The Solace of Closed Spaces: Cities as Saviour

By Jane Holtz Kay

These are the times that try our sense of place (to re-phrase Thomas Paine): unlike that distant time when city was city, country was country. No mere tautology here. City was downtowns and main streets, both time-worn and timely. Country was bucolic, rolling, spotted with Ben and Jerry cows.

Now, an ugly blur spreads across the continent as the big-box malls and subdivisions swallow the landscape. "Sprawl," that ugly word of dubious etymology, is the malaise of our time-the spreading McMansions and hardscapes, the family farms churned into subdivisions, the landscape degraded by the visual and environmental pollution of the architecture off the exit ramp.

And we hate it.

Or do we? "The only thing that people like less than sprawl is density," says a developer. The "d" word describes our visceral fear of The Other, a new neighbor-any neighbor-or a developer clearing the way for yet another view-wrecking suburban starter-castle. And folks whose heroes have always been cowboys take aim. But not alone. For citydwellers retort as well, disdaining the greedy wasteful lawns and pining for more sidewalks.

It is time to close the city-country chasm, the split between the "urbanist" citylover and the "naturalist" devotee of untamed sites (as if it weren't-well-natural for humankind to complement the solace of open spaces with the vitality of closed urban ones). The xenophobia that saps our power to save the last-chance landscape must cease. We must consider walkable, urban living as the antidote to the 90-mile-an-hour-lifestyle that spits out the subdivisions, browns our greenfields, causes the runoff that despoils our waters, sucks up the oil that sends us off to foreign wars. It is time to restore the urban infrastructure that centers us, to in-fill the brownfields, ravaged plots, and parking spaces, to retrofit our dysfunctional metropolises for a smaller footprint.

Only by coming together and congregating can we save our endangered planet. We must be green, gray-and red, loving the russet tones of baked brick and admiring the glitter of steel and glass as well as a country meadow or windswept canyon. We must multiply the phalanx of multifamily three-deckers parading Boston's streets, shoulder-to-shoulder, to squelch the burgeoning outburbs. Served by rail not road, these communities spawn pedestrians who invigorate quirky shops, small-scale commerce, neighborhood schools.

We can enhance this alliance of city and country by restoring and enlarging the green urban necklace of Olmstedian parks, the daylighting of places like Providence's river-and indeed, we have. We can stake out urban gardens on parched, sunbaked rooftops surveying the city. In vacant lots. In a reclaimed driveway like Berkeley activist Richard Register's.

We do not need to draw up a green moat to protect the planet. We need to nurture a kinder, gentler urbanity, a citified environmentalism. Cities and the suburban circle around them can supply the space to absorb and, better yet, invigorate populations oozing everywhere. Town parks can relieve the wilderness. Neighborhood schools can pull the road warrior parent-chauffeur off the ever-widening highway.

It's not easy being an "urbanist" when the dictionary offers no definition; tough, too, to expand the word "naturalist" from its narrow source. But semantic shortfalls do not lessen the imperative for this "urban naturalism." City folk, country folk, men of the mountain, women of the world-"whatever," as the teens say-we had better learn to hang out together in cities or (as another revolutionary put it) "we will all hang separately."

This article appeared as a "Point of View" column in Orion, May/June 2003.

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