Intriguing piece about The City: A Global History by Joel Kotkin: Link. Excerpt:
"The City" offers fascinating insight into the ideologies that have created different city designs, and into the natural human desire to gather together to live and for commerce. He reminds us that the ancient Romans created a vast system of infrastructure, including the aqueducts, but that after Rome's fall, it collapsed into a tiny echo of its former glory. He provides a quick tour of city development in the Middle Kingdom, the Middle East and even Middle America.
Perhaps the most fascinating insight: Cities need a sense of moral purpose to survive and flourish. It's not enough, he argues, for them to serve merely as a center of commerce. It's that idea that helps me the most as I continue my critique of the modern planning movements.
In a recent interview, Kotkin complained to me that New Urbanists and others who want to recreate urban living as a rebuke to suburbanization tend to miss this almost-spiritual side to city planning. The hip, vital cities modern planners are most enamored of, such as Portland, Ore., are geared almost exclusively toward "young people and the nomadic rich and trustafarians," those childless trust-fund elites who are seeking high culture but eschew child-bearing and religion.
In Europe, he said, all the major cities are mostly devoid of children. Yet planners refuse to acknowledge that "the evolution of suburbia is part of the continuum of urban history." He calls the people who run cities the worst enemies of them, as their hamfisted regulations, the destruction of schools and the bloated bureaucracies are unfriendly toward average middle-income families.
