Urban Planning

Pinning the blame on Moses, or celebrating Jacobs, or vice versa is a way out of a big question that neither the political left or right in the United States has many clear answers to: how to resolve the tension between the benefits and pitfalls of large-scale planning and local control.

Though we were in a braking zone, which meant we would get to see the cars for an extra second as they slowed into the turn, my view of their approach was mostly obstructed by bleachers draped in a Jack Daniels ad. Still, I found myself waiting with anticipation for the cars to scream by in a blur every minute and a half. A group of twentysomethings looking for the concert stage where the Chainsmokers were playing postrace ended up staying to watch. A couple of cops nodded along to P.O.D.’s “Boom” blasting from speakers nearby.

As Kimmelman’s employer keeps reminding us with googly-eyed headlines, rent is soaring. The city’s pandemic-era eviction moratorium has been lifted. Our new mayor is a cop who seems to disdain unhoused people. And the architects of the largest residential transformation in the city today—the supposedly radical campaign to close Rikers Island—insist that incarcerated New Yorkers should be in a better jail, not in apartments.

State officials lease our land to petrochemical engineering companies that produce the plastics and poisons that all but ensure we lose everything to climate change, at which point they will find someplace else to go. There are fewer and fewer wetlands to buffer storms on their way to the shore as a result of catastrophic losses to the region’s biodiversity. Don’t get me fucking started on the damming of the Mississippi, which would otherwise naturally rebuild the marsh by continuously depositing sediment it brought down.

A billboard whose finer print I can’t read says FREEDOM and the next says EMPIRE (an insurance group) and the next says ESCAPE REALITY (an image of a boat). This road leads to Lake Superior, which might as well be an ocean. 35 takes you to the end of America, or the beginning, depending on whom you ask. But there’s an energy to the ends of things. Cars and trucks are driving very fast.

Martha’s Vineyard has always been a place that gives people their privacy and allows separate, siloed communities to have their own social affairs. “Chilmark midnight” is nine o’clock, at which time things are still going strong down-Island. Only Edgartown and Oak Bluffs allow liquor stores. The summer and year-round crowds are separate, too, more so than in the old days, and so are the ethnic communities, less so than in the old days—there are more cross-cutting ties of old classmates and the like, now—but more than one might imagine.

Abolition—the notion that prisons and policing are directly linked to slavery and thus antithetical to human liberation—is not new, but it is to some people. That is lamentable, and not unrelated to the challenges associated with social transformation, but it is not avoidable. We need to prepare the ground, look for nascent and emerging practices and nourish them.

We’re told this is temporary, a momentary suspension of normality, and in our hearts we sentimentalists all want to believe the streets will soon be filled once more with stoop dawdlers, grandmas pushing shopping carts, vested business bros with their phones on speaker, fleets of annoying schoolkids, boys and girls out on the prowl, the stench of weed and the cries of desire. (On second thought, let’s consign the business bros to the past.) But we all know the dream of a quick recovery is delusional, that our altered reality will last a year, maybe two.