American exceptionalism, urban landscape and “the roads not taken”

The last entry looked at Nathan Lewis’ insight that the “hypertrophic” scale of the American city (and town) street, which from today’s perspective seems “designed” for the car, was in fact an early 19^th century phenomenon – a century before the car’s invention. What then, in Lewis’ view, accounted for this fundamental transition of proportion and scale between the traditional cities of Europe that the American colonists had left behind and the designed cities and towns of the New World?

Lewis draws on the views of historian Kenneth Clarke, author/narrator of the classic BBC television series Civilisation (Civilisation Episode 13: Heroic Materialism) who argued that, around the turn of the 18^th century, a new aesthetic gripped the Western world. “Clarke points out that, beginning with the new technologies and industrial processes of the Industrial Revolution, people's aesthetic sense turned to civil engineering as a means of expression, rather than cathedrals or other architecture. People expressed their creativity, ability and wealth with things like bridges, highways and dams. Mass production, as opposed to the personal one-off production of the local cobbler, tailor, potter or blacksmith, was the new theme of the Industrial Revolution. Mass production was never about quality, of course. It was about volume and price. It expressed itself in repetitious homogeneity … People were fascinated with their newfound powers of creation, their ability to manipulate material and natural resources on an unprecedented scale. Why make a road only 15 feet wide? How about 30 feet? 100 feet? 300 feet? Woo Hoo! The idea of handmade quality, that Better was Better, became a quaint notion of an intellectual subclass of the elites. Thus, we go from the architecture of … craftsmanship, ornamentation, artistic vision, cultural sophistication, and one-of-a-kind originality, to an architecture of very utilitarian buildings and machine-like repetition.”

This view is certainly persuasive. But it fails to explain why this industrial aesthetic was applied so early and spectacularly in American cities.  Was it that European cities, being already built (even though their city walls had largely been demolished by the mid-19^th century) suffered from “sunk costs” – it was simply too expensive to tear down the existing urban fabric and replace it with an architecture more sympathetic to a modern, industrial aesthetic? In this sense, the American city and town, being laid out on a tabula rasa (in current jargon, a “greenfield” development), had no such constraints. A new aesthetic could spring fully formed from the prairie, as in Chicago. One could also argue that the sheer pace of expansion through mass immigration to America, and therefore the exponential rather than incremental nature of growth in the American context, was also influential. But can this be the whole story? Even when one looks at the forms of new urban development in northern Europe throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, it is difficult to find any examples of the scale of streets and grid concept that characterised New York (1811) and Chicago (1840s). Haussman’s boulevards in Paris (1870s), the new districts of Berlin (1890s), or the westward expansion of London (1840s-1880s), while very different from the format of the earlier walled city, don’t compare.

In looking at this question I will draw heavily on the work of the cultural historian Morris Berman, in particular his book “Dark Ages America”. Berman argues that the American Revolution marked not just a political break with England, but also reflected (and reinforced) a radical cultural transformation of society in the American colonies. Taking the analysis of Gordon Wood (“The Radicalism of the American Revolution”), he argues that “we have to grasp how unprecedented the American Revolution was. We tend to focus on the political dimensions of … the break from England. But this was much less of a rupture than we think. The real revolution, according to Wood, was social, a complete transformation of the relations that bound people to one another. In fact, the Revolution rejected aristocracy as it had been understood in the West for more than two thousand years; the country went from monarchy and hierarchy to egalitarianism and commerce practically overnight” [Berman, p.244]. “In a very real sense, then, the American nation was born bourgeois. Unlike Europe, it never went through a feudal phase. For sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, this absence is the key to ‘American exceptionalism’, one aspect of which is that social and political alternatives to the American mainstream – communitarian ones in particular – have never been able to get off the ground. Individualism, laissez-faire economics, and the pursuit of private interests were locked in from the beginning: deviations from that norm never really had a chance. Whereas Europe had a feudal tradition of noblesse oblige, which in the modern period took the form of welfare, public housing and employment… the United States offers its underclass only the ideology of individual mobility and personal achievement.”[p.246]

In order to distinguish between the two cultural traditions Berman adopts a distinction originally made by Isaiah Berlin in a 1958 lecture (‘The Two Concepts of Liberty’): between “negative freedom” or freedom from; and “positive freedom”, or freedom to [p.71]. Negative freedom, essentially the liberal democratic ideal, stresses the notion that liberty is fundamentally an individual prerogative: namely the ability of an individual to live his or her life as unconstrained as possible by society or the state, as long as the exercise of those rights do not interfere with the exercise of other people’s rights. The notion of positive freedom, on the contrary, argues that individuals realise freedom and fulfilment within a social and political context, and that therefore political power and social organisation can and should be used to free humans to realise their full potential. Berlin focused in his lecture on the downside of positive freedom – the totalitarian extremes of fascism and communism that arose as the perverted extremes of socially utopian political philosophies. Berman however makes the point that Berlin’s lecture was lopsided: by focusing on a critique of the extremes of positive freedom he failed to address the downside of negative freedom taken to an extreme – an atomised and competitive society of selfish individuals, lacking the interest or will to coalesce in pursuit of goals and projects that improve society as a whole. Berman does not quote Mrs Thatcher, who famously said: “There is no such thing as Society”, only the individual, the family, the market, the State and the Nation. But perhaps that is the quintessential articulation of the notion of negative freedom, at its most extreme.

This is not to say that either “negative” or “positive” freedom is good or bad per se. For our purposes it is a useful tool for understanding that, just as the evolution of European society, political organisation and urban environments in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was inevitably constrained and moulded by Europe’s feudal roots, so too was the American experience inevitably constrained and moulded by the radically new circumstances in which the colonists in the new world found themselves. (I should say at this point that this analysis really only holds for the non-slaveholding society of the north of the United States; the political development, culture and urban environments of the slave-agricultural states of the US and of Latin America were obviously utterly different.)

At a very basic level the political and social evolution of Europe was constrained by two overwhelming facts: all significant property was already “owned” (or under feudalism, controlled), and agricultural land was a “closed system”. Peasants were tied over generations to feudal landlords through complex bonds which were certainly exploitative, but also contained elements of reciprocity, mutual obligation and paternalism. In the “free air” of the cities craftsmen, traders and artists certainly had much greater independence based on their own skills, and opportunity and freedom were commensurately greater. This meant that all social progress short of revolution (which were regular but mostly defeated) could only be incrementally attained by the relatively powerless, through solidarity with one’s peers or community (such as guilds or trade unions) to achieve concessions, through negotiation, through withholding labour or selling one’s labour to another employer. From the perspective of the owners of property and the holders of political power, questions of reform, readiness to compromise and fear of pushing the masses too far were central issues of the era. Throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries social and political reform and reaction were a central theme: the extension of voting rights to non-property holders, improvement of urban living standards and provision of subsidised housing by philanthropists or the state, the recognition of trade unions, the extension of free or subsidised education, rent protection and anti-child labour legislation, and the extension of insurance for unemployment. Interestingly, in Germany it was Bismarck, in alliance with the most reactionary political forces in the country, who was at the forefront of constructing the emerging welfare state. The other key difference was that agricultural land, the main factor of production, was by definition limited. Agricultural production could therefore only expand incrementally: it was possible to expand output per acre by more efficient use of the existing land or via one-off transformations through the introduction of new crops (such as corn and the potato), but in general the wealth-creation possibilities for the main sector of the economy could not be radically expanded. There was therefore no means of escape for the rural poor except via immigration to the Americas or to join the urban poor in the cities; indeed, the process of agricultural “enclosure” (the consolidation of fields to allow more efficient farming) led to the massive acceleration of the process of driving the rural poor off the land. It was only in the late 19^th century that falling prices of grain from American fields, the transport revolution of trains and steamships, and political reforms (the “Corn Law”) that eliminated protective tariffs for the landowners in Britain, allowed the diets of the urban poor to radically improve (probably back to levels the rural poor had enjoyed a hundred years previously).

The situation in the United States was so radically different that it is difficult to exaggerate the psychological differences in the way in which people viewed their environments. Land was suddenly a free commodity, dependent only on the willingness of the individual and his family to clear the land, plant crops and, where possible, get the crop to a market. Nothing (except for indentured labour or slavery) prevented the individual from leaving an employer and starting on his own. The horizons both for the individual and for society as a whole were vast by comparison: agricultural output could expand exponentially simply by clearing new land; high labour costs promoted high investment in mechanisation which fed back into higher productivity and output; immigration expanded massively through the same technological transport innovations which allowed the processing and export of crops. In a sense, the surprise is not that the urban landscape of America is so different from that of Europe, but that it remains so similar.

To quote Berman again: “[t]he American story is one of a nation that moved along a certain trajectory, ‘choosing’, at a number of crucial junctures, options that seemed glamorous and exciting at the time – technology over craft, individual achievement over the common weal, innovation over tradition, automobiles over mass transit, suburbs over cities, power over compromise, economic expansion over social welfare, competition and autonomy over community (to name but a few) – but that finally landed us at the nadir of our civilisation, namely in a Florida Wal-Mart trampling some unfortunate woman into unconsciousness for the sake of a $29 DVD player. (Don’t kid yourself: these people are your neighbours.)”[p.238]. OK, a bit polemical, but his basic point is spot on.

The important conclusion is that the American urban environment looks like it does for a good reason – that if there is a spectrum from “no such thing as society” at one end to “society is almost everything” at the other, American society is very much at the individualist end, the product of “the relentless American habit of choosing the individual solution over the collective one” [Berman quoting Alex Marshall, p.251]. As we saw above, this is not a value judgement: Japan, for example, is probably at the other end of the spectrum – where social constraints, collective obligations and the pressures of conformity in behaviour severely constrain the “negative freedom” of an individual, but in which there is a corresponding respect for, investment in and enjoyment of a public realm.

In particular, the technological “choices” that a society makes are surely not neutral but rather are embedded in, and constrained by, that society’s basic operating systems. When, for example, Jane Jacobs confronted Robert Moses’ traffic schemes by arguing for the centrality of the street in a city’s life, American cities had been evolving on a divergent path from their European precedents for a century and a half. The basic concept of street scale diverged, as we saw earlier, by around 1800. The early part of the 20^th century saw large American cities seize on the possibilities of the technologies of the elevator and steel-framed construction to radically transform their downtown areas. The rapid and wholehearted adoption of the automobile, and the subsequent drive to adapt the city landscape to the car, was therefore just one of a number of innovations in the urban landscape of which American society was an “early adopter” and relentless “booster”. European societies were far more restrained, perhaps backward, in their adoption of these specific technologies. It was clearly not for lack of opportunity or knowledge, or that they chose to remain less modern, but rather that the centres of gravity of those societies were skewed toward the socially consensual over the individual, toward the public and state over the private, and toward continuity over radical breaks with the past.

A final point I would make is that the process of society-technological choice-urban environment may not be just one-way: i.e. significant feedback loops are involved. For example, sociological analyses that have documented a decline in civic engagement in recent American history (I am thinking in particular of Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community”) clearly identify patterns of development in automobile suburbia as contributory factors. Again, it is not to say that these forces are not present in all societies, rather that the propensities are greater in some than others.

In this respect, perhaps many of the design choices in the American urban environment are an inevitable by-product of a mainstream society which is mobile, dynamic and aggressively competitive, and that more communitarian, public-spirited or social democratic principles of urban planning, designed to enhance “positive freedom”, could be a long time coming.