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Planned Communities – Where Dreams Go to Die
In the early 1950s, a Viennese-born architect named Victor Gruen was out the change the world with a new way for Americans to shop and interact: an indoor, fully covered, shopping experience. But his dream was far different from the shopping malls we know, today.
He wanted to create a walkable, diverse environment reminiscent of the historic streets of Vienna, where he grew up. It was a place free of automobiles, filled with shops, cafes, offices, residences, schools, and even a hospital and public art and green space and everything else a “community” needed. Needless to say, what ended up getting built was a gigantic stacked and packed shopping mall set in the middle of an expansive, blacktop, parking wasteland… sans all the rest. It's called the Southdale Center in Minnesota. Real estate developers immediately embraced the model and the rest is history.
After decades of unsuccessfully trying to realize his vision, Gruen returned to his beloved Vienna, only to find that the old downtown was now in the shadow of a gigantic shopping mall.
Somehow, utopia never quite turns out the way one plans. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying… and failing.
Planners have been envisioning new towns and cities for centuries. In the 20th century, we had Le Corbusier's ultra-urban Radiant City, Frank Lloyd Wright’s kinder, gentler Broadacre City, Paolo Soleri’s sci-fi mega-city in the desert, Arcosanti, and at the other end of the spectrum, the suburban "miracle" called Levittown. More recently, we’ve had the folly of New Urbanism, typified by new towns like Laguna West, near Sacramento, and Seaside, Florida, which served as the set for “The Truman Show,” a film lambasting America’s “faux” nightmare of a perfect life.
Ironically, the planning concepts behind the Seasides of the world, much like earlier failed concepts like “urban renewal,”[1] removed more of what is great about towns and cities than they produced. And now, New Urbanism has joined up with “high tech” to become the next step in the “mall-ing” of America, writ large: the current trend that new towns should be an amped-up vision of fake, self-contained, planned communities where residents are nothing more than avatars in a real-life Sim City, metaverse.
New Urbanism + High tech = The New Faux America
Outside of Draper, Utah, on the 600-acre site that was once a state prison complex, the world-renowned architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is planning a new town for 7,400 households. It’s called “The Point.” It’s a “15-minute city.”
The “15-minute city” is the latest fad in New Urbanism based on a rationalized but ultimately arbitrary constraint. Created by French-Colombian scientist Carlos Moreno, its conceit is to be 100 percent "walkable" and put an end to automobiles (or any other form of autonomous, personal transportation more sophisticated than a bicycle) under the theory that this will create more sustainable, human-centric, urban environments. Aside from the fact that it seems Mr. Moreno has never heard of alternative fuel vehicles (one of the fastest-growing industries in history) and that we are becoming more dependent on co-existing with machines and technology, not less, (e.g., electric bikes) this quaint idea contradicts the realities and demands of real life and things like weather, (hurricanes, rain, snow, or sweltering heat) getting older, or having to drag home heavy items like paint cans or lumber and a hundred other things real-life people do. (Oh, I forgot, Amazon will deliver it all in an hour)
Still, we all have a natural attraction to these kinds of ideas. And, fundamentally, Moreno’s vision is a planning “lite” version of more substantial investigations going on, such as Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, designed by the British architectural firm, Foster + Partners. Masdar City strives to create a self-sufficient, sustainable, carbon-neutral, zero-waste city in an uninhabitable place. Conversely, it seems The Point strives to create an inhospitable place in a perfectly habitable location. Unfortunately, much like Victor Gruen’s original hopes, what may have had a glimmer of promise to begin with has been reduced to a new version of plastic Americana.
The Point
The renderings in the development’s marketing package say it all. All of the people in them are in their early 20s to late 30s and look like they just stepped out of a Gap catalog: smiling, biking, shopping--faux people living faux lives. There are no old people in The Point. There is no ethnicity in the Point. There are no disabled people, no poor people, and no one who we would commonly call a "working man." There are no "outliers." The people are as generic and fake as the architecture: a sea of smiling, millennial, stock photo, "knowledge" workers who never have to get their hands dirty. Like some bastardization of an elitist resort, it's a consumption paradise supported by invisible service workers, who probably are either "ware-housed" somewhere or have to live someplace else.
It's a disturbing vision.
The Point
I’m sure it all looks good on paper and its marketing will be draped in all the right E.S.G. and socially correct jargon, but being alive is about more than a list of generic needs and services and faux “cafés” on every corner. Real life is messy and the better for it. A sense of “place” takes more than a clever stage set. Otherwise, why go anywhere? Why go to Paris or Venice when you can see the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas or ride the gondolas at the Venetian Casino?
At The Point, the “environment" is a potted plant, “home” is defined by soothing colors, granite countertops, and required square footage per “user,” and everything is pre-programmed to be "do not touch."
Living in The Point will be like living in something between a grotesque Googleplex campus and a mixed-use, shopping, mega-mall/office park. The Point is the “Truman Show” on steroids, but without the faux scale or homage to historical “character.” It doesn’t even pretend to acknowledge individuality or personal preferences. It’s a sea of banal, impersonal, homogeneous buildings of similar size, height, and shape. It’s is a place where people are conceptual “things” and “open space” is a “feature,” not a wild and unpredictable experience.
In short, it has no nuances, no idiosyncrasies, no spirit, no emotion, no poetry, and no soul: nothing that makes us human or alive. It is a place that only its too-cerebral, ideology-driven designers could love.
The Point is where dreams go to die.
[1] The urbanist, slash and burn concept that destroyed some of the best inner city neighborhoods in the country in the 1950s through the early 1970s, in the name of creating a better world.
Bob Silvestri is a Marin County resident, the Editor of the Marin Post, and the founder and president of Community Venture Partners, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community organization funded by individuals and nonprofit donors. Please consider DONATING TO CVP to enable us to continue to work on behalf of California residents.