We’re building copy-and-paste cities
Our cities are becoming boring. What were once melting pots of cultures, ideas, and designs are now models of scalability and reproduction – indistinguishable asphalt jungles. They’re losing their souls, and we’re losing ours, too.
Over the last century, the United States defined human progress. We went to the moon, cured diseases, and created revolutionary technologies. Our achievements were exceptional and our cities reflected that. In a twenty-year timespan alone, we erected the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station, and the Chrysler Building. Our skylines were testaments to our greatness. Yet, something happened in the past few decades: we’ve moved backward.
In recent years, urban populations have exploded. The mass migration of tech workers and skilled labor to cities has caused housing demand to mushroom – a real estate developer’s dream. To keep up, they rapidly assemble apartment building after apartment building, like legos in the hands of a toddler on a Halloween sugar high. Each tower is identical to the next.
As a consequence, our skylines have become predictable. What were once beacons of local character are now monuments to capitalist efficiency, dominated by recurring glass, steel, and stucco facades, mistakable for the work of a single dystopian architect. We’re building copy-and-paste cities.
The problem isn’t in our growth. It’s in the way we measure our growth. Over time, we’ve forgotten the ideals that make us human and we’ve substituted profit in their place. David Perell explained it in his essay The Microwave Economy: “The world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility.”
In our quest to maximize square footage and capitalize on rents, we’ve ignored the importance of the things that make our places unique. The qualitative is mistaken as subjective, and the subjective is dismissed as imaginary.* Our streets are becoming sterile and our sidewalks less alive. Every city is becoming the same.
In a nation of creativity and individualism, monotony is death. We thrive on being different. In cities, we express this creativity through public art, unique architecture, and regional cuisine that come from our hearts and souls. What’s the point of seeing a new city that looks exactly like the last three? We seek out experiences we can’t get anywhere else. So if every city becomes the same, our serendipity in exploring new cultures and places will vanish.
Paris illustrates this perfectly. It’s the city of love: cobblestone streets, romantic architecture, and a river that flows through the heart of it all. Yet, in 1925, famed architect Le Corbusier wanted to tear it down. He proposed a city redevelopment called “Plan Voisin” that would replace large swaths of Parisian city blocks with skyscraper apartment buildings. The project was designed to be an urban utopia, housing more than three million people across social classes in the heart of the city. And though the project was designed in good faith, it was vehemently rejected. It would have destroyed the character that made Paris unique! Without its grand boulevards, enchanting neighborhoods, and sidewalk cafes, the city’s spirit would’ve disappeared.
Le Corbusier’s “Plan Voisin”
Instead, the city did the complete opposite. It prioritized its individuality above its profit and strengthened what the world already loved. Since denying Le Corbusier of his plan, Paris has built more bike lanes, designed more parks, and envisioned a place in which each neighborhood is a vibrant, self-sufficient organism. The cobblestone streets weave throughout the city, the sidewalk cafes dance with exuberance, and the public gardens are in full bloom. Paris is alive and its character is stronger than ever.
Paris realized that we are our cities. The collective spirit of the people is the spirit of the place. So if the places we love lose their characters, we lose our own. We’ll no longer be proud of the places we live and we’ll have no reason to stay.
If our past has shown us anything, however, it’s that we get to control how our cities evolve.
Instead of continuing to build tasteless apartment blocks and uninviting places, we can choose to stand out. We can embrace the quirks of our local cultures and bring our cities back to life. We are what makes our places special and we need to show that. The future of our cities is in our hands.
UPDATE (12/26/2021): While I still agree that urban beauty is paramount and it massively informs the way we perceive our societies, it’s less critical than having abundant, quality housing. In the current moment, multifamily development – in any form – should be prioritized. Lack of housing supply in major US cities has caused rents to skyrocket, leaving working-class residents without hope of finding affordable housing near work. Without this housing, these residents will be pushed further into the wealth-evaporating holes they’ve been trying to escape. See why the average teacher in San Francisco spends 64% of their monthly income on rent alone.
Therefore, while I really don’t want to see Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin enacted anytime soon, we need to strike a balance between beauty and the speed and supply of development. And strong preference should be given to the latter.
*This idea originally came from Lewis Mumford’s book The Culture of Cities.
Special thanks to those who helped edit this essay: Daniel Sisson, Paul Mills, Efty Katsareas, Gayatri Taley, Chris Wong, and Gillian Liu