Tag Archives: built environment

Considering a community’s “moral geography”

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A resident of Harrisonburg, Virginia walks through the community and consider the moral implications of its design:

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Today, as in the century-old photo in my hand, the rail bends out of sight just beyond a wooden bridge. A brick warehouse still flanks the right side of the track, though offices now peer through its rows of windows. To my left, the changes are starker. Where the train platform once extended welcome and permitted leave-taking, the blank face of the local jail looms overhead. Razor wire and surveillance cameras stand vigil. The pride of the city at its inauguration in 1911, Union Station is now a faint memory. In its place stands a depot of another infrastructure project: our national network of prisons, jails, and detention centers…

I remember Gilmore and the jail’s residents as I walk toward Court Square, at the heart of this small city. A domed pavilion stands on the corner. The waters that flowed from a spring here made this a place of gathering and relief long before any dream of a city or courts. For generations, many Indigenous peoples, including the Monacan, have made the Shenandoah Valley a place of dwelling and struggle, provision, and exchange. Though European arrival transformed land into possession and fixed new boundary lines upon it and upon our hearts, ancient routes still guide our movement through this valley. Early roads followed the trails of Indigenous peoples, as did the railways. Today, a federal interstate channels commerce and transit along similar paths…

These spasms are more than historical artifacts or chance misfortunes on the road to progress. They shape our national history, the places we live, and how we move. Nearly a century after Harris’s death, the civil rights movement challenged Jim Crow laws and won significant advances toward desegregation and legal equality. Meanwhile, racial and class separation were being further inscribed upon the land itself. Three signature construction projects characterized this reactionary spatial reordering of the postwar and civil rights era: the suburb, the interstate highway system, and the carceral archipelago. Together with their complementary social and physical infrastructure, these institutions map an enduring moral geography that guides how we live and move in the world…

There are no quick fixes or universal remedies. But if we’re willing to dream new dreams together, there are tools we can learn to use to refashion the places we live into places of shared thriving. In the Shenandoah Valley, we are reckoning with our liability for supremacist land use planning and the historic destruction of housing. Community groups are participating in comprehensive zoning and regulatory reviews in hopes of spurring affordable housing and increasing neighborhood economic integration. Networks of mutual aid and community safety are warming up to keep immigration enforcement from tearing us apart. Families are organizing bike buses for schoolkids. Cooperatives, cohousing, bail funds, and community land trusts are forming to practice new ways of being free together in the land. Everyday people are taking risks and making sacrifices to redesign our lives in this place for connection, care, and joy.

Our building and planning choices reflect decisions made by leaders and residents. These decisions have moral dimensions; they are not just practical matters or problem-solving exercises but rather are the result of humans enacting meanings in a setting. Answering “What makes a good community?” is a moral question that then affects all sorts of discussions and decisions.

I appreciate that the article both acknowledges the past processes that led to our settings today and reminds us that we participate in shaping our communities today. If we find that we do not like the moral geography we have today, there are opportunities to develop a different moral geography.

It would also be interesting to hear how others in the community understand and respond to the past and current moral geography. How many people notice these moral dimensions? Who benefits from the existing moral geography? Is there consensus about what the moral geography could be in a decade or 50 years?

Most of the American built environment is not designed

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen argues in Welcome to Your World that despite what we know about the importance of the built environment, few American environments are designed:

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Most of what we see from our windows or in our surroundings has been constructed, but it was not really designed in any but a rudimentary sense of the word. In the United States, 85 percent of new construction – whether it is a new bridge, an urban park, a housing development, or a school addition – is realized at the hands of construction firms collaborating with real estate developers or other private clients. Many of these buildings bypass designers (a catchall term for professionals involved in designing the built environment, including architects, landscape architects, interior architects, urban designers, city planners, civil engineers, and other sorts of civil servants) completely, or employ them only cursorily, to review and stamp their approval on drawings… (xxi)

Why is this the case?

In the United States and in most other parts of the world today, many people believe that engaging a highly trained design professional is an unnecessary expense. True, wealthy individuals and corporations with plenty of assets do buy design to add beauty or prestige, and public and private institutions aspiring to serve as cultural stewards hire trained, informed professionals for complex structures such as skyscrapers. But this is not the norm.

The reason aside from financial considerations is that most projects in the built environment are commissioned on the basis of and judged by two complementary standards. Safety first: building codes and legislation and inspectors enforce standards that ensure that our bridges and buildings and parks and cityscapes will withstand gravity and wind, will weather the vicissitudes of climate and the ravages of time, and that their smaller features, such as electrical systems and stairways ,will not shock or trip people up. Function next: people expect projects to serve an institution’s or private individual’s daily needs both effectively and efficiently, which often means with as little expenditure of resources – space, time, money – as possible. (xxii)

In other words, design and beauty and their effects on people and their interactions are not considered as much as they should be. An emphasis on safety, initial cost, and function shortchanges what the built environment could offer in the long run. Thus, Americans often get uninspiring buildings and places.

This reminds me of three similar arguments:

  1. James Howard Kunstler makes a similar argument about the American suburbs. Why would people care about such places that offer so little in terms of the built environment?
  2. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg argues that public buildings and spaces could offer much to enhance community life if they were built with design and people in mind. For example, schools and libraries could be true gathering places that bring people together.
  3. Architect Sarah Susanka argues Americans do not need bigger homes but rather homes that are designed for them and that will enhance their life. Instead, the homes that Americans get – not designed by architects – are lifeless boxes.

Given the social forces at work leading to this, it would take substantial effort to have Americans value and employ better built environments.