In his latest “editor’s note,” James Bennet of The Atlantic finds a curious trend when he examines a series of articles collected under the title “The Future Of The City.”
[T]he astute, independent-minded reader?which is to say, of course, you?may grow suspicious. Are we really out to embrace the future, or to re-create some idealized past? After all, Christopher Leinberger, in ?Here Comes the Neighborhood,? proposes innovative policies so that, in some ways, our cities of the future can look ? like our communities of the early 20th century, when streetcars laced together every town of more than 5,000 people. John Freeman Gill, in “Ghosts of New York,” yearns for renewed imagination for art in our public spaces ? like we had back in 19th-century New York. Are we committing a mistake similar to the one that Benjamin Schwarz, in “Gentrification and Its Discontents,” attributes to acolytes of the urban preservationist Jane Jacobs?trying to seal in amber everything we happen to like, and pretend that the rest can just go away?
Carolina Journal Radio listeners might remember Michael Sanera discussing this same topic when he unveiled his glossary of government planning jargon:
