The "Realist Philosophical Case for Urbanism and Against Sprawl"

Longtime MOJ readers know that I'm a big fan of my colleague Phil Bess's work on urbanism and architecture.  (I reviewed his Till We Have Built Jerusalem here.  Also, Greg Sisk engaged Bess here.)  It's worth the time to read his two-part essay (here and here), published at Public Discourse, called "The Realist Philosophical Case for Urbanism and Against Sprawl."

Now, as I've told Phil (and probably imposed on MOJ readers), I do worry that the "case against sprawl" often involves cultural and aesthetic snobbery (and even worse, hostility to families-with-children) as much as sound philosophical claims about the nature and destiny of the human person.  We need to be careful about romanticizing dense cities and about demonizing less-dense (and, in my view, unattractive and frustrating) suburbs.  There is a lot about the "urban" that deserves criticism, and a lot about the suburban that is worth praising, or at least accepting.

What I really like about Bess's work, though, is that he is critical of the "New Urbanist" movement precisely for its failure to get beyond an emotional, taste-based case for the urban.  As Bess says, the better question to ask is (in my words), "what are persons and what are they for?  And, in light of the answers to these questions, how should human communities look and be built?"