In reading Ebenezer Howard’s optimistic piece on the Garden City, I was surprised and unsettled by his motivations behind these developments. His plan was thought out well for that age and he sounded genuinely convinced that this would be the solution to urban plight. Should I have been present during this period, without observing the fallout that has come from suburban thinking, I might have found his development to be just the thing we needed to escape the “smoke fiend”.
What I find to be unsettling, however, is how such novel and seemingly appropriate plans to address real problems can transform into the problem itself. How could Howard have known that this way of thinking -the compartmentalization of cities- would spur drastic and damaging changes in land use cover when the population boomed? This unnerves me as an individual interested in approaching the types of problems Howard undertook. Addressing sustainability problems comes with an immense responsibility to future generations, but must be balanced by the need to address urgent issues when the future can only be planned for, not predicted.
Howard’s placement of undesirable populations between the allotments and the center city seem to isolate these groups. Is there some social reason for doing so? Are there zoning codes in practice in the U.S. that still implement this form of rigid social compartmentalization (besides those we see between classes)?
Howard's Garden City complex was one of 250,000 population in a circle 10 miles in diameter with a central city and six ringed residential centers all linked by boulevards, canals and rail lines.
One of Howard's primary motivations in creating the garden city was to connect the country with the city, which was appropriate in that it identified humanity's innate desire to be connected to nature -something industrialized cities of his era lacked. While the garden city has aspects that one can identify as 'sustainable' (like protecting local agricultural land and mass transit infrastructure) the idea that a city would be designed and then implanted, rather than grow and spread organically, is not ideal for building community. A sustainable community incorporates the desires and values of its members, rather than relying simply on the judgments of outside planners.
Jane Jacobs focuses her arguments on this concept in "Orthodox Planning and the North End". Change should come from the people, and when it does not the community members are the ones who suffer the consequences. She finds that frequently planners misdiagnose community vitality using shallow and misdirected indicators. Jacobs equates the science of urban planning to the science of blood letting. Despite the lack of evidence that traditional planning techniques do not work, they are continually utilized to the detriment of the residents.
In Mumford's critique on the design of cities, in "Cities and the Crisis of Civilization", he argues that human life support systems that are integral to our health and sanity are now organized around the city system (represented as the "cult of death"), rather than organizing the city system around human processes (the "cult of life").
To increase environmental stability and protection Aldo Leopold describes the need for ethics that govern the treatment of land. This ethic states that when an action works to protect and sustain the health, integrity, and beauty of the environment it is correct. When it works to degrade the health, integrity, and beauty it is incorrect. While I appreciate the notion of the land ethic, it is a complicated ethic by which to live. Because humans, like every other form of life, need to extract resources for survival, it is difficult to identify what level of extraction maintains ecological integrity and which do not. Many actions surrounding the utilization of natural resources clearly fall into the right and wrong categories, but many are more difficult to judge.
Leopold compares humanity's relationship to land to Odysseus's relationship to his slave girls. Because Odysseus owns the girls, his treatment of the slaves is not considered moral or immoral. He has no obligation to spare the girls despite the benefits he receives from their services. The ownership of land operates in the same way. People reap benefits from the land, but have no ethics regarding the maintenance and protection of the property.
In Roseland's Toward Sustainable Communities, the way in which Roseland highlights the need for stable economic capital insightful. Rather than simply focusing on the need for job growth and investment within the community, he mentions the importance of living off of interest or income. This is frequently discussed and advocated, specifically regarding the economic recession. Living on income and interest is then quickly contradicted as community leaders call for incentives that increase consumption to bolster the markets, but continue to reduce the resilience of consumers.
Living on economic stocks can also be paralleled with Roseland’s argument for the need to live off of natural stocks. By returning to this behavior communities are better able to stabilize our life-support systems.
Strong and weak sustainability are two topics that appear simple to understand, but unclear as to how they are implemented, if at all. Are stocks of assets, whether environmental or human-made, left for future generations quantified and assessed (I assume not)? Or are these two concepts merely different perspectives on how to pursue inter-generational equity? If the latter is the case, do strong sustainability and weak sustainability have implications on the ways in which sustainable development is actually implemented?
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