Cities Need Aesthetic Harmony

Most American cities have no real planning behind them. There are urban planners. There are regulations that tell people what they can and can’t build, when they can build, and how high they can build it. There are zoning commissions telling people where they can build what kind of building and run what kind of business in what place. There are laws telling you where you can put windows, how many doors you can have, whether or not you can use stairs, and so on and so forth. There are countless electoral bodies that can say ‘no,’ and consultants need to be paid to even tell you whom you need to bribe.

The response to this from some critics tends to be to just get rid of all the planners and busybodies who might interfere with the decisions made by sovereign property owners. In theory, an entire city could be made up of entirely sovereign rights holders, who might paint their buildings each in a different garish color, or pick some eccentric style unique to their personalities, like Beverley Hills mansion dwellers are apt to do.

More practically, what we see in the real world is that property owners tend to care profoundly whom they live near. The dirty little not-so-secret of wealthy New Yorkers, for example, is that many of them live in co-op apartment buildings. These co-ops have boards. These boards discriminate against potential property owners in the building who might not be of sufficient human quality to suit the other residents. Some of these objections can be absurd — old ladies have been known to object to even complain about tenants whose children chalk up hop-skotch boards in front of the lobby. But that’s their rights as property owners — to form agreements with their neighbors to prevent the neighborhood from going to pot. This also helps to prevent the aforementioned garishly-painted-building problem.

It’s even been said, at times by malcontents, that these co-op boards often discriminate based on race.

We all know that isn’t true, though. All New Yorkers just love Black people.

When we see the great squares in many glowing cities of Italy, or the architecture of Christopher Wren in London, we see some measure of ‘top-down planning’ at work, contributing to a cohesive aesthetic for the cities. But those cities can’t retain a cohesive aesthetic — and thereby a culture that’s working towards something harmoniously — if people aren’t allowed to exclude others from settling there, even if they may be able to buy off one person.

The government may not need to regulate every aspect of construction in a town — the result of that tends to be the humiliating, pervasive ugliness which is common to the United States and the former Soviet Union — but the sovereign of a town or city, should there be any, ought to exercise some stewardship and leadership over what it ought to be — in consultation with the town fathers, who should hopefully be extremely permanent if not multi-generational residents.

It’s not that long-term residents of cities don’t see a need for this sort of multi-generational stewardship. They do — and they complain mightily when no one is around to prevent fundamental changes in the characters of cities. In the premier cities of the West — London, New York, Paris, and some of the others that escape my memory — the common complaint for many long-term residents is that they’re losing their essential characteristics. While mayors of these cities might trade tricks among themselves to make things operate more smoothly, like congestion pricing, none of them tend to have permanent, multi-generational interests in the continued upkeep of the city — unless you consider their business interests or their desire to put together an electoral pseudo-dynasty of some kind.

Cities reproduce themselves over time in the same way that people do. The ones that maintain some architectural distinction that matches their histories tend to be worth visiting. The ones that don’t, aren’t.

The government (whatever form it may take) also has a vested interest in not creating so many fractious communities within the city that law enforcement becomes too expensive to manage. Even in famously ‘diverse’ New York City, enclaves form around dominant ethnic groups, despite all the propaganda (sincerely believed) encouraging racial mixing within neighborhoods.

Police are only able to really function well if they have good relations with ethnic leadership in different neighborhoods. Otherwise, no one calls the police, and the sovereign lacks authority over the neighborhood. Because the city’s aesthetic flows from the people that it houses, housing many highly different peoples within a single city results in clashing aesthetics — an ‘Epcot Center’ effect, which may be more or less charming depending on the people there.

We have to consider that from the perspective of quality of life for urban residents, urban leaders have an obligation not to produce an entirely confused culture. People need to know what’s good, beautiful, and true — or they can’t cooperate. These things also need to be obvious, symbolized everywhere, spelled out clearly enough for an idiot to understand (because most people are idiots), and understood as close to universally as possible.

Housing multiple groups of people, none of whom can agree on those things, is a recipe for unhappiness and cultural compromise, rather than some hoped-for flourishing among all the differences. There should be differences — between cities. Not a rapidly fluctuating essence of a city in which mass migration in and out is a constant development. Cities are delicate things indeed — Europe lost many of them after the Roman collapse. Their maintenance for centuries is an achievement not to be taken for granted.

America in particular has been abysmal at maintaining its cities over the past few centuries. Barely after we constructed them, we started destroying them through neglect and stupid ideas. We should take care to do what we can to preserve the ones that we still have.

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