In the middle of the documentary Fire of Love, which covers the life and death of the volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft, Maurice shares a quote that made me press pause: “The madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything but his reason.” He shares it, I think, to help explain his love for volcanoes and his capacity to appreciate beauty as he flirts with danger.
The quote comes from G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 book, Orthodoxy.1 He wrote it to explain how he became a Christian but also to intellectually defend Christianity against modern skepticism. But when I heard this quote, it articulated something I have been trying to say about transportation engineering for some time.
Despite the terrible outcomes of the transportation system in the US—40,000 traffic deaths a year, sprawling roads we can’t afford, worsening air pollution, and degraded urban design to name a few—we got here doing everything by the book. Engineering manuals justify everything from parking minimums that sprawl cities to highways that divide them. The logic and goals in these manuals are simple: they use if-then logic to achieve uniformity and efficiency. Building an apartment complex but you’re not sure how much parking you need? There’s a table for that.2 Considering adding a crosswalk to a road? There’s a decision tree that will tell you what to do (hint: it may be nothing). Seeing congestion on a main corridor? There’s a volume threshold that tells you when it can be widened.
Doing everything by the book appears logically consistent within the book. But in the context of everything else—public health, sustainability, financial resilience—the actions that made sense in isolation appear absurd.
What Chesterton meant was that the way reason behaves in the absence of everything is not rational at all. When questioned about their decisions, engineers provide what appears to be a rationale but is often procedural obedience. Want a crosswalk across a four lane road that poses a danger for your trip to the grocery store? Too bad, there aren’t enough people crossing there according to the manual. It doesn’t matter that this road divides two neighborhoods or has never reached its projected traffic volume or is a rapidly densifying corridor that is becoming the de facto front yard for new residents. The manuals which engineers consult do not account for things like beauty or justice. And if it’s not in the manual, what is an engineer to do?
What Texas DOT is doing in Austin—demolishing homes, businesses, and schools to widen a highway up to 22 lanes—seems mad, but to an engineer, it’s simple: we widen the road when congestion increases. Simple logic for a simple worldview. It is logic devoid of everything else.
The problem is that breaking from this stubborn logic now seems just as crazy—you want to add a crosswalk to a four lane road? But it’s only crazy if you accept the four lane road as necessary. Outside the logic of a professional manual, in the context of what makes cities great, the four lane road dividing two neighborhoods appears incredibly illogical.
I picked up Orthodoxy to understand Chesterton’s quote in context and ended up reading the whole thing. In doing so, I came across a couple more points that got me thinking about urban planning at large. While they are intended mostly as arguments for faith, I find that they provide insight for the way we build cities.
Transcendental love
For Chesterton, reasoning gets us in trouble with love, too. For you don’t love a thing for any particular reason: “the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness is a reason for loving it more” (68). In other words, love is not contingent. It does not stick around when something is great and leave when it declines; it just sticks around.
For how this relates to cities, consider his example: “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because people loved her.” If we latch onto a particular quality of a place, we’re apt to defend that quality no matter how problematic it becomes. But if instead we love the spirit of the place, we’re willing to address its problems to improve it. Chesterton goes even further:
If a man loves some feature of Pimlico [a neighborhood in London], he may find himself defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico itself, he may lay it to waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem (p. 72).
What happens when people love a particular feature of their neighborhood above all else? NIMBY politics have defended the physical character of neighborhoods at all costs, holding neighborhoods in stasis and making housing more scarce. The ensuing consequences of the housing crisis arguably include negative effects on economic productivity, innovation, equality, families, public health, and climate change. The narrowness and shallowness of love for a neighborhood’s physical character catalyzes broad and deep consequences not just for its respective city but for the entire nation. And these consequences compromise the same neighborhood people are trying to “save.”
The tradeoff inherent in the NIMBY worldview is impractical by all measures. To continue refusing to change seems unsustainable. In places like Aspen, for instance, the service industry is economically hampered because employees simply cannot afford to live there. Sedona has approved safe places to park so people who can’t afford rent can sleep in their cars. Even if these industries can survive a worker shortage, and if workers are willing to endure these conditions, I don’t find this to be a morally or politically tenable compromise.
If we were, on the contrary, capable of loving our cities beyond their physical character, our politics would arguably be more practical. Homes would get built where people wanted to live, close to jobs and amenities. And jobs and amenities could locate closer to homes, allowing neighborhood needs to be met more efficiently. “The more transcendental is your patriotism,” Chesterton says, “the more practical are your politics.”
Implicit in Chesterton’s definition of love is an acceptance of change, which if you love something is not a choice:
If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must always be painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post (123).
We neglect our cities by refusing to allow them to change. As a city changes demographically, economically, socially, its physical needs change as well. So how do we embrace changing a place we love? For Chesterton it is through faith: faith that the passion and dedication of a city’s inhabitants will sustain its greatness no matter what transformation it makes.
Novelty is the enemy of progress
Chesterton spends much of the book railing against modern ideology, namely how it’s constantly looking for something to revolutionize, some idea to invert, some new goal to invent. He criticizes the intellectual culture which he felt was a whirlwind of change and confusion. When people are constantly changing their minds, they have no capacity to affect change: “The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind” (p. 113). Turn a blade of grass blue everyday and you make progress toward a completely blue word. But change your color of choice everyday and you get nowhere.
I find that there are two versions of this that we contend with in urban planning: one in the form of well-intentioned plans that sit on shelves, the other in the form of corporations wielding technological innovation to distract us from the car’s failure to address our transportation needs sustainably.
Take the empty lot in Asheville pictured below, which locals have dubbed The Pit of Despair. It’s a big, gaping hole in the middle of downtown.
It’s a city-owned property that’s been like this for over 10 years. Five years ago the city hired a suite of consultants to come up with a plan to develop the site. In the three years I’ve lived here, I haven’t heard a peep.
Or consider Broadway Street, the four lane pedestrian death trap I mentioned above. I discovered that the city’s own 2016 mobility plan called for an extensive road diet. However, when the proposal was brought up at a recent meeting neighbors had with the mayor and a city transportation planner, neither had heard of it.
Planners come up with these proposals because they believe in them, I know they do. And perhaps politicians do, too; at the very least they commission them because it makes them feel good. But planning and policy making isn’t all about feeling good; it’s about hard work, difficult conversations, and compromise. We can’t write lofty plans that feel good and then flee to the next shiny thing.
The other version of novelty that traps us is technological distraction wielded by corporations to convince us that their best interests are aligned with our collective best interests. Car manufacturers have been doing this for over a century. First it was inventing the term “jay walker” to normalize the superiority of the car and its ownership of the street. Now it’s selling us a fantasy of rideshare and autonomous vehicles—Futurama is just around the corner!—to further normalize the car and all its negative consequences.3
The hype around autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, and rideshare are all distractions from the tried and true principles of good urban design. They are no more than innovations within a transportation system whose terrible outcomes cannot be resolved without a revolution.
If we chase novelty, whether it’s through a shiny new plan or a shiny new machine, we neglect the simple, traditional principles that we know build great cities. And we neglect the hard work we need to do to get there.
Great cities won’t come from a denial of change rooted in fear, endless visioning documents without teeth, or through some miracle invention in the private market. They will come from the belief that we can do better, the courage to try, and the faith that, even if we fail, we can persevere.
Maurice attributes it to Nietzsche, which is ironic considering that Chesterton scorns Nietzsche in Orthodoxy for being a timid thinker and writing in vague metaphors.
To be fair, transportation engineers aren’t alone responsible for this. While parking minimum requirements originated from the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Parking Generation Manual, urban planners helped adopt and uphold these rules. They’ve also upheld Euclidean zoning which is increasingly becoming less defensible as housing becomes further and further out of reach for most Americans.
In recent years, traffic deaths have actually gone up.
Thumbnail credit: Appears in G. K. Chesterton, a Criticism by Cecil Chesterton, p. 242.
“When people are constantly changing their minds, they have no capacity to affect change: “The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind””
We have a particularly loud anti development voice here locally who is emphatically FOR! Whatever argument she heard last.
As her positions sway with the winds, she never gets anything accomplished, but she is ever present in the discourse.
You want urbanism!? Read his Napoleon of Notting Hill!