Living Like Humans Were Supposed To Live

Life's better in a place that's designed for human life

I visited Tokyo recently, and I can’t stop thinking about how great it was. And I mean, come on, look at this:

But truth be told, I was a radicalized urbanist well before I visited the urbanist Mecca. I’ve changed my mind about quite a lot over the years, but one thing that’s remained pretty consistent is my view that you shouldn’t need a car to live your life. I realize some people read sentences like that and have a knee-jerk reaction (“So you wanna ban all cars!?”), but I’m not really interested in talking to those people. This is Substack, after all, which I’m still hoping can be a more thoughtful place than Facebook/Twitter and the like.

So why is urbanism so thoroughly appealing to me? I’m not a city planner, an engineer, an architect, or even much of an architecture nerd for that matter. Why is this the political issue that takes up most of my extra bandwidth these days? I can think of a few possible reasons.

To start, I’m native to the Northern Virginia area. If you’ve never been, it’s something you don’t see too often in the United States: a dense suburban landscape that is (for the most part) pretty nice and well-maintained. It’s not an urbanist dream by any means (the DC area actually has some of the worst traffic in the country), but there were at least a few years of my life where I could just leave my apartment and walk to my local H-Mart or go for a relaxing jog, and I’m telling you, it felt so so so so good. Once you’ve lived in a place like that, going back to normal car-dependent suburbia feels even more demoralizing.

If you’ve ever lived in the suburbs elsewhere in the US, you’re probably used to seeing this sort of monstrosity:

I don’t actually know where this hideous stroad is located, but honestly, it kind of looks like Everytown, USA to me. I currently live near a similar-looking hellscape, and have passed through or driven along many more in various US states. Even if you’re not a Japanophile like me, I have a hard time believing that anyone would rather spend time exploring the above environment than, say, this one:

Or this one:

I mean seriously, when you compare our urban planning abilities to theirs, it’s like the difference between a Park Hyatt and a Motel 6.

When you add to that the fact that most of our urbanist failures in America could be remedied at zero cost to taxpayers (just fix the fucking zoning laws already), it’s even more perplexing that this is such a tough sell here in “the land of the free.”

Of course, negative partisanship plays a role. A decade ago, the only people really talking about zoning reform in America were (at the time) small, niche non-profit groups like Strong Towns (proud supporter!) and maybe some academic libertarians at the Cato Institute who no one paid much attention to. Now, as our politics has become increasingly sorted, with Democrats generally representing big cities where the rent is too damn high, urbanism is becoming coded as a left-of-center issue, causing predictable reactions from, presumably, the same people who freak out about “banning cars” when you dare to say that car ownership shouldn’t be effectively mandatory. Even abroad, it seems that urbanism is no longer innocuous enough to avoid the ire of conspiracy theorists.

This is particularly disappointing to me, as I always thought one of the big selling points of urbanism was its totally non-partisan, ideologically-neutral nature. I must have missed the section in the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engles recommend deregulating our zoning ordinances so that we can build denser, more affordable neighborhoods. Guess that’s what I get for skim-reading.

(Update: Maybe this take was a bit too cynical. This recent story from Montana made me happy. My sense is that if urbanism remains primarily a state/local issue, it’ll remain mostly nonpartisan, whereas if it gains more salience at the national level, it’ll probably continue to polarize. In any case, maybe I should take Zappa’s advice.)

In all seriousness though, the biggest reason for my unwavering urbanism is that it feels like such low-hanging fruit to me. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that I believe in a housing theory of everything, but… yeah I do kind of buy it, actually. In addition to helping us tame our out-of-control housing prices, living in a walkable place just seems like a better, healthier way to live. I’m not a doctor, so forgive me for this unsolicited medical advice, but I’m pretty confident when I say that spending most of our time indoors, sitting stationary on our asses, is NOT the healthiest way for human beings to live. I hope that’s not too controversial.

In other words, urbanism seems like one of those rare silver bullets that could actually solve many problems simultaneously.

There’s also just a certain ineffable vibe I get from vibrant cities. When I walk through Tokyo, I look around with the same sense of awe that I would if I were trekking through the Amazon or hiking in the Rockies. It’s just a marvel to witness, and there’s something even more marvelous about the fact that dumb, bipedal apes like us are responsible for building it all. There’s just something kind of magical about that.

Or, when I look at these narrow buildings in Kyoto and notice how different they are in terms of age and design, and I get a sense of how organic it all feels. No one planned for these two buildings to fit perfectly next to each other, it’s just what people are able to do when they don’t have too many arbitrary restrictions telling them not to.

And if you’re the type of person who grumbles at all this and says, “No! I like my car-centric suburban neighborhood!” that’s fine. No one is coming to take that away from you. I’d just like there to be more options for people like me who actually want to go outside, touch grass, try new foods once in a while, and maybe even interact with other people. And if you’ve never tried living that way before, honestly, have you really lived?