Exactly. Anyone (like that blowhard Joel Kotkin) who argues that the beige subdivisions of today’s America exist because people prefer them to real cities is WRONG. Americans didn’t choose suburbia (at least not in the form it currently exists in), suburbia chose them. When they were priced out of San Francisco, driven from the Bronx by gun crime, or forcibly relocated from Buffalo by a CEO wanting to rake in a little more profit by shifting his disposable workers to North Carolina, they were forced into suburbia.

Why has no revolutionary or radical thought been able to take hold in the United States (or if it has, it has been relegated to a few minuscule pockets of urbanity on the country’s fringes, like San Francisco, Portland, or Chicago) in the past 40 years? Because it’s been suburbanized out of us. By making it impossible for people to organize freely, to exchange ideas, to protest, suburban sprawl has made this nation a monocultural mass reveling in the status quo.

In Yaletown and the Concord Pacific lands, where the bulk of Vancouver’s recent downtown condo construction has been, there is actually a very diverse array of apartments. One of the things that really strikes me is how many kids there are: the playgrounds always seem to be full and a new elementary school was built there in 2003, the first new inner-city school in several decades. The demographics of many condo towers seem to be more diverse than some let on: they’re not all grey-haired retirees or wealthy expatriates.

Of course, Vancouver’s real Achilles heel is the relative lack of social mixity: there is social housing scattered around the new developments but not nearly enough to achieve a proper income or class balance. Still, though, Vancouver does much better than most other North American cities in this regard.

Now I’ve taken this discussion really off-track…

Personally I think that private ownership may be the key to maintaining public order. Whatever the reason, it is worth keeping in mind that the percentage of households which correspond to the ‘nuclear family’ ideal (ie those most suitable for suburbia) is not getting any larger. In fact, as our populations age, we will need more and more smaller apartments which don’t require a lot of maintenance!

Mary- I am going to Malaysia in a few weeks! I won’t have much time for wandering around, but it will be interesting to contrast KL with Singapore.

Sounds like a terrific book.

But seroiusly, you touch on two of the big problems with the Internet and the blogosphere.

1) How do you evaluate the credibility of interventions?

and

2) How can you make sure that people who have something carefully considered and well-researched to say can afford to spend the time necessary to make posts worth reading?

Saying that the observations to follow are drawn from the research that went into a book is one way to flag the post as being considerably more serious than hastily drawn impressioins presented without reflection.

Similarly, doing all that research, taking the time to reflect on what one has seen, heard and read, and then writing something that is interesting for others to read is an expensive proposition in terms of time and foregone income from other sources. In the case of Green City, the research took three years more or less and the writing, another 10 months. I’m not an academic, I’ve never had a grant for my non-fiction (although I have for my fiction), and my income basically comes from various sorts of journalism –and book sales. Hence the plug in the post. I’m scheduled to do three more essays–on Kochi, India, Shanghai and São Paulo–and the only way I can justify taking the time to write them is to include the name of the book and who published it.

Sorry if you find it annoying, but that’s the way it is.

Best wishes

Mary

Urbanphoto, like most other Internet forums doesn’t pay anything.

When I visited Singapore, I was struck by just how lively public spaces could be in a city where so much of the built form is Corbusian–and that extends to some of the most egregious tower-in-a-park settings, in the new towns. I’m still not quite sure what to make of it, although I tend to chalk most of it up to culture–both S’porean culture, and Western cultural biases. I suspect we sometimes make too much of the impact of architectural models on human behavior.

I’m cynical about Lee Kwan Yew’s brand of “Confucianism,” which seems designed chiefly as a convenient excuse for Southeast Asian autocrats to quash dissent and cultivate an oppressive papa-knows-best approach to governance. What holds true for Singapore does not necessarily apply to other Chinese societies. Confucian principles inform Chinese culture, yes, but so do many other things, and the ideology of “Confucianism” as promoted by Asia’s conservative elites is really just a way to assert control.

“People want their own plot of land, their own private yard..”

And that is a large part of the problem facing the world. I call it the Green Paradox, that by claiming our own bit of nature we destroy it, both by paving it over to build the roads suburb an development requires, and by becoming so dependent on fossil fuels. It was to explore this paradox that I wrote Green City: People, Nature and Urban Palces (Véhicule Press, 2006). The Singapore model is one of sseveral I look at–and I found it far more humane that I expected.

Partily this is because people do have”something that they can decorate and set up according to their own personality and taste,” as Donavon so nicely puts it. Because so many people own their own flats, they have a great stake in where they live, and it shows in the city.

As for the execution rates: I find them shocking, and I’m trying to follow up to see just how accurate that estimate is. The figures appear to come from an Amnesty Internationial report made in 2004, but where the AI figures come from is not immediatelly apparent. Just for the record, I’ve written Urgent Action letters for AI for 25 years.

But I wouldn’t use this unpleasant fact about Singapore to damn everything that has been accomplished there in tackling problems of housing and green.

Singapore is a Confucian society, 75% Chinese, where people democratically vote for strong-handed governments BECAUSE they suppress all forms of dissent and value the collective good. The state has the highest per-capita execution rate in the world–almost three times more than Saudi Arabia, which comes second. The Corbusian model works because most Singaporeans don’t think outside the textbook and want to live in the same kind of pastel mausoleum high-rise as their neighbour.

There is too much of a strong individualistic streak in Western Society for the Corbusian model to work. Freedom of thought + expression are too deeply anchored in our societies for the majority of the population to accept living in large anonymous pastel tower blocks. People want their own plot of land, their own private yard, or something that they can decorate and set up according to their own personality and taste.

The only Western societies where the Corbusian model has worked moderately well are the Scandinavian countries. That’s because Scandinavians are more orderly and respectful than the rest of us (and, thankfully, a lot more creative than Singaporeans!)