Phil Bess weighs in on the suburbs . . .

Here's urbanist-before-it-was-"new" Philip Bess, commenting on my recent link to "A Defense of the Suburbs":

 

Poulos's full argument is more nuanced than the excerpt you have quoted; but his argument requires even more careful definition and nuance then he has provided, specifically with regard to urban and suburban form.  After all, in today's America one can live in a pedestrian accessible mixed-use city neighborhood or small town and still be free to relocate.  But an argument for suburban form is at the very least an argument for separating daily uses and making them conveniently accessible to each other only by automobile.  If Poulos is defending that, he is---in my humble opinion---nuts.

 

Some Americans have a vocation to higher things that requires them to be mobile.  Some Americans are mobile when they are young and relatively unengaged with other obligations.  But many Americans are mobile for less considered and less lofty purposes.  For raising children to become capable and confident and civic-minded adults, stability is more often a better recipe than mobility.  Poulos may be post-modern, but if he is defending mobility as the sine qua non of human flourishing, he is no conservative.  The ethos of American suburbanization---identified by Tocqueville even before America was able to have post-1945 automobile suburbs---is that America is something to be consumed for whatever our immediate purposes, often merely appetitive, may be.  Modern suburbia not only reinforces and facilitates our mobility, it requires it---whether or not we have any idea of where we're going, or why.  

 

Any beautiful and culturally sustainable human settlement has become so only because some trans-generational community of persons over time has loved it and for its sake willingly endured pains, including the occasional pains of staying put.  (Think Nietzsche's---of all people!---"long obedience in the same direction.")  As hard as I would find this to believe, perhaps Poulos sees no genuine good in such settlements, nothing particularly important about communities of place with respect to human well-being.  If so, I can only infer that he views American natural and built landscapes as raw material for transient human beings, an implicitly placeless and disembodied view of human flourishing; post-modern indeed....

 

On the whole, I think it is good for people to be free to move; about this I suspect Poulos and I agree.  But freedom, as modern popes rightly remind us, is a good to be employed in service to the good.  In America, it is communities of place---traditional towns and urban neighborhoods and agriculture---that need defending, not suburbia.  That suburbanites are our countrymen (and also a majority) means that the defense of traditional urbanism must be both rationally and rhetorically compelling as well as respectful; but if it's true that human beings learn virtue and thrive in communities, defending small towns, city neighborhoods and agriculture rather than suburbia is what conservative public intellectuals should be doing.