The Politics of Design: The New Urbanists vs. the Grass Roots
by Mike Pyatok
Abstract
This article briefly reviews the origins of the New Urbanism and its manifesto as emerging from the social change movements of the 1960’s, which in turn evolved out of ideas of a previous generation of American and European designers living through the rise of modern industrialization. In a similar manner to the Modern Movement’s opposing design manifestos which represented different class interests, some connected to industry and others with labor movements, two groupings of American architects and planners have emerged to face today’s economic, social and environmental challenges. On the one hand today’s promoters of the latest utopian design manifesto, called the New Urbanism, aggressively use the media and align themselves with private developers, mayors and redevelopment agencies, entertainment’s Disney, HUD and its PHA’s, and, most recently, Al Gore’s campaign. Arising from the same turmoil of the 1960’s, and parallel to the New Urbanists, arose a more loosely affiliated network of progressive academic and practicing planners and architects who have aligned themselves with disenfranchised underclasses not benefiting from the economic wealth of the post-War era. Members of the Planners’ Network (PN), the Association of Community Design (ACD) and Architect’s Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), by intention or not, have not developed a manifesto based on specific design and planning formulas, but take direction from a body of thinking linked to a broader left-progressive intellectual and political agenda. They work almost primarily with grass roots organizations in lower income communities and intentionally stay under the mass media’s radar screen to better serve their constituents. The article concludes with ideas for possible overlap and collaboration between these professional groups serving different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Origins
Contrary to how it may be portrayed by, or to, the media, the New Urbanism was not created suddenly by a handful of individuals who invented these ideas. The organization represents the natural congealing of ideas incubating among thousands of my peers who, over the past thirty years, have been rethinking, experimenting, and practicing these ideas which we thought to be better ways of organizing humanity and implanting ourselves on this planet. As we approached our 50s, we had sufficient experience and track record, whether in the academy or in practice or both, to find ourselves in positions of power and credibility to begin to be heard. We understand that the values underlying the products and environments produced for the middle classes in this age of late industrialization are now out of sync with the intelligence and environmental awareness of a growing segment of those same classes, a ‘quality of life’ awareness gained during this ‘age of information’, built upon a half century of post-war, publicly subsidized higher education. But some of us are also realizing that the recommendations of our generation to help those classes out of their dilemmas are too often out of sync with the needs of lower socioeconomic classes.
Our generation’s sense of mission sprung from both the benefits and mistakes of the previous generation of architects. An earlier generation of artists, designer and architects who shaped The Modern Movement, also sprung from a set of social, economic and political conditions unique to their time that linked them with industrialists and other forms of emerging new wealth to promote the values of mass production and the liberating promises of the ‘machine age’. Partly inspired by admirable, socially motivated tendencies, many wanted to spread the cultural wealth that industrialization promised. Mass production held the promise of expanding the demographic base of consumption leading to physical comfort and convenience for everyone, while modern design, with its more ‘rational’ basis for mass production, held the promise of better meeting human biological and even ‘spiritual’ needs.
The more ‘progressive’ designers of that same movement wanted to weaken the hegemonic cultural control exerted by the wealthy classes through their pompous architectural displays and possessions, an aesthetic learned in educational settings that mimicked France’s elite Ecole des Beaux Arts. While these creations required labor-intensive work by skilled craftsmen, they often ignored the needs of the masses. A new and exciting aesthetic foundation for mass production was needed to make its products more palatable to the public but at the same time it increased the wealth and power of the industrial new rich who exploited the growing numbers of factory-based workers. In the same way that political connections are being made by today’s generation of activist designers and planners, as the CNU is doing with the Gore campaign, so too then in their zeal some architects toyed with gaining favor with political parties to promote their ideas as the Bauhaus’ Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnson did with the Nazis or Hannes Meyer did with the Socialists and others with the Bolshevists.
The progressive architects of that earlier generation saw the burgeoning factory-based cities of the ‘machine age’ as desperately needing reform, and simultaneously devised two opposing strategies, one for rebuilding and one for escape. Inner-city densities and mixes of uses in older cities inspired dreams by architects to erase their dense and unhealthy pasts with high-rises and open spaces to improve conditions for light and air, ingredients for a healthy life in their view. Others, driven by more romantic, almost anti-city dreams, developed ideas of how to build idyllic communities in more country-like settings. While the former rationalists gave support to urban renewal schemes, the latter romantics and their descendents went on to contribute to America’s mid-Twentieth Century suburban escape.
And so was born America’s interconnected system for urban renewal/removal and suburban growth/sprawl, both resulting in a wasteful consumption of resources and presumably negative consequences for families, whole communities and the natural environment. Both efforts primarily served the interests of those citizens who appeared to pay their own way, although major government subsidies heavily assisted both enterprises. Both efforts created less than admirable consequences for the poor and working poor.
In the face of these disconcerting conditions, my generation was entering the schools of architecture and planning during the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and its military draft reaching up into the middle classes, the unjust consequences of urban renewal and removal, and the damaging exploitation of the environment all angered this generation. It prodded these emergent design professionals to direct that same doubt and suspicion about arrogant corporate and military expertise toward their own educational institutions and the dogma popular at that time for how to design a better world for humankind. Boycotts were the order of the day by the mid-60s in schools of architecture and planning, and radical reform of design and planning curricula was the preoccupation of the late 1960s into the first half of the 1970s.
Many learned to look critically at the history of our professions, the ideological and epistemological origins of our professions’ ideas, and hungered for alternative careers with a better bases for invention that would create a more just and more planet-sensitive design enterprise this time around. Some joined the Peace Corps, others stayed home as Vista Volunteers. Some joined universities to think about the past, experiment with the present and dream about the future without the distractions of everyday practice. Some created the first ‘community design centers’, to directly serve the needs of disenfranchised communities. Some thought the social and behavioral sciences would show the way until they learned that Western human sciences suffered from a serious case of ‘positivism’, predisposing them to aloof detachment and to trivial quantification of the obvious. Anthropology, with its methodology of participant observation, encouraged those with political tendencies to merge with under-served populations in their quest for justice through participatory planning and design methods. Neo-Marxism and its cultural critiques fueled the analysis of planning and architectural theories to seek out their implicit connections to the evils of capitalism. Biology and ecology were coming of age and their findings were providing a foundation for architects and planners seeking more planet-sensitive interventions.
Others, less prone to seeking ideas from much beyond the traditional bounds of the design professions, sought answers from within the more limited physical world of space and form as understood by architects and planners. They sought examples from history considered by their values to be more enduringly successful solutions, revising and updating them to meet today’s unique conditions and elevating them to archetypes and formulas for future success. It is from these roots that much of the CNU’s principles and approach spring.
It should be noted that most of my generation accepted the culture of consumption and its exhibitionism, joining in its celebration either through overtly commercial applications or as high art in various strains of radical individualism and self-indulgence, some stretching the limits of their believability by claiming links to philosophical deconstructionism.
As the old adage states, architects do not come into their prime until they begin to approach 50 years of age. It is not by accident that these many strains of protest and quests for better alternatives are now reaching their maturity for this generation. What might be characterized as the progressive left has coalesced around such organizations as The Planners’ Network (PN), the Association of Community Design Centers (ACD), and Architects Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR). The first two formed in the early 1970s, a direct outgrowth of the 60s disenchantment with the results of market-driven economies and the latter in the early 80s in response to Reagan’s callous disregard for social and economic justice and poor environmental stewardship. Also in the early 1970s, university-based faculty and researchers looking toward the social and behavioral sciences formed the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) to improve the foundations upon which the work of architects and planners is based. Some of the more mainstream practicing professionals, who also held academic positions permitting them to reflect and experiment, were also seeking change and congealed only recently under the rubric of the ‘New Urbanism’ which formalized itself in the early 1990’s. It came on the scene to serve the suburbs which finally grew to being the nation’s centers of political and economic power, maturing to intolerable physical conditions while at the same time their offspring were rediscovering the cities.
As with the earlier generation, this generation of architects and planners has begun to show the magnitude of their political and methodological differences. On the one hand, there are those whose careers and lifestyles have remained entrenched geographically and intellectually close to the lives of the disenfranchised. Some originated from these ranks and no amount of professional education and practice can socialize them out from those roots. They are fundamentally suspicious of organizations like the CNU comprised almost exclusively of members of a privileged professional class, particularly when they espouse, with unshakeable confidence and braggadocio, that they have found solutions not only for members of their own class, but for everyone else as well. That their ideas are embraced and used by developers to expand their profits, or by mainstream politicians to give the appearances that entrenched social and economic problems are being solved by a change of scenery, further leads these critics to distrust the outcomes. They have not only kept a suspicious arm’s length from the centrist New Urbanists, but often find themselves in direct conflict with them since each group of professionals often serves different socioeconomic classes who are in conflict with each other while struggling for a piece of America’s geography and pie. Even when the CNU is attempting to serve the underclasses, their entr?e into these efforts is through agencies whose style and interests often are distrusted by those being ‘served’, for good reasons learned from experience.
Hence, as in the Modern Movement, and CIAM, internal differences of opinion within my generation of architects and planners revolve around issues of class, i.e., from where in the body politic and culture do these ideas arise, and who is paying for their evolution? Some understanding of these differences may lead to an understanding of areas of overlap and potential complementarity between the members of the CNU on the one hand, and the ACD, PN and ADPSR on the other. There are some of us, like the author, who are members of all of these organizations because of their significant areas of overlap and mutual contributions. And, as with all organizations, some would classify their differences as either more severe or less severe than I do.
Scale
The CNU has squarely placed itself in the service of some very established sponsors: HUD and its HOME and HOPE VI programs; private developers working in the suburbs; private developers and redevelopment agencies working within older inner cities; and, only occasionally, non-profit development corporations. The latter tend to execute smaller in-fill projects which do not have the power to attract major media attention, or to display as dramatically the promise of the organization’s physical design principles. The CNU, whether consciously or not, wants larger projects to achieve real impact and to provide demonstrations they think are worth emulating. So they gravitate to larger scale sponsors. In doing so, they often find themselves having to represent powerful interests that are displacing others in the way of development, whether that be land uses like agriculture on the edge of the city euphemistically referred to as greenfields or blue-collar industrial uses and low income residents within the city, derogatorily referred to as brownfields. Redevelopment agencies, and now PHA’s using the HOPE VI program, are examples of this kind of revitalization through gentrification.
On the other hand, most members of the PN, ACD and ADPSR frequently find themselves serving grassroots organizations and communities bearing the brunt of change instigated by these larger public and private partnerships. Their professional skills are aimed at local self-determination and developing means of revitalization which include protections against displacement. Indigenous communities, squatters, migrant workers, inner-city tenants’ rights organizations, ‘communities of resistance’, are among their list of clients. This is not to say that governments do not contract the services of these professionals. Quite often they do to help agencies steer their policies in directions that will reduce friction across socioeconomic classes. An excerpt from the PN’s very brief statement of purpose highlights their basis differences with the CNU: "We believe that planning should be a tool for allocating resources and developing the environment to eliminate the great inequalities of wealth and power in our society....we advocate public responsibility for meeting these needs, because the private market has proven incapable of doing so."
Politics
Given who they serve, the CNU must appeal to the moderate middle of the body politic and avoid deeper structural criticisms. Injustices in the system must be noticed, but solutions must first pass the test of the centralized sponsoring agencies. To their credit, the CNU is not intended to be another academic manifesto, but one whose principles get applied, no matter what. If homeownership is desired by the powers that be as the solution to neighborhood revitalization, whether by HUD or a local mayor or RDA, and renters must be displaced, the CNU adopts that ideology. Does anyone ever seek to displace large concentrations of wealthy people to create a healthy mix of incomes? Of course not. Only those without property stand in the way of ‘progress’ and since they are much cheaper to move, and since it is believed they have serious social pathologies anyway which is why they have gotten themselves poor in the first place, some must always be displaced to create ‘healthier’ communities.
We no longer as a nation have slavery, but tenants, whether rural or urban, are truly second class citizens and are treated as less than equal citizens by our property laws, tax codes and development policies. The CNU, fixated on applying physical design formulas, skirt these issues as the purview of others. The invitation of Angela Blackwell to speak about gentrification at the recent CNU conference in Portland came after many cries for attention to this issue, and her minor presence on the agenda was eclipsed by the growing magnitude of the CNU’s built work facilitating this consequence.
Recently, the University of California’s College of Environmental Design at Berkeley sponsored a conference about the New Urbanism. One of the keynote speakers invited to the conference was Oakland’s Mayor Jerry Brown, presumably because he is encouraging the development of 6000 new units for 10,000 new residents in downtown Oakland. Little attention by the organizers was paid to the fact that he is not only luring in developers of market rate housing, he is aggressively and publicly campaigning against any more production of affordable housing, calling it the ‘slumification’ of Oakland. He is encouraging developers and property owners to shut down the remaining SRO’s and he has already given an eviction notice to an SRO and multi-service center for the homeless owned and operated by the City. He has even encouraged a nationally known development corporation interested in downtown Oakland to exclude the 20% set-aside for affordable units it was planning on its own to include in its development. A price is paid by going to bed with the centers of power who embrace the logic and ideology of the ‘free market’. The CNU, more consciously than not, is taking sides that are proving to be embarrassing, if not structural to its approach.
Methodology
For the CNU, if there is to be any local participation in decision-making, it is usually facilitated by professionals under direct contract to the sponsoring agencies to be certain that outcomes do not contradict the goals and intentions of the sponsors. The CNU speaks to the need for flexibility and responsiveness to local conditions through participation and that the goal is to achieve comprehensive solutions to community problems, which may not always be physical in nature. But the CNU approach ultimately rests on a collection of physical design formulas. Local participation is directed into and within that physical design framework. To question the expenditure of public dollars on sticks and bricks instead of intensive tutorials, serious job training, educational trust funds for residents, micro-loans for small businesses, and perhaps spending less on physical improvements with only enough to meet code and repairs, is simply not tolerated. Both public and private developers, viewing the world from the middle of the class structure, see a well-designed environment as a higher priority over intensive people-oriented solutions.
Never in words, but always in actions, the measure of success from this world view is too often seen in terms of increased property values. Recent claims of success by HUD in its HOPE VI program state that incomes of residents have risen by 32% in the transformed projects. This may disguise the fact that people of higher incomes were imported into the upscaled projects and lower income households were exported with vouchers. Also, the present so-called economic boom, given the history of capitalism, will eventually see its end, and how will we fair with an overall reduction in available affordable housing because of HOPE VI, when incomes will drop among lower income households and there will be fewer units available for communities to use as a safety net?
On the other hand, a quick scan of just a few of the PN’s Newsletters and a review of some of the projects undertaken by the ACD’s membership, reveals a bottom up methodology. These efforts have, first and foremost, the intention of achieving ‘empowerment’, not the rebuilding of real estate conditions. Community organizing is the long term goal, to use whatever project undertaken by local organizations as a means to build that community’s ability to protect and expand its interests against more powerful propertied interests. Good design and sensible spatial combinations of land uses are important goals, but both of these are always in the service of building the economic and political capacity of disenfranchised members of a community, not to merely improve local property values. In fact, in a market-driven economy, these goals can often be in direct conflict.
To this alternative view, award-winning physical solutions are not the ends, but act more like trophies to prove that a local, under-served population has the capacity to achieve fine results when given the opportunity. Hence, how local human resources are brought together and involved in the process of analysis, invention and implementation is critical to achieving this long-term human goal. If the very idea to bring change to a community and then how to achieve it, are instigated by outside sources of capital, no matter how well-intentioned the design team may be to solicit local input, any effort to seek local involvement in someone else’s plans will always meet resistance. The point being stressed here is the fundamental difference in the position that physical design plays in organizations like the PN or ACD versus the CNU. For these alternative designers and planners, their work and their products are tools for organizing disenfranchised communities, as a review of their periodical, Planners Network reveals. For the CNU, the photogenic results of the built environment, and the policies and codes that will achieve them, after all is said and done, still seem to be the end all purpose, given the overwhelming majority of the content of its periodical, New Urban News. A reader cannot help but conclude that they believe good physical planning and design, as defined by its experts, are the sine qua non for making a better society.
HOPE VI
In some ways it is no wonder that HUD and local RDA’s are rushing to the physically-fixated CNU formulas. To the progressive left, this predisposition for seeking quick physical fixes as signs of social improvement is endemic to the class position of those who steer these agencies. After all, these agencies are directed by legislators and executives who are reflecting the dominant ideology. This is not to downplay the importance of well-designed and comfortable environs for everyone, for, as an architect, this is what all four of my lives are about. But there are too many beautiful places in the world populated by perfectly miserable people, and too many miserable places populated with perfectly wonderful people still living with high hopes because certain social, cultural and educational opportunities are perceived to be, or are in fact, in place for their offspring. Such observations from traveling in the First and Third Worlds cannot help but give pause to messianic assertions about the important role of good physical design to making a good society. It is for this reason that I have hesitated to submit my work as examples of the New Urbanism because I cannot ascribe to it the same levels of salvation as its leadership is willing to claim. When used in this manner, our work as architects and planners becomes a kind of cultural legitimization for the inordinate preoccupation with property values held by elements of the larger society.
It is often argued that the dramatic removal and rebuilding of communities is what the poor also want. But what choices are given? If the $250,000 per unit of a HOPE VI new unit were offered as an alternative to a minor code rehab accompanied by a $25,000/year grant for five years, taken from the annual interest on that amount, to create an educational trust fund for a family’s offspring’s higher education, which would that family choose? A family may reside in the newly built unit for five years, maybe a decade as it gets older and more worn. What is the asset life span of a quality education? A lifetime.
The CNU may respond that physical improvement is HUD’s charge, and after all, under HOPE VI some funds now can be diverted away from sticks and bricks to social and economic programs. But if the CNU has achieved the clout with HUD that it claims, it could be using its bully pulpit to refuse to serve those PHA’s which are fixated on unnecessary physical improvements, either in the form of totally rebuilding or gut rehab, to the detriment of people-programs. And certainly, they should not be serving any PHA that has not made one-to-one replacement a high priority to insure that all units for very low income households are replaced one-for-one, either on- or off-site.
This has not been the case and there has been an unconscionable silence on the part of the CNU about the lack of a one-to-one replacement policy nationwide. A few years ago I assisted a tenants’ rights organization in Seattle to prepare an alternative plan to one prepared for a HOPE VI tear down of over 900 public housing units for very low income residents. The new plan was to have only about 1/3rd of the new units available to households at that level. The CNU, under the auspices of HUD, was asked to review the local housing authority’s design along with others emerging around the country, to be certain they were ‘CNU approved’.
The tenants’ rights group was convinced that the proposed ‘new urbanist’ remake was too costly--the application of certain of its planning principles for gridded streets and alleys necessitated a very extensive road and infrastructure system. This consumed an inordinate amount of the budget. A less expensive but equally workable revision was devised as an alternative which saved the existing picturesque ‘garden city’ layout and its 250 mature trees, and saved substantial funds to help build off-site replacement units available to very low income residents. The tenants’ rights coalition convinced the city council with the findings of their alternative and it withdrew several million dollars of city funds, redirecting them to non-profits to help build the lost units off-site. The original New Urbanist layout, however, went forward, with the reduced number of units available to very low-income households. Across the country, stories abound about injustices related to HOPE VI and coopted methods of ‘resident participation’ which are ‘vouchering out’ the outspoken troublemakers.
The Seaside Institute is sponsoring a series of a dozen conferences for 2000-1 about the New Urbanism. All but one are open to the public or to anyone who can pay their way. Only the one being co-sponsored by HUD, the CNU and the ULI regarding the design of public housing is by invitation only. This exclusivity can only send the message that this union has something to hide or is afraid to include certain topics of discussion which critics might bring to the table.
Style
This will not be a discussion about issues of architectural style. However, I am referring to the style of self-management of the CNU organization itself. Granted, the organization is not even a decade old but after eight years the same handful of founders still rules its board with tight control over its content and direction. Task Forces established by the membership are a recent innovation to get the membership participating in the organization’s direction, but ultimately their recommended initiatives must be approved by the board. A recent effort to single out the unique conditions of lower income communities in the inner city as opposed to green field conditions, more specifically how to deal with the problems of structural poverty, gentrification, etc., was to be addressed by an Inner City Task Force. This group has been folded into a larger task force titled Development and Implementation presumably to insure that the discussions about equity remain part of other discussions which include private developers pursuing market-driven strategies. Only time will tell how these particularly thorny political issues will survive in that setting.
While the organization wants to be more inclusive, it remains affordable primarily to well-paid professionals. Its recent conference in Portland cost $400. in addition to hotel and travel expenses. The ACD, on the other hand, held its conference in the same city and at the same time with an entry fee of $50., at a local community facility. This is a reflection both of the incomes being earned by the different memberships but also a difference in approach which attempts to expand access to non-professionals of modest means. Because of the simultaneous occurrence of their conferences, the ACD, with its 30 years of experience working as architects and planners in lower income communities, approached the CNU with its less than 10 years, to mount a panel discussion discussing the unique issues facing designers as learned from their perspective. The CNU turned down the ACD’s proposal. While the ACD mentioned in its conference literature that the CNU was occurring simultaneously with the CNU and its members were encouraged to attend both when possible, the CNU made no mention of the ACD conference in its literature. In fact, many of the CNU leadership had never heard of the ACD.
Possibilities for Collaboration with the CNU
Given that the CNU sees its mission as giving physical form to the goals and aspirations of larger development entities, whether for government agencies or private developers seeking major transformations in the physical environment, and recognizing that these interests are not always in sync with the interests of lower income populations, perhaps the membership of the PN and the ACD can be seen as a pool of advocacy professionals available to those with less economic and political clout who may feel to be, or who are in fact, threatened by the consequences of these larger interventions. In the same way that the justice system insures balanced representation by allocating two pools of public funds to support both public prosecutors and public defenders, there needs to be professional representation for those without property when planning the alteration of our environment. Those threatened must be organized sufficiently to select their representatives and be prepared to develop their own proposals for change independent of the sponsoring agency’s team or to make informed responses to those proposals from a base of professional advice that they can trust.
With all due respect for the CNU’s membership, they cannot be all things to all people, if specific interests are paying the piper. This has always been true with real estate development and the CNU has proven not to be immune to these biases. This approach can bring much relief to CNU members when addressing inner-city conflicts because they no longer have to play a duplicitous role, fearing the anger of their sponsors if they side too much with the complainants, while scheming with graphics and language to seduce suspicious lower income residents and/or neighbors to accept their sponsors’ plans. Even when dealing with the kind of NIMBY-ism which market-rate developers face when operating in more upscaled communities, the experience with careful and honest community participation built upon neighborhood trust, which members of the ACD and PN have developed, can be an asset to moving such developments forward.
In my own experience I have been tapped by private developers who witnessed my presentations about the methods I have used for organizing lower income communities into the planning and design of projects sponsored by non-profit developers local to their communities. The developers recognized the value of these same processes even when organizing more upscaled communities into the process of designing their projects, since ultimately there really are no class conflicts between the proposed developments and the local communities. On the other hand, I have turned down requests to facilitate participation in projects by non-profits and public agencies which ultimately would have coopted the interests of lower income residents.
The role of the advocate architect or planner is to seek workable solutions acceptable to those threatened. The teams of professionals engaged by both sides are not in a win-lose encounter, but on an honest quest for options that can satisfy everyone. There will certainly be compromises on both sides, but those who distrust the motives and potential consequences of the sponsoring agencies at least will have the satisfaction of having been heard and not having been manipulated by someone else’s team.
Conclusion
Those who know my built work cannot understand why I have been so vocal in my criticisms of the CNU. My affordable housing work has won its share of awards and is seen as sympathetic to the principles of the CNU. Given my review at the start of this article of where most of my generation of architects has chosen to apply its talents, some may think I am just a few degrees off from where the CNU seems to be headed. As a member of the CNU, I fully respect the extraordinary way they have tapped into the discontent within the middle classes about their lowered quality of life, and the way they have been able to muster the attention, if not involvement, of architects is nothing short of herding cats, the author being a case in point. And the case studies they have been collecting are truly extraordinary achievements, given the effort it takes to move the inertial mass of our culture away from its habits of living learned over the past fifty years.
But it is that very central position of physical design put forth by the CNU in the overall scheme for improving society, not just by how narrowly they may be defining it, but in particular, how it is being applied within disadvantaged communities that has alienated not just myself and others in the organizations I have cited, but other caring members of the larger design professions who are hesitating from embracing it. By accepting the dominance of the ‘material’ in our society, the organization may be just perpetuating the deep causes of our maladies, only correcting it now sufficiently enough to redress its recent destructive social and physical consequences, to allow us all to continue to make acquisition and appearances the centers of our being.
It is not surprising that the CNU’s leadership linked itself as advisors to Gore’s campaign and its platform for ‘livable communities’, and that other architects and planners, including some of its own membership, saw value in Ralph Nader’s positions. To the CNU leadership, someone like Gore seems to represent those in the country who find some fault with the present way our culture, through its combined private and public sectors, has been developing our cities and their edges. To them the basic framework is sound and could improve its performance if intelligent alternatives are presented. To others, someone like Nader, while he may never achieve established power, raises questions about the fairness of the basic structure of our society. He raises the bar of criteria which measure the performances of those in power against the real quality of life for all, especially for those who are left out of the formulas for success in market-driven economies. They do not wear the lenses of the dominant ideology that too often prevent others from seeing the connections between First World excesses and Third World deficiencies; between corporate free trade and the diminishing power of labor and the quality of our environment; between the quest for good design on behalf of propertied classes and the reduction in quality of life for the non-propertied classes.
It was Nader who spoke at the WTO and IMF protests in Seattle and DC in 2000, not Gore or Bush. The Naders of the world lose elections, but I think in the long term, history may be on the side of their message. Policy makers, as have the corporations over the past 30 years, listen closely when people like him speak for they help correct the errors of their ways. The critics of the CNU will not bring down what is becoming the dominant ideology of the mainstream for the development of our environment in the foreseeable future because it is compatible with the logic and ideology of market-driven economies. While they may help many in the years ahead, we can only hope that their critics will be heard as well, and those being criticized will make the effort to minimize the pain they will be causing others. If not, the next generation will soon be on their heels, pointing to their contradictions and failings, and how capitalism compromised their charter and coopted their membership into simply creating a more seductive form of business as usual.