Dead City, Living City

Seeking a truly great American urbanism

Cheese turns out to be a surprisingly rich metaphor for urbanity. In 2004, PBS docuseries Frontline profiled French marketing guru Clotaire Rapaille. His schtick was identifying an archetypal “code” for different products and categories. He seems to have been fairly influential as the new millennium dawned, telling CBS in 2003 that the code for SUVs was domination — aggression and imposing machismo. So we might have Monsieur Rapaille to blame for today’s SUV arms race.

Anyway, the Frenchman offered cheese as an example of his code thesis to Frontline. Below is an extended version of his comments at the 35-minute mark:

[I]f I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don't want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that's where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.

I started working with a French company … trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn't understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that's why you have to read the age of the cheese [when you buy it]. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don't put your cat in the refrigerator. It's the same; it's alive. … The French like the taste before safety. Americans want safety before the taste.

This elegantly summarizes two competing mindsets about how successful American cities and towns, including suburbs, will look. Like cheese, all urban communities are fundamentally alive, the literal agglomeration of their residents. The question is, should they be, functionally, a dead, static system or a living, dynamic one?

Obviously I am on team dynamism, as are most folks reading this (unless I go viral for the wrong reasons again). As one YIMBY friend likes to say, there is no healthy way to decline — for a community to lose population or economically contract. Cities either grow or die. On that basis, the death and life of American cities is truly existential.

Though the image of a healthy, balanced system could be instructive, I actually think the more insightful half of the analogy is the dead cheese, the dead urban form, sanitized and monocultural. It allows us as urbanists to tell the story of and even empathize with the things people like about single-use zoning, single-family neighborhoods, and expansive, environmentally toxic, and underutilized private lawns.

Though not the whole story, I do agree with the common urbanist assertion that many Americans know only the prevailing sprawling suburban ideal.

In high school I experienced a rapid economic awakening as I read books like Freakonomics. For example, setting aside your own feelings about the policy, I found myself questioning whether the minimum wage actually leaves the people it is meant to help better off. I think many American urbanists go through a similar process, progressively rejecting blasé status quo opinions about bike lanes and dense housing. My own conversion in the spring and summer of 2021 felt almost religious.

As I have changed my mind about economics, urbanism, and other issues, especially when my opinion has shifted away from the prevailing majority, I have tried to hold onto the memory of my prior opinion. Some of these shifts have been philosophical, working through logical consequences of basic values. But certainly for economics and urbanism, I was simply exposed to information or ideas that the average American probably does not critically engage with, through no real fault of their own.

The dead cheese strategy of a quiet suburb with single-family homes on large lots that would not permit corner stores (never mind a lack of foot traffic to sustain them) is a deliberate choice, a risk avoidance strategy. The milk was pasteurized to make the cheese safe and consistent. Many people living in such places have no mental model for a viable alternative. In is not accurate or, moreover, helpful to assert that housing reform opponents are evil. Nor is it fair to suggest that the vast majority of normies who vaguely like suburbs and dislike true cities are simply prejudiced.

The biggest challenge for us as urbanists is, I am realizing, institutional more than political. We have a playbook for winning land use reform and I believe we will get there, after years of hard work. Much less clear is a path to American cities that inspire unequivocal pride worthy of the greatest nation on earth, where residents of all backgrounds can get a good education and fully participate in the economy.

I recently toured around Alexandria with Patrick Murphy, one half of the couple behind my favorite urbanist YouTube channel, Oh The Urbanity!

I of course showed Patrick Del Ray, the streetcar suburb where I used to live. Then we headed over to Old Town, ending up on two pedestrianized blocks of King Street and the Potomac River waterfront. Patrick explained that in Canada there is no association between cities and low-performing public schools, and noted that Toronto has about ten times fewer homicides than Chicago, an order of magnitude difference he found shocking after feeling totally safe in the Chicago neighborhoods he visited.

American commenters on their videos frequently ask, ‘What about crime? What about schools?’ and as he put it to me, ‘I’m not sure because those aren’t problems for Canadian cities.’ Patrick also said that the Canadian experience gives him hope for American cities. And as thorny as American cities’ problems are, I agree with him.

American cities’ institutional shakiness is not destiny, even though it has been shaped by centuries of historical factors from the post-reconstruction nadir of American race relations to urban renewal (what an Orwellian term) and so on. Sticking with the example of Toronto, it is incredibly ethnically and culturally diverse, with about half of its residents born outside of Canada, much lower median incomes than Chicago, and a slightly larger population to boot.

All of this is causing me to question, slightly, my own adulation for streetcar suburbs. How alive is the cheese in such neighborhoods, given that hardly any people with low incomes can afford to live in them, because their relative rarity in the U.S. has made them so desirable? What does a successful American city — prosperous and functional, socially, economically, and racially integrated — actually look like today?

For months I have been actively grappling with the Gospel metaphor of the dog eating the crumbs that fall on the floor from master’s table. The way advocates talk about and celebrate committed affordable housing (that is, subsidized) makes me a bit uncomfortable, because it feels like a kind of surrender.

Constant is the refrain: ‘The private sector cannot provide housing affordable to the lowest-income residents.’ Maybe that suggests that the market is beyond repair, and I can understand why people might feel that way. Maybe, to be frank, it is an important narrative for the nonprofits that provide this important service, and I truly cannot fault them. I know fundraising is brutal, especially for housing work. But maybe, I worry, it signals a lack of confidence among the members of the professional-managerial class (which I obviously belong to) who do such work, that low-income residents can fully participate in educational and economic institutions, that they can improve their station in life and build a better future for their families. My biggest fear is that we do not, in our heart of hearts, believe they are capable of it.

But I really do believe that they are. I am hopeful. I reject any notion that great American cities are a utopia. The bar we need to clear is low: Safe neighborhoods, good jobs, abundant housing. There will always be some crime, some injustice, some suffering, but no circumstance requires Chicago to have almost as many murders as all of Canada (about 39 million people, the same population as California and Tokyo).

As I wrote previously about committed affordable housing, I cannot really object to distributing life preservers when so many people are struggling to keep their heads above the water. With that fully understood, I do see a serious risk of fixating on problems that feel intractable, to the detriment of identifying ways to think and act that will create an American urbanism with a seat at the table for everyone.

To leave you with something more concrete, here is how 1974 economics Nobelist Friedrich Hayek might put it. The story goes that Hayek and his friend John Maynard Keynes drew different conclusions from economic depressions. Keynes wondered what caused markets to destabilize and economies to dramatically contract. Hayek considered the long arc of human history and the striking recency of the widespread prosperity we associate with modernity, which left him asking a different set of questions. What causes economies to grow? As another great economist put it, what were the nature and causes of the wealth of nations? What causes societies to prosper?

What causes cities to succeed?

A dead cheese view of urbanism is mechanistic, prizing control and certainty. Artifice is a means of minimizing danger. ‘Things are just cleaner this way.’ A city where the cheese is alive is more like a garden or a forest, ideally a teeming rainforest or coral reef, a natural system that evolves over time as different factors play off of each other. Making cities nurturing places is a tough question. We have to let our cities evolve and grow and accept such complexity. We must embrace difficult answers to the biggest challenges our cities face, to actually do better. Dead cities have no future.

Thanks to my 443 subscribers, especially my 11 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, especially on my concept for a real estate financing platform, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.