I know I've gone over this several times now at my various personal sites this summer, but a recent bike ride reminded me of it once again; that many parts of Chicago in 2007 (as well as many other cities) are the precise manifestations of the science-fiction utopian dreams of people from the Victorian Age, back in the 1800s. And not only that, but in large part we have these Victorians to thank for such a situation, for combining grand visions with massive influxes of capital, as well as the schemes that have allowed for the maintenance and growth of such projects for 150 years now and counting. It's something that I think cannot be overemphasized enough, something worthy of deep awe and respect -- that large cities for the most part were pure hellholes 150 years ago, but that the persistent optimistic vision of certain people back then, as well as a patience with timetables that many times spanned decades, profoundly changed the situation or at least in certain parts of certain cities. And not only all that, but that if we really want to get serious about saving certain other cities in our modern times, or transforming slummy sections of cities into nice ones, we could do a lot worse than to precisely imitate the lessons learned during the Victorian Age; such lessons have been working for a century and a half, after all, and their profound success can be seen with our own eyes on a daily basis.

I know, I know, this makes me sound like a horrifically old-fashioned fuddy-dud! I know! But what can I say? I really am a bit of a horrifically old-fashioned fuddy-dud, and I don't deny it; that no matter how much of a champion I am of bleeding-edge tech and the Global Online Lifestyle, I also remain a hopeless Luddite when it comes to certain subjects. I will always retain a paper notebook for certain tasks; will always prefer face-to-face meetings to virtual ones; and there are certain theories about life developed hundreds of years ago that I still believe in, that I feel are still the best theories to have about life. And among the odd collection of specific issues I in particular am fascinated by, none are more volatile than that of city planning and urban renewal, and that's for two related reasons of course: 1) that the issue didn't exist longer than 150 years ago; and so 2) no real time-proven theories have yet emerged about the subject, and with a whole lot of different theories now tried.

And why am I so fascinated by city planning in the first place? Oh, I don't know; I just find it inherently interesting, I guess, the entire concept that we think ourselves capable of cramming a million people or more together into a tiny geographical space, and that we can maintain the mindblowingly massive infrastructure needed for such a situation, the resources needed to keep these million people in relative peace, instead of the constant state of disease, filth, violence and anarchy you would think such a situation would inspire. And indeed, this is precisely the situation most large cities produced at the beginning of the Industrial Age (late 1700s to early 1800s), as humans progressed from a mostly agricultural society to one that mostly manufactured things in mass quantities, using a rapidly increasing amount of manmade material. This need for massive manpower in small spaces is what led to the premature explosion of large cities in this period, done before humanity quite knew how to handle such situations; and as a result, at first these cities became veritable cesspools, apparent proof (or so the Luddites said) that the Industrial Age spelled the apocalyptic doom of humanity, and is what inspired the now-outdated pastoral movement, where people pined in novels, paintings and song for a simpler life in the country, a bucolic life sometimes so idealized that it could've never actually happened in the real world. And this is the same period, of course, when groups as the Transcendentalists came into being, when people like Thoreau tramped off into the woods to write Walden, when Germany's infamous naturalist/nudist community first formed, and all kinds of other such "back to nature" activities.

All of these things influenced the way people started thinking of big cities, and of the ways they could be improved; and so did the good things that came from the Industrial Age, like the chance for a lot more people to get a basic education (reading, writing, arithmetic, etc), leading to a profound increase in interest in culture, the arts, leisure, sport, etc etc etc. And thus it was that an optimism about technology was combined with an idealized pastoral nostalgia, to produce certain ideas about city planning that really started taking hold; that cities need to contain large interior green spaces, for example, as well as things like libraries and neighborhood centers, for providing culture and athleticism and health to the masses. Or that certain "zones" should be created within urban spaces, for making the venues located there as tolerable as possible; so that slaughterhouses don't get built next to private homes, for example. Or that the very mechanics turning humans into cogs can be used for human betterment as well; that electric trains can be built, for example, for cleanly and efficiently whisking massive amounts of people across relatively far distances.

We take all these things for granted now, too much for granted; so much for granted, in fact, that we've mostly forgotten how controversial these theories were when first proposed, how unproven they were and how warily they were greeted by the general public. The vision these "City Beautiful" urban planners were selling was literally a utopian one, when compared to the sad reality of what those cities were actually like at the time; impossibly rosy statements about how in the future, clean and happy citizens will bicycle and tram their way around well-maintained, sewage-free streets, spending their large discretionary incomes on exotic consumer goods, from a variety of well-lit and well-ventilated stores and cafes right in their neighborhood. A place where people can escape daily to lush, well-patrolled nature preserves right in the middle of the city; where free education for all is provided through public taxes at a variety of modern campuses evenly dotting the city, as are cultural events like concerts and discussion clubs, millions of books and movies, thousands of bike racks and trails.

HA! TOSH! BAH! HUMBUG! Clean and happy bicycling middle-class citizens indeed! But fuck me if it hasn't come true, you know? I'm living proof of that, a person who might as well be a space alien to the average citizen of the early 1800s, living an impossibly luxurious life that most of them were unable to even envision back then. Or, well, like I said, it's true for at least parts of cities these days, if not the entire city limits in most cases; here in Chicago, for example, such a situation only exists mostly on the north side of the city, not the south or west. And this is where discussions of this sort always get controversial; because the fact is that giant sections of Chicago, as is true with most cities, are still a giant shithole, with the citizens there living under the same kinds of filthy, unsafe conditions as those from the average Charles Dickens novel from the 1800s. And let's face it -- no one likes such a situation, and it is one of the biggest focuses these days among contemporary city planners, of how to "reclaim" these apocalyptic-wasteland sections of cities, and transform them into the same utopian visions that other parts of that city already are.

And this of course is why I get called a fuddy-dud by some, and a whole lot worse by others, because I literally believe that certain Victorian ideas concerning this subject should be instituted in such neighborhoods, in order to have the best chance of transforming these neighborhoods into clean, safe, vibrant, exciting ones. Yes, I believe in neighborhoods having lots of small, intimate parks and other public green spaces, places where locals can feel a sense of pride and ownership, and will therefore voluntarily keep those spaces clean and crime-free. Yes, I believe that we need to provide the funds to keep these spaces pristine and freshly mowed in the first place, their trails freshly repaired, their dark spaces well-patrolled and free of vagrants. Yes, I believe in the power of libraries; of smart public architecture; of mixed-income residential zones; of tax breaks for cafe and gallery owners. Yes, I believe in banning certain "immoral" venues from being erected in certain parts of cities; for example, in not allowing liquor stores or check-cashing places within a quarter-mile of a school. Yes, I believe in all of these things, no matter how old-fashioned they sometimes sound (or "preciously optimistic white guy", as the ultra-liberals might call some of my beliefs), and believe that a simple implementation of such things could literally save such places as Chicago's south side, as well as entire dilapidated cities like Detroit and Baltimore.

And so at the end of the day we're led back to a question I've been pondering a lot this summer, as my citywide post-cigarette-quitting bike adventures have had me seeing more of Chicago then ever before in my life; of whether we even live in an age anymore where such massive resources can be dedicated to such things. It's undeniable, it's absolutely fucking undeniable by now, that the United States is in a period of decline these days; that our most glorious days as a country are now officially and permanently behind us, just like Greece and Italy and Britain and all of the other former centers of now-eroded empires throughout human history (or "superpowers," you Americans, if you're more comfortable with that term than "empires"). In fact, when you look back now on what profound things were actually accomplished during this country's height, it can sometimes boggle the mind; here just in Chicago, for example, local citizens did no less back then than reverse the flow of a river, artificially construct over ten miles of new shoreland, as well as create over 500 public parks over the course of a century, 500 public schools, 80 public libraries. It can be stunning at points when all added together, and required a stunning commitment as well; billions upon billions of dollars, millions upon millions of man-hours, a patience among millions and millions of citizens for plans that sometimes took decades to fully accomplish.

It could be argued (and in fact I will argue) that such mind-boggling things can only be accomplished during the "rising phase" of a country's history (in America's case, for example, in the 75 years between the Civil War and World War Two) -- the years when that country precisely isn't a world superpower, when it doesn't have to commit such ridiculous resources towards a permanent military complex in charge of protecting and maintaining this superpower. That you can't convince millions of people to commit to such radical visions unless things are fairly shitty at the time, where even an untested and risky theory is preferable to what currently exists; that when a country grows prosperous and powerful (and fat and lazy), like the US has since the end of WWII, it becomes nearly impossible to get citizens to sign on for anything radical, long-term or expensive. So I wonder, then, if you could even get people in this day and age to support, say, a billion-dollar bond issue in the first place, one that would utterly transform something like the south side of Chicago or the entire city of Detroit, that would demolish thousands of dilapidated buildings even while constructing thousands of new ones, literally ripping up old street layouts and reterraforming entire neighborhoods. There's a lot of people out there who immediately smirk and roll their eyes when I get on this subject, which of course is my entire point; that 100 years ago people not only didn't snicker at such plans, but actually pulled them off.

Do we even have a society anymore that can actively transform parts of itself it doesn't like? Or are we doomed to suffer the fate of all crumbling empires -- a breakdown of the military-industrial complex holding everything together, an implosion of an artificially overinflated economy, a resultant lack of resources for even adequately maintaining what we already have, much less initiating anything new. We're in danger right this moment of entering a backwards period of American history; where, for example, we go back to the days when a huge part of the general population no longer receives a free basic education, because we literally can't afford it, in that we are forced to commit a greater and greater percentage of our dwindling and dwindling gross national product to fund a bloated and outdated Cold-War-Era military structure, that no one is able to transform because of extreme conservatives achieving such a complete and impossible-to-break hold over the governmental mechanisms keeping such a military structure in place, precisely by changing both the law and culture into a more fascistic, authoritarian one, done for no other reason than so they can keep skimming off the top and making themselves and their friends rich and fat. Such things have happened at the end of every empire, as anyone who knows their history can confirm; are we in America going to let it happen here too?

Or...or. Or we can actually learn the lessons that history wants to teach us, cut this slow decline off at the knees precisely because we know now what causes it. We can re-invent ourselves as a country, just like England did at the end of their empire years; we can "rebrand" ourselves, if you will, into something much more appropriate for a post-Cold-War world, into just another piece of the enormous jigsaw puzzle which is the global economy, the global culture. If we can somehow collectively give up the idea that the US needs to be the world's police, that we need to keep dedicating the insane amount of resources needed to be these world police, we will suddenly find an interesting situation on our hands; trillions and trillions of extra dollars, that is, to fund things that we previously thought impossible to fund, like a national healthcare system, an increase in public education instead of continual shutdowns, a transformation of certain urban areas. It's a choice that all of us as Americans face right now; who we choose for President next year, for example, is going to profoundly determine which of these two directions the US will be heading down over the next decade. I hope it'll be the right choice; but given the US population's track record of late, I'm certainly not betting on it.