Obsession

Behind the push for a reversion to cities designed for human beings and not machines are a variety of motivators.  While environmental and energy issues are often used to justify this neourbanism, as it is called, it is clear that there is some other driver.  Good livings are being made by good people as they prepare us for the long emergency that faces us as oil is depleted.  They trot out neourbanism as the main thing that is going to make the transition survivable while we reconfigure civilization to deal with a low energy future.

This is using a hammer to drive a screw: it will work, but not particularly well.  However, neourbanists persist with this single, possibly inappropriate, solution to a complicated problem because, I believe, they feel a perverse combination of schadenfreudeand masochism.

Imagine how they would feel if you were to say to them, “Hey, we’ve found a way to generate energy that is dramatically less expensive than anything we are using now, produces no carbon dioxide, can be used to destroy the fuel in atomic weapons, is safer than natural gas or coal and can provide all the energy we might need for the next few thousand years.”

I believe that they would feel pretty disappointed. The concrete justification they have for their obsession would vanish and they would be stuck in the mushy world of philosophy, trying to make convincing arguments that they are right.

The bad news, as I’ve learned far too late in my life, is that we have had just the technology I’ve described available to us since 1967... 1967!  And we’ve gone right ahead and put our world on a path to destruction that we may not be able to reverse.

Bad news for the neo-urbanists: governments are finally beginning to take note of this technology.  India is and has been for some time.  China is now moving forward on it.  Of course, the U.S. government which actually invented the technology, is ignoring it, but they’ll come around soon.  The question I want to ask is, what is the government of Singapore doing about this Liquid Florine Thorium Reactor (LFTR, pronounced “lifter”) technology?  Nothing that I can see.  Nothing that Wikileaks can see either.

The relaxed attitude of the government toward our dwindling energy supplies gives Singapore neo-urbanists a reprieve so they can still use Post-Peak doom and gloom to justify pushing their passion onto the world. But good and sufficient reasons exist outside of the disintegration of life as we know it to justify Neo-Urbanism:

“Modernist architecture is generally so bad that it is almost totally inappropriate for most common uses and climates.” Léon Krier

“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”Lewis Mumford

“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.” Lewis Mumford

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. “Jane Jacobs

“The structure of life I have described in buildings - the structure which I believe to be objective - is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.“Christopher Alexander

Being a practical sort of person, I suggest that you take a walk through any of the nicely conserved areas such as the one around Duxton Hill. and then walk around the perimeter of Suntec City.  Then decide which seems more suitable to your personal sense of self; which leaves you feeling like you've lived rather than simply persisted.  Singapore’s conserved areas aren’t perfect, but they do give a sense of what neo-urbanism is all about.  Suntec City, on the other hand, typifies everything that can go wrong when the human dimension is left out of the equation.  Neo-Urbanist Duxton Hill is for people.  Modernist Suntec City is for cars.

Which do you prefer?

Contributed by Frank Bouman