In Savannah’s Historic District, an array of colorful buildings, iron balconies, and leafy squares weaves through brick and cobblestone streets shaded by live oaks. You can feel the individual craftsmanship and care of a community while immersed in the atmosphere of Jones Street or Chippewa Square. But only a few hours northwest, outside Atlanta, you’ll instead find endless six-lane highways, identical beige homes or shopping centers, and mass-produced gray concrete buildings to accompany the gray concrete roads. There is little distinctiveness or human touch from those who live there, and these buildings could be placed in any of the countless similar cities across the country.
What explains this contrast? We traded our historical devotion to beauty and civic care for mass production and economic value. In a hypercompetitive market, developers survive by meeting the building codes at the lowest possible cost. And when profit and utility are the primary incentives, there’s little room for the artistic detail found in past American architecture and city planning. Many leaders and citizens alike don’t see the importance of the extra time and cost required to craft aesthetic beauty and believe it to be an afterthought of mere preference or taste.
Yet this commercially driven trend forgets the true reason for community beauty: It’s not a mere superficial preference but an inspiration for those who call a place home. In the words of Winston Churchill, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
The impact of aesthetics can be hard to articulate but nonetheless impossible to ignore. Take a home for example: Single family households, students in dormitories, and even soldiers in their barracks rooms, all spend their time and money to decorate their surroundings. That desire shows itself in many forms: family pictures, banners, flags, plants, lights, awards, colors, or specifically designed furniture–each expresses a wish to shape one’s home a certain way.
There is something that we can’t necessarily describe or articulate, which calls us to live in a home with some form of aesthetic style and beauty. This feeling nurtures our soul, puts us at peace, and makes us feel as if we belong. In this way a city is simply an extension of the home. When it contains craftsmanship, cleanliness, and a human touch of beauty, it inspires citizens who feel at peace and conveys that they belong in the place they live. Most importantly, it inspires citizens who care–which sparks the very civic responsibility and participation our communities lack. To stay informed about local elections, participate in community events, support neighborhood businesses, help keep the streets safe, and even pick up trash; all have higher stakes when the people view the city as an extension of their home–a sentiment which is difficult if the shape of their city bears no similarity to the shape of their home. A city of gray concrete invokes the same belonging and responsibility as if there were a home decorated with nothing but concrete.
Great thinkers have long seen beauty as inexplicably interwoven with goodness and justice. Plato believed one must be able to identify and understand what is beautiful before one can properly reason about what is right. Is this metaphysical connection why we are infused with a longing for beauty? It is a question as old as civilization. What we do know is this: beauty, whether we want it to or not, matters for the human condition and the societies we form.
Beauty and aesthetics are not solely for those with the wealth to build magnificent cathedrals or capitol buildings; beautifying our places can be as simple as cleanliness and adding a human touch in small ways that reflect those who live there. Whether it’s decorating for the seasons and holidays, painting community murals, or even maintaining planter box gardens, each symbol of humanity breathes life into a citizenry. Commercial, modern design in our nation is accelerating, and the decay of the public’s perceived duty to their communities accelerates with it. If we want inspired citizens who embrace civic responsibility, we must build cities worthy of them–places it would be an honor to call home.
Image Credit: Paul Cézanne, “Village Square” (c. 1879) via Wikimedia.
1 comment
Rob
Really enjoyed this piece, especially as a human geography teacher. You make a good point that “The impact of aesthetics can be hard to articulate but nonetheless impossible to ignore.” It does often seem so obvious when designs are aesthetically unappealing that we wonder why we have to even say it, how these designs got past the drawing board. On your point, “We traded our historical devotion to beauty and civic care for mass production and economic value,” Andres Duany’s book Suburban Nation describes how America had small towns with Main Streets that were the envy of the world before WW2, but in the suburban explosion engineers and zoning codes took the steering wheel and real community design went out the window. His New Urbanism tries to put the best principles of urban design back into use. James Kunstler’s 2004 TED Talk “How Bad Architecture Wrecked Cities” is a classic. Ironically, while Latin America is far poorer than the US, its cities are often much more appealing, with much more street life, because the Spanish built grids of walkable streets and cathedrals, not, as you put it, “endless six-lane highways, identical beige homes or shopping centers, and mass-produced gray concrete buildings to accompany the gray concrete roads.” Strange thing is, it’s entirely theoretically possible to build cities that work again. Doug Burgum did a great job of essentially flipping downtowns in North Dakota as an entrepreneur and later governor, before becoming Secretary of the Interior. Would love to see a modern version of the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s-1900s.