so popular in the early 1950s, when the threat of crime was much lower.
Your argument might make more sense if you could come up with a reason why people did not create modern suburbs when they had the chance before World War II (say, in the 1920's, to eliminate the obvious anomaly of the Great depression). The heyday of the 'city as cesspool' was at the turn of the century, yet America did not see largescale exodus from the cities then, even though cities were much more dangerous (due to the threat of disease) than they ever were in the 50s and 60s.
In any event, you don't have the empirical evidence you started out with: the fact that suburbs were wildly popular in the postwar period does not, a priori indicate that they are what people wanted. You must take outside factors into account. You can argue that, regardless of these factors, people like the suburbs anyway, which is what you're doing, and which is fine. But you can't argue that their existence in and of itself is sufficient to show how Americans want to live.
Re:Governments and Markets (Score:1)
Yeah, this is true, if you think that GM, Ford, and Chrysler are 'consumers' and 'the body politic' (why do you think the interstate highway system was built?). In any event, this is pretty much irrelevant to the original comment, which compared attempts at New Urbanism to the big, arrogant hand of the elite, while the postwar rise of the suburbs was supposed to be the will of the people. By your thinking, if the powers-that-be decide to implement New Urbanism ideas, then that must be the will of the people, too.
I think you're sort of right, and what I'm saying is it doesn't matter. Both postwar and current urban planning (or lack thereof) are heavily influenced by government. It doesn't help to romanticize one as 'natural' and denigrate the other as a manmade abomination, no matter which you think is which.
Re:I've been there & Live in FL (Score:1)
Re:Old news. (Score:1)
Take your paranoia outside, or at least do your homework
ryan
Katz Rulez (Score:1)
More than that, he's an intriguing writer, and always covers interesting topics. God knows he can write a movie review more coherently than Taco; most of the "writing" here wouldn't pass bar in a freshman English class. None of you -- particularly the posters -- can write worth a shit. Don't try and kid yourself into thinking otherwise.
You want to criticize someone because "it's fun?" Criticize your own stupid ass. Better yet, wait until you get past 11th grade before you try to learn how to critique.
Re:Justified fear? (Score:2)
I have a friend who ran a prosperous real estate management business - he had a lot of properties in South Central before the 1965 riots. Well, he doesn't have them anymore, and that pushed him straight down the financial ladder, from a gorgeous house overlooking the city lights to a horrible boring condo in Chatsworth.
A certain amount of paranoia is, sad to say, justified. I can understand your point of view, because your town isn't my town, but in many places fear of the urban world is perfectly justified.
D
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Re:You can build an Interstate ... (Score:2)
Right now, do you think the general public would rather live in single-family houses or the massive multi-family housing blocks required by policies such as the New Urbanism?
Do we want to make it so that the preferred way of life for most people - the single family residence - becomes so expensive virtually nobody can afford one?
I think the answer is clear. And I think the increased housing costs that are part and parcel of the new urbanist design are not going to make it any friends.
I'm not saying suburbia is perfect. Of course it isn't! I am saying that any new policy should accomodate, in some way or another, the very human desire for personally owned single-family homes.
D
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Re:Justified fear? (Score:2)
*shrug* We had riots in the 1960s here, too.
Probably not on the same sort of scale, but riots nonetheless. And if the area was reduced to a pile of absolute rubble, that's one thing -- I don't want to live in a pile of rubble either.
But the stupid thing I've noticed around here is this: If a plaza is slightly rundown looking and its main cilentele are senior citizens and white, everyone thinks "Oh, how sad," but they don't feel THREATENED by it. If the same slightly rundown plaza has a young minority clientele, people feel threatened and scared. And for gods' sake, everyone needs to do laundry.
There are certain neighborhoods that even I try to avoid, like the one where a firecracker was set off extremely close to my car eariler this summer.
What I am taking issue with is the assumption that the entire city is like that, and the assumption that "city" + "black families" = "crime-ridden ghetto." Yes, we've had a murder in my neighborhood. ONE murder in the two years I've lived there, and as my landlord told me when I moved in "If you don't deal drugs or live with someone who does, you won't have problems." We also had murders in the suburbs when I lived there. *shrug*
But a former co-worker of mine, who moved to the suburbs because he found the city threatening, had his car broken into, his roommate's car broken into, and his car stolen in the space of three months. And he was paying about double the rent I pay for the dubious privilege of living in a suburb that wasn't even safer than where I live.