Design Would Be Great If It Weren't For The People

Amateur James Lileks cracks back on the new dean of Design and brings some clarity to the city/suburb feud:

But what do we mean by the suburbs, anyway? My neighborhood was considered a suburb when it was originally laid out; it was where people went to get away from other people. Now it's the city, and that's fine with me. To the south is a large classic first-ring post-war suburb that provided cheap starter housing to new families--you know, people who somehow, by complete accident, managed to marry and bring up children together. Why did they move? Why did they leave the city? The suburb predated the big freeways, so it wasn't the inexorable mind-shifting presence of the great concrete ribbon that made people move. Freeways, after all, force people to do things against their will. Screaming, weeping, holding on to the door frame until the wood splintered, people were ripped from their city apartments to tidy bungalows in the flat arid hell of suburbia.

I'd suggest that people moved because the new place better suited their needs and desires, and this would seem to suggest good design.

But I'm an amateur at this sort of thing. I will note that the suburb is now indistuinguishable from the larger city to which it's attached; the very distinction between city and surburb has been lost. You need to get way the hell out there in the exurbs for the usual japes and preconceptions about "the suburbs" to apply, and even then they're tired, banal, and condescending. From one perspective, the surburbs are homogenous, sure: it takes a certain amount of money to live there. If you accept that as an important distinction, though, it means that every neighborhood is homogeneous. My old funky tumble-down Southwest neighborhood was homogenous, inasmuch as it was populated mostly by students renting hollowed-out houses. But it seemed rather diverse, because it was full of different people who believed different things and pursued different interests.

Are we to believe the suburbs are different? I've been listening to the spoiled children of Levittown all my life, yammering about their ticky-tacky houses their fathers busted his butt to buy so they could live in a potato field instead of a crumble-down cold-water walk-up, and I'm tired of it. Boring people live everywhere. Interesting people live everywhere. People have reasons for wanting to live in certain places, and if someone wants to live in the city, it's his business. If he wants to live in the burbs, it's his business. I could argue that people who confine themselves to the city are removing themselves from the experience of suburbia, which is actually more germaine to understanding America's future than experiencing some of the lousy blocks I drive through daily. But I won't; as I said, I'm the amateur here.