Leaving an Awful Legacy for Future Generations
For most of human history, humans designed and built time-tested settlements, buildings, and transportation that were loved and persisted for countless generations.
Starting in the twentieth century, this all changed for the worse due to the emergence of the motor vehicle and the modernist architectural paradigm. Neither of these ruinous innovations are capable of leaving us with human-centered places that are sustainable, loved, human-scaled, or timeless. Instead, the buildings, communities, and transportation these two tragic paradigms have left us and future generations are unlovable, despised, oversized, unsustainable, unaffordable, and ugly. So much so that we and future generations are eager to demolish such things the moment they are built (or stop them from being built in the first place by an enraged mob of NIMBYs).
Today it seems hard to believe – following a century of ruin by motorized transportation and modernist architecture – that before the twentieth century, developers were admired and considered heroic because they reliably brought lovable buildings and transportation to our communities. After a century of awfulness, developers instead reliably bring us buildings and transportation that we rightly fear and despise and want to stop or demolish as soon as possible.
Jan Gehl once expressed the joy of living in a place and time when new development was intended to make people rather than motor vehicles happy, or a time when buildings were designed based on a time-tested and loved design rather than an embarrassing dream of a modernist.
A time that bears no resemblance to today.
“How nice it is,” Gehl rhapsodized about the past we have lost, “to wake up every morning and know that your city is a little better than it was the day before.”
Gehl was expressing what it was like in most of human history. The rise of motorized travel and modernist buildings has tragically reversed this joyous expectation. Instead of eager expectation for what was to come, we are now horrified by what will be done to make our communities worse.
It does not have to be this way.
Much of our future will be about demolishing the awful legacy of the twentieth (and the early twenty-first) century and replacing it by restoring the tradition of designing for people, not motor vehicles or modernists.