Comments on: Philip Bess’s Pizza

By: Philip Bess

Philip Bess — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:14:47 +0000

Patrick:

Thank you for your kind words about my recent talk in DC. I need to correct one thing however: the analogy (and the drawing) of a city neighborhood being like a slice of pizza—a part similarly related to the whole—does not originate with me, but rather with Leon Krier, whose insights about traditional urbansm I am happy to share with whoever will listen.

I have been following with interest the Front Porch / PoMoCon exchanges throughout the summer, and hope to find time at some point to suggest how New Urbanists, for all we have to learn from this exchange, might also have something of value to contribute. Here I will simply say, with regard to the “what else” is needed in addition to good places for human beings to live well, that I concur with both the FPR writers and the PoMoCons that character virtue is essential to human flourishing and that it develops in the context of communal commitment and obligation. There seem however to be two broad areas of disagreement between you: one over whether and/or how much place really matters to human flourishing, and the other over whether modern society and culture can themselves promote and sustain the formation of good individual character habits. Clearly, I think that place matters; but I am more ambivalent about how well modern societies encourage character virtue. I address the latter subject at some length in the first chapter of Till We Have Built Jerusalem under the different and perhaps oppositional virtue-rubrics of “Tocqueville” and “Benedict;” and only mention this to say that the book’s subsequent arguments for traditional architecture and urbanism should be read in light of the anthropological premises articulated and the cultural questions raised in that first chapter.

By: Patrick Deneen

Patrick Deneen — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:32:59 +0000

D.W.,
Absolutely right. Bess’s normative/anthropological arguments significantly move the issues of new urbanism into a different sphere that implicates far more than building styles, driveway placement, etc. The connection to arguments of natural law implicate economic relations, broader issues of local and regional economy, more comprehensive issues of human scale, ultimately whether communities can govern themselves in significant ways (subsidiarity), e.g., keeping out things that are now virally present everywhere (from pornography to Wal Mart – not that they are all that different). It’s an encouraging direction, and one I want to encourage directly.

By: D.W. Sabin

D.W. Sabin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:56:55 +0000

There is a lot of good work in the New Urbanist and New Classicist wing of architecture and planning. Unfortunately, it is restricted to Town-making as a merely aesthetic exercise with a side order of social planning. It is , in short, shoveling shite against the tide. A properly organic town will evolve the layout prescribed by the New Urbanist only when there is a properly proportioned horizontal and vertical economy. These New Urbanist enclaves exist as tourist paradise or episodic gems within a larger oozing mess because the fundamental underlying economic and transportation paradigm is a bloody wreck. Collectively, we are historicides and motion junkies whose homes …up until recently …are a form of currency and our towns simply some kind of ad hoc essay in “lifestyle” rather than sustainable vessels of life. We carve out an ever-reducing bubble of meaning within the expanding morass and take our New Urbanist victories when we can. Packaging, in this day and age appears to be good enough.

I like that there is a social thinker, not an architect…delving deeply into New Urbanism. We also need economists..or better yet, some kind of anti-economists to start to do so. Leon Krier and Thorsten Veblen should do lunch. Yea, I know the old coonskin hatted prairie populist was a little off his rocker but Ayn Rand and her Milton Friedman brigade tried to meld architecture and social-economic thinking together and we get Corbu’s Radiant City with a side order of Greenspan’s lugubrious “Irrational exuberance”.