[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build community in St. Louis]

Dear Nick,

I am beside myself with thoughts on the matter of urbanity and the good life. But I am shaken with terror that our views might be irreconcilable. The reason this terrifies me is simple. My faith in reason is scholastic. I think that should we be talking about the same thing, but I feel we are not. We should be able to at least communicate principles of discussion and come to a shared understanding of how this “science” should work. Ideally, we could come to a full list of objections and respondeos and sed contras that demonstrate a mutual understanding, which to me counts as affection.

So, my proposition is this: let’s go to Kigali, Rwanda and Krakow, Poland and test our theories. Should these towns be more like America or more like Western Europe or stay like they are? I think we will see that Americanization is more desirable, even if not exactly replicable.

You might say this is unfair. I am stacking the deck in my favor by anchoring the discussion around actually existing states of affairs. You want to start from the platonic view of the good city and figure out what tradeoffs get us closer, while I want to start with empirical places that at first glance seem to offer the things you say are most essential for a good city.

I think we can overcome this obstacle. I am not a “status-quo-monger”; I do not think that whatever just so happens to be at this moment is the best achievable – or that whatever societal forces produce is normative by the mere fact of it being produced, rather than something else. I think we could do much better and could have made better choices in the past, which implies that I too have a platonic view about what ‘better’ may be. However, the difference so far in our conversation are that I take historical examples of the past century as strong evidence for what is preferable and what is not. When millions of people individually make a choice, I should seriously consider whether that might have been in their best interest.

Automobiles are preferable. Individual self-owned powerful machines that can move goods, children, commodities, Amazon packages (“thank you for your service!”) and groceries are amazing. They can move canoes, baseball equipment, my book boxes, furniture for my house, and musical instruments. With enough density of people and luck of location I suppose I wouldn’t need a car – provided my relatives lived nearby. But the automobile used well is a huge boon to freedom for the arts, sports, leisure, and even religion, as well as work, labor, and economy. Even the Spartan men were notorious for their one luxury: the decked-out chariot. From better transportation spring so many options for finding communities that want what I have to offer and have what I want to enjoy. By increasing the extent of the market, autos increase the quality and quantity of businesses which I want to patronize. Oh great, internal combustion engine, rise and buzz, ye electric car! The world without such machines would be poorer and sadder and less vibrant – more like Kosovo, not more like Cologne.

Those incessant sorrowful singers about the sins of the automobile do have important things to say as well. Cars are loud, deadly, polluting, and atomizing. Can these costs be mitigated? I think so, and I know so, for we have already progressed in each of these dimensions since 1960, and noisy automobiles remain merely as a hideous choice exercised by Bosnians and hot rod kids and Harley guys. Meanwhile, I drive across the metro to St. Charles listening to a Ron Chernow biography, or the excellent dj’s of 88.1 KDHX, or a Conversation with Tyler, or conversing with a distant friend over the phone. In most other historical and present cities, there is much more cost to commuting. We are not the best we could be, but we have it pretty good.

Now, I hear your objections. Firstly, “Automobiles do not allow these choices, they cause the problems they are an alleged solution to! That is not progress.”  I respond that it is progress on net, though there is still more to do to improve things. Or secondly you could object, “Is your disembodied intellectualized experience of the world better than knowing the actual neighborhoods you are traversing? Lost in a technologically enabled reverie?” I respond, these are not mutually exclusive and I, desiring to live a good life study the map of neighborhoods and businesses along my routes and sometimes refuse the interstate.

The strongest objection is the poem by Dana Gioia:

The Freeways Considered as Earth Gods
by Dana Gioia

These are the gods who rule the golden land.
Their massive bodies stretch across the countryside,
Filling the valleys, climbing the hills, curving along the coast,
Crushing the earth from which they draw their sustenance
Of tar and concrete, asphalt, sand, and steel.

They are not new, these most ancient of divinities.
Our clamor woke them from the subdivided soil.
They rise to rule us, neither cruel nor kind,
But indifferent to our ephemeral humanity.
Their motives are unknowable and profound.

The gods do not condescend to our frailty.
They cleave our cities, push aside our homes,
Provide no place to walk or rest or gather.
The pathways of the gods are empty, flat, and hard.
They draw us to them, filling us with longing.

We do not fail to worship them. Each morning
Millions creep in slow procession on our pilgrimages.
We crave the dangerous power of their presence.
And they demand blood sacrifice, so we mount
Our daily holocaust on the blackened ground.

The gods command the hilltops and the valleys.
They rule the deserts and the howling wilderness.
They drink the rivers and clear the mountains in their way.
They consume the earth and the increase of the field.
They burn the air with their rage.

We are small. We are weak. We are mortal.
Ten thousand of us could not move one titan’s arm.
We need their strength and speed.
We bend to their justice and authority.
These are the gods of California. Worship them.

“The Freeways Considered as Earth Gods” by Dana Gioia from PITY THE BEAUTIFUL © 2012 Dana Gioia. 

Do they cleave our cities, push aside our homes? Yes. Yet we a flexible and ingenious people, adjust our cities and lives bit by bit to maintain the benefits and decrease the costs of suburban disruption.

Aesthetics arguments are too often selective in their evidence. Unpleasantness can be economically modelled.

I agree that the costs of suburbanism and the auto are not properly adjusted. I agree that minimum parking requirements are stupid, that cars get a free ride and implicit subsidy in urban planning, that there is too much wasted space in business developments (especially through minimum parking requirements, and that restrictions on building housing make all this worse. Yet, I also think the vast majority of people for justified reasons want personal transportation optionality provided by car ownership. Too many localists and urbanists are willfully minimizing of this fact. They think that the goal of urbanism should be to minimize car ownership. Even in the great public transit, walkable cities of the Netherlands a majority own cars. The purpose of transportation in a whole ecosystem is to move people and goods to where they need/want to go as quickly, safely, and cheaply as possible. Thus autos need not be taxed and penalized out of oblivion because “the people have bad taste.” Cars integrated into and harmonized with cities is not only possible, but desirable.

So let me leave you with this, following the sage advice from Plato and Aristotle, the view of the good city should include a mathematical model. Now while I am a bit more mathematically sophisticated than the ancient philosophers, I am not up to contemporary standards of urban economists like Ed Glaeser. Nonetheless, the standard introductory graduate school model assumes only two needs: a workplace and a living quarters whose cost is a function of distance from work. But you can and should introduce whatever values you want into the model, create a distance-cost value function, then create a map of the resulting small world. As you as you start adding in things like heterogenous desires among residents, and agglomeration of certain types of businesses in certain districts, you start getting shapes that look strikingly similar to our actual world (but with much more density). Add in HOAs, municipal building regulations, and poor urban safety and you get the status quo. I am not saying these are good. I believe there are winnable battles to improve both urban and suburban life. Yet, it is a hard drill to get anywhere else than where we are. And I believe in the types of improvements you point to that make drama productions, religious community, and community musical concerts easier. I would just not blame “the automobile” or “American values” or “capitalism” for the current state of affairs, nor do I think Europeans have it so much better. Europeans move to the US far more often than the other way, because, at its best, US dynamism in economics and the arts and family formation are all complementary to each other.

In any case, I think my economic view of the world is the correct starting point for both ought and is, and from it we can work towards the best possible set of tradeoffs together.

Meet me in Rwanda, where we will continue the discussion.