He is approached by a man with a clipboard, that universal talisman of functionaries who take themselves to be deputized on behalf of order. What the functionary says is hard to make out. But then it hardly matters, does it? It is really the clipboard that conveys the message, a mute form of authority that often has no real argument to give, and can be effective only if everyone automatically defers to it.

But our stunt rider doesn’t do this. From his helmet cam, we see him riding in a slow circle around Clipboard Man on one wheel, and you can sense that he is at ease. “Does this look dangerous?” he asks, a bit incredulously. He has a point, which is easy to grasp if you have ever been nearly killed in a parking lot by some upstanding member of the PTA backing out in her Suburban.

But Wheelie Guy then takes it to the next level. He says to Clipboard Man: “You’re just confused, and it makes you feel things.” The functionary really does seem to be stumped by this interaction.

Wheelie Guy rides off. He clearly won the battle, in some important sense, but isn’t fool enough to think the police will be hip to his higher logic.

According to that logic, it is not just that Clipboard Man’s mission is gratuitous, objectively speaking: the parking lot is empty. But the fetish of rule-following becomes its own justification, and it fills him with a lust for enforcement even when there probably isn’t, in fact, any rule to cover parking lot wheelies. At the risk of seeming unpatriotic, I have the sad duty of pointing out that this seems to be a distinctly American phenomenon. As my French friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy said to me: “You are rule worshippers”, to the point we will make up rules on the fly to cover unanticipated eruptions of the human spirit. To compensate, we keep singing a song to ourselves about being “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.

This tension between clipboards and wheelies seems to perfectly represent America’s checkered struggle with urban living and the technocratic push towards the so-called smart city. The longing for order that underlies attempts to render the city as an object of rational planning is sometimes impervious to chastisement by the stubborn realities of human behavior.

How, then, would the land of the free embrace the idea of the smart city — the idea that the logic of interconnected electronic devices can be applied to the human landscape, with everything optimized and orchestrated by an “urban operating system”? The energy and sewage infrastructure, police protections, trash collection, the allocation of parking and street capacity, the orchestration of traffic lights, the timing of deliveries and all the other services that make a city work will be massaged by data science and achieve a kind of frictionlessness.

Of course, human beings tend to do things that are unpredictable, making them the bug in the system. But if people can be coaxed into driverless cars, it may become possible that our movements through the city can be monitored and coordinated from afar, bringing us closer to what the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “a glorious, collisionless manner of living”. He was naming the ambition of a certain modern character-type, whom he called “the rationalist”.

Transformative urban planning has long been an ambition of the high-modernist mindset. Its goals are usually public health, efficiency, beauty and something more elusive — order. Some cities that have received the full treatment over the past two centuries are wonderful places to visit despite their controversial remakings; see Paris (much of it demolished and rebuilt by Baron Haussmann under Louis Napoleon in the 19th century). Others, like Brasilia and Chandigarh (both designed from the ground up by Le Corbusier), quickly became ghost towns, full of high-modernist buildings and plazas of impressive conceptual ambition through which the wind whistled forlornly, eventually to be repurposed by squatters or stripped of building materials for use in the surrounding shanty towns where urban life carries on in defiance of the master plan. Such projects are sometimes sited in the developing world because they have no robust tradition of self-rule, and therefore offer no organized resistance to the plans of these Western visionaries. Le Corbusier offered his services as a planner to Western authoritarians — both the Vichy regime and Stalin’s USSR — before hitting upon this strategy of siting his projects in the developing world.

There is something in the technocratic visionary that is too easily tempted into a moral-intellectual space that floats free of the empirical, and has more in common with the non-falsifiable commitments of a cult. And while these grand visions are easy to criticize on these grounds, it is usually the small-bore, uncoordinated attempts to assert control that, cumulatively, can lead to a clampdown on the human spirit in urban spaces. Yet, precisely because of the petty-tyrant character of such clampdowns — the obvious fact that they are clampdowns — they may summon a response in certain bold souls that is beautiful to behold. Like Wheelie Guy.

The rapper Lupe Fiasco understands this. It’s there in his beautiful track “Kick, Push” — the story of an urban kid who comes to maturity through skateboarding, and in doing so, encounters clipboard authority.

Since the first kick flip he landed
Labeled a misfit, a bandit
His neighbors couldn’t stand it
So he was banished to the park
Started in the morning
Wouldn’t stop till after dark
Yeah when they said it’s getting late in here
So I’m sorry young man there’s no skating here

The kid meets a girl skater; she takes him to a spot in a parking lot he didn’t know about, and they grind it until “security came and said there’s no skating here”. They become part of a crew. They get chased out of office building plazas. “Just the freedom was better than breathing.”

Coming of age, fugitive love, solidarity: getting chased off by “security” plays a role in creating the dissident bond. What a shame it would be if there were no Clipboard Men to heighten the experience of freedom! Like Wheelie Guy, the protagonists of “Kick, Push” confront the forces of order personified: functionaries who are nonetheless flesh and blood, giving chase to kids on skateboards and probably relishing the chase for human reasons of their own. What becomes of this human drama — the drama of freedom — when order is rendered algorithmically? Where is the fight? It is submerged and illegible. It already happened, somewhere else, and the skaters were not party to it.

Sometimes urban spaces are designed to forestall moments like those depicted by Lupe Fiasco, making the explicit intervention of “security” unnecessary because the possibilities of use have been more rigorously constrained by the design itself. Thomas de Monchaux writes of “the taste for order” that prevails when public parks, for example, come to be funded by private interests. It is natural to suppose this is driven by liability concerns, but the taste for order tends to slip the bonds of any such calculation and become a kind of murky moralism: not something openly avowed but rather taken for granted, hard to grab hold of, and therefore hard to contest.

Monchaux writes about the High Line in New York City, a wonderful park created with private financing out of an elevated railway that had long been out of service. He gives the park its proper due, but then notes that “its defining detail is the prim arrangement of metal pins and ropes that enforce the border between paving and planting. They seem to say: Do not wander, do not play, do not fool around.”

Perhaps such features have a legitimate safety rationale to them (stepping off the deck and into the flower beds, a distance of some six inches, could cause you to twist an ankle). “Yet there is also something in this regulation that goes beyond defense against the worst possibilities, toward a discouragement of all the benign irregularities — the unruly felicities, creative improvisations, leisurely inefficiencies and insouciant eccentricities — that are the heart of urban life.”

Monchaux connects the design of public spaces to political culture:

“In our liberal democracy, any occupation of public space — even, sometimes especially, at play — is a celebration of the rights of assembly and expression. The greatest success of parks and plazas is… in the ways that, as a matter of policy and design, they encourage the taking of liberties.”

This is what skateboarders represent, and more. They take a plaza not as a mere empty space for assembly, but as a constitutive element of their activity. Its hardscape features define specific challenges; they develop a repertoire of skills that may be specific to the place. They appropriate it for purposes that were never intended but are latent in it, lying dormant as affordances to be discovered by people who roll. Their “misuse” has a revelatory quality.

Understood this way, skateboarding easily lends itself to being viewed as performance art. But this would be to risk misidentifying skateboarding with the feckless “subversive” aspiration of art people. I think it is more instructive to view urban skating as an expression of civic republicanism, if one may apply a stodgy-sounding term here. Consider Monchaux’s parenthetical remark that the best parks and plazas encourage the taking of liberties “as a matter of policy and design”. Yes and no. If the liberties in question are to be actively taken (for that is what is impressive about the skaters), rather than prescribed, the “encouraging” must have a minimal quality to it. Such is the tactful quality required of the design, and it is a quality characteristic of liberalism as originally understood: securing the minimal conditions for living together, and a bit more, but not trying to control everything.

Liberalism too easily slides into something more ambitious, and by that measure less liberal. Public spaces that feel unadministered seem to be vanishing. If the “policy and design” of parks and plazas is to be modest, deliberately under-determining of the uses that might be found for them, the designer must refrain from precisely that which is most exciting to intellectuals: a comprehensive vision. Such visions invariably clamp down on play, because play insists on making its own rules, internal to some game that is “for us” as Johan Huizinga pointed out in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. That is, for we who are right here right now. The skaters definitely have a sense of this “we”.

In assessing the smart-city vision, then, we need to keep one eye on how well the proposed order will leave room for those sources of unplanned urban delight so well named by Monchaux: “unruly felicities, creative improvisations, leisurely inefficiencies and insouciant eccentricities.” What if Clipboard Man is to be installed in an opaque, proprietary “urban operating system” that is highly determinate, an “efficient, one-to-one mapping of activities to facilities” in which parking lot wheelies do not compute? How is this clampdown likely to reverberate through society? Will it modify the liberal inheritance that we take for granted? Whose vision is this, anyway?

Writing in Tablet, Jacob Siegel points out that “democratic governments think they can hire out for the basic service they’re supposed to provide, effectively subcontracting the day to day functions of running a city and providing municipal services. Well, they’re right, they can, but of course they’ll be advertising why they’re not really necessary and in the long run putting themselves out of a job.” There is real attraction to having the tech firms of Silicon Valley take things over, given the frequent dysfunction of democratic government. Quite reasonably, Siegel writes, many of us would be willing to give up “some democracy for a bit of benign authoritarianism, if it only made the damn trains run on time. The trade-off comes in the loss of power over the institutions we have to live inside.”

The issue, then, is sovereignty. In the late 2010s, Google’s Sidewalk Labs planned to build a model city within Toronto, a sort of Bonsai version of what is possible, conceived in the spirit of other demonstration cities that were intended to sway elite opinion. The most famous of these is perhaps Potemkin’s village that so impressed Catherine the Great. Sensors would be embedded throughout the physical plant to capture the resident’s activities, then to be massaged by cutting-edge data science. The hope, clearly, is to build a deep, proprietary social science. Such a science could lead to real improvements in urban management, for example by being able to predict demand for heat and electricity, manage the allocation of street capacity based on demand, and automate waste disposal. But note that hoarding the data collected, and guarding it with military-grade secrecy, is key to the whole concept, as without that there is no business rationale. The project was canceled in 2020 due to local opposition over the matter of “data privacy”, which could just as well be named “data ownership”.

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James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, is useful given Google’s governmental aspirations. In the 1988 book, Scott traces the development of the modern state as a process of rendering the lives of its inhabitants more “legible”. The premodern state was in many respects blind; it “knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed ‘map’ of its terrain and its people”. This lack of a comprehensive view put real limits on the aspiration for centralized control; the state’s “interventions were often crude and self-defeating”. The rise of a more synoptic administrative apparatus in the 18th century made it possible to improve the delivery of services and the keeping of records, mainly for the purposes of taxation and military conscription. Enhanced legibility also led to a new way of viewing society, as a system that is intellectually graspable. As such, it becomes an attractive object to the gaze of visionaries, and invites intervention. The more rigorous the vision, and the more confidence it inspires in those who share it, the more the intervention seems to demand that a blank slate be prepared for the master strokes.

This same urge might explain the impatience of the smart city urbanist, née venture capitalist, who told The New York Times that “human beings currently live in cities that are the equivalent of flip-phones”. There’s a keen sense of waste; our sheer lack of optimization offends. Another investor-urbanist, a Mr Huh, complains: “We have not affected the fundamental building blocks of infrastructure and society.” The Times reporter writes that Mr Huh gestured to his laptop and said: “We’ve made this better. We’ve made the new things better. We haven’t made the old things better.” In a helpful gloss, the reporter points out that in thinking about how to make the old things better, “people in tech prize ‘first principles’, a concept that suggests that historical awareness and traditional expertise can get in the way of breakthrough ideas”.

Here we see the old drama of modernism playing out one more time. The urban blank slater reminds us of Thomas Hobbes’ disgust with the customary or common law, that body of precedents and practices that ordered English life, but which appeared to his impatient mind as a sediment of inherited mindlessness. For him, life needed to be governed by laws that would be excogitated from scratch (by him), according to clear principles, not by the haphazard accumulation of informal usages and understandings. Rather than seeking the reasons latent in our unthought practices, and from them trying to reverse-engineer the logic of a city, the smart city epigones of Hobbes place their trust in their own powers of a priori reason.

But governing by syllogism doesn’t work very well. For one thing, the sovereign forfeits that easy, habitual law-abidingness that custom secures. As Thomas Schrock said in his critique of Hobbes: “We follow customary laws, not out of fear, but because they are here with us, our own, part of us.”

Governing by syllogism, on the other hand, requires heavy police work. Call Security!

The Thames is the only place I feel truly rooted, even if it too is rushing out to sea, as the poet John Denham wrote, “like mortal life to meet eternity”. The river is the reason London is here: it is a primordial presence in the city, with its murky waters and oozing tidal beaches.

It is also a human artefact, its banks and bridges part of the ever-changing fabric of the city. The spaces and structures along the Thames determine who can enjoy its redemptive powers, and in what ways. With sensitive design, London’s riversides could be an unparalleled treasure — but we’re not there yet.

The Thames encompasses many worlds, from the bucolic neighbourhoods of Kingston to the pincushion of skyscrapers that is the Isle of Dogs. That is what makes it a true index of London’s character, for the city remains in many ways a disparate collection of villages. And the riverside is at its best when it provides an intimate dialogue of public and private, something all too rare in the contemporary mega-city. In Wandsworth and Battersea, for instance, the Thames path passes riverboat communities and occasionally zig-zags, in almost labyrinthine fashion, around the contours of low-rise apartment buildings. The private spaces enrich the public by making them less anonymous, but there is enough distinction that you don’t feel like an interloper.

In all of these ways, the Thames allows Londoners to see and know their city, and discover its hidden corners. These are glimpses of how the river could tie the city together.

But only in the past 50 years has it been possible to imagine the Thames as something Londoners share in common, and that prospect is rapidly disappearing again. Before the Seventies, the river had for centuries been dominated by warehouses, docks, shipping and industry; more toil and smoke than afternoon walks. This was the often brutal and impoverished landscape that Dickens observed throughout his life, having worked as a boy in a shoe-polish factory on the Thames’s shore (now the site of Charing Cross station), and which gave him the unforgettable opening of his last novel, Our Mutual Friend, where a pair of scavengers salvage a corpse from its waters.

All that is gone now, apart from some exotic place-names recalling the goods that used to arrive here. Since the Nineties, London has found a new role as a safe deposit box for global wealth, especially through its property market. This change in fortunes has brought new forms of architecture, in particular high-rise glass apartment buildings, with the most profitable locations overlooking the river. As though by some reversal of the tide, the gritty poverty of Dickens’s Thames has turned to pristine wealth, and the capitalism Britain once exported to the world along this river has returned to colonise its very banks.

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As a result, the public potential of the Thames is being squandered. Long stretches between Putney and Vauxhall, for instance, have become a monoculture of generic glass towers. Sometimes these protrude right out to the waterside, forcing you to walk around them, and are often arranged on plots of private land with signs reminding passers-by not to skateboard, cycle, or walk dogs. Such developments are to a thriving urban realm what a commercial plantation is to a forest; instead of ecosystems you get sterile, monotonous repetition. Signs of life are rarely seen in these compound-like spaces, which may reflect the fact that many of them are just storing capital for foreign investors. Or it may simply reflect that there is no longer anything interesting to do in these areas.

In the Eighties, during the first phase of redevelopment on the Thames, new apartment blocks still reflected the capital’s traditional character as a low- and medium-rise city of brick. Now, thanks to the growing flood of commercial development, London is rapidly acquiring a high-rise skyline. These structures are obvious symbols of the city’s disturbing inequality.

This trend is especially destructive in the river’s historic areas, where monuments are being crowded out by luxury apartments and offices. At the recent Battersea Power Station development, new buildings have squeezed the historic structure into a kind of glass corset. The same will happen to the South Bank if the enormous new building proposed there, 72 Upper Ground, is not stopped by governmental review.

It’s worth noting here that, along the Thames as elsewhere in the capital, it isn’t just a case of private developments reshaping public space, but often of public space itself turning out to be privately controlled. A 2017 Guardian investigation reported that the site occupied by City Hall — the home of the London Assembly and Mayor — was owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait. A reporter seeking details was bundled away by private security guards and told that “unsanctioned journalistic activity is banned on the site”. Similarly, the land surrounding the ExCel centre in the Royal Docks area, another seemingly public space, belongs to a United Arab Emirates investment vehicle.

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The Trad case for Brutalism

By Niall Gooch

Tall glass construction has become emblematic of the degrading of the public realm, though this is not to say it has no place on the river. The Isle of Dogs financial district, as seen from the Docklands Light Railway pulling out of Canary Wharf station, is one of London’s most remarkable sights. Given its economic function and discrete location, this cityscape feels like a more natural part of the capital than what sits across from it on Greenwich peninsula. Here, we see the other downside of post-Nineties commercial development: not dull monotony but a random assortment of architectural gimmicks, including the O2 arena, Ravensbourne University and the mother of all InterContinental Hotels.

The river can accommodate many forms of expression: the modest and the monumental, the intimate and the extraordinary, the classical and the kitsch. But it is a question of composition; every building and landscape depends for its effect on the way it contrasts those surrounding it, just as every musical note and motif does.

How can the Thames achieve a better rhythm? As Rowan Moore has written recently, many of the recent failures stem from familiar political dynamics. Successive Mayors promised to humanise the river, before succumbing to the temptation of huge foreign investment and the accompanying housing and job statistics, however misleading those inevitably are. Meanwhile, any prospect of co-ordinated planning along the river has been scuppered by the financial motives of the multiple boroughs that control its banks.

The obvious answer is to create more scope for unified planning, although that would have its own stifling effects on riverside variety. There should at least be stricter limits on how much of the riverbank in a given area can be given over to private high-rise buildings, as well as a firmer hand used in the application of guidelines, which currently allow developers to claim they are working sensitively with their surroundings, when anyone can see the opposite is true. Above all, the paths that give the public access to the riverside must be protected from further encroachments.

But it may be that London’s characteristic restlessness and impermanence will provide part of the solution. The return to brick-faced building with more traditional proportions, known as New London Vernacular, over the past decade is a reminder that urban form is always shifting in response to economic conditions, political pressures and taste. The boom in glass towers began after the economic slump of the early Nineties; will these monuments to inequality and corporate power make it through the period of hardship ahead? Sadiq Khan’s decision to block Foster + Partners’ 1,000 foot “Tulip” skyscraper in 2019 suggests there is already a political ceiling to the skyline. It’s perfectly plausible that, in a generation’s time, people will have turned against the luxury architecture of today, much as they began dubbing Brutalist buildings “monstrosities” in the late 20th century.

That said, it will require more than a change of style to give Londoners the river they deserve. The Thames Path was designated a National Trail in 1989; today, much of its passage through the capital has been entrusted to private landowners, who have lined it with gates, security cameras and metal fencing. Only a wider revulsion at the erosion of public space in the city, powerful enough to spur political action, will secure London’s most ancient asset for the future.

Indeed I only found that out last week, when word got out that North Lanarkshire Council had agreed to purchase Cumbernauld’s town centre, but only in order to raze it to the ground. The responses adhered to a familiar script. Architectural historians, of course, were appalled; they argued that, as Britain’s first shopping centre and a radical experiment in building a town centre that went up instead of down, the eight storey “megastructure” was an important part of our cultural legacy. But there was no popular outrage at the news that the rotting eyesore in the centre of the town might soon be gone.

In fact, the destruction of The Centre Cumbernauld (to give it its proper name), which was erected on concrete stilts over a dual carriageway in 1967, has been a dream of many people for a long time. In 2005 it topped a poll of 10,000 people in the UK as the building in Britain that people most wanted to see demolished. Cumbernauld itself, like many of the 27 New Towns that were built in the UK after the war, does not have a great reputation. The comedian Craig Ferguson (who grew up there) once derided it as a “modernist experiment”, where “clueless” town planners had provided “soulless housing for ground-down workers”, before adding that the houses looked like “German machine gun turrets”. My cousins on the west coast of Scotland were pithier: they called it “Scumbernauld”.

Yet for a brief moment in the Sixties and Seventies, Cumbernauld represented an exciting vision of the future, in which a projected population of 70,000 workers and their families would move through the town via a network of pavements, underpasses and bridges. They would never have to cross a road, and never have to spend more than 20 minutes walking to reach the “brilliantly logical” town centre, which housed shops, a library, offices, apartments and even a few penthouses.

When Princess Margaret visited The Centre Cumbernauld in 1967, she pronounced it “fabulous”; that same year it won the Reynolds Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects. My grandparents lived there in the last years of their lives and greatly preferred their Cumbernauld flat to the one they had lived in on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow; likewise my Aunt Janet, who lived there between 1972 and 1982, still remembers how novel it was to go shopping without being rained on.

Indeed, even if it had been pouring when I paid a visit last week, I would have remained dry: when I stepped off the bus, I was already inside the centre, confronted with its “brilliant logic”. Is it possible, I wondered, that the architectural historians are right: does Cumbernauld’s town centre deserve to be preserved for future generations? I followed a ramp (there were no stairs or lifts) to the first floor, where I entered the retail complex which had so impressed Princess Margaret 55 years earlier.

The years have not been kind to the place. Where once it featured well-known retailers, such as Halford’s, M & Co. and the supermarket chain Presto, now it is clearly the part of the complex where rents are cheapest (an additional shopping centre, the Antonine, was grafted onto the original building in 2007; that one was opened by Princess Anne); it is here that the eyebrow threaders, tattoo artists, “vintage” shops and suicide prevention centres set up shop. The interior had been remodelled so all traces of its late Sixties utopia-lite origins were gone: bizarrely, the enormous clock from St Enoch’s train station in Glasgow had been embedded in the wall of a mezzanine in the new section, where it kept the time at a permanent 8:20.

After about ten minutes, a security guard informed me that it is forbidden to take pictures in the centre, because it is private property. I moved to the next level, which contains the library and a children’s day-care. This section has not been remodelled; it is very close to the original: lots of brick and tile and concrete, the pipes and wires were exposed. The corridors had names, as if they were streets, but the doors granting entry to them were locked. A service lift was out of order; a weird bench was moulded into the concrete; the glass overhead was filthy. Through it, I could make out the windows of the penthouses, long since abandoned. At the far end, a roof garden for toddlers hung suspended in the air over the dual carriageway beneath.

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The library itself was cheerful enough, but overall, I felt as though I had stumbled upon a vision of Logan’s Run as reimagined by Seventies British trade unionists, only the death squads that were supposed to kill you after you turned 30 had all gone, and everyone had long since taken the opportunity to run away, or simply grow older. It was pretty grim.

But if it was grim on the inside, then it was much worse from the outside. Glimpses of Cumbernauld’s town centre from the window of the bus over the years had not done justice to the scale of the architectural catastrophe. It reminded me of the vast Izhmash plant in Udmurtia, Russia, where they pump out AK 47s and other weapons. But Izhmash at least had a decorative historical entrance; with the general absence of windows and the abundance of pipes and wires in the town centre, everything looked like the back of something. The only feature the eye was drawn towards was the long rectangular section with porthole windows suspended on stilts that hung over the road. Locals call it “the alien’s head”.

From there I took a stroll over the bridges and through the underpasses of the town. Certainly it was convenient, though obviously the planners had not thought about the canvas that endless concrete represents to bored teenagers and the threatening atmosphere it can present at night. I was passing through a particularly luminous underpass when I was accosted by a man with a hammer and sickle tattoo on his arm. “They paint it and then it gets graffitied the next day,” he said.

When I asked him how long he had lived in the town, he replied: “Most of my life, on and off. Cumbernauld is a social experiment: it’s driven me doolally. Have you seen the centre? It’s full of people like that.”

Returning, I felt a sense of coercion: the ghostly hand of the planners had arranged everything so that I was more or less obliged to follow the same route through extremely functional housing. Obviously the working classes had no need of freedom, beauty, or variety: they could get by with a few trees. Behold, Le Corbusier’s “machine for living in”, in the Lanarkshire hills.

When I arrived in Cumbernauld, I was open to the idea that the town centre might be worth saving. Now, not so much. It was not the brutalism; having spent a lot of time in the former USSR I have developed a taste for brutalism when done right. In Central Asia, in particular, architects took eastern motifs and incorporated them into their concrete structures, giving a character to blocks of flats, universities and national libraries that is entirely lacking in Cumbernauld. Those structures are worth preserving, though the cheapness of the materials likely means that one day those buildings too will disappear. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the USSR embraced brutalism in the Seventies, after “communism” had withered to mean a fridge and a TV in every house, and an annual beach holiday. In the end, the ideology was not that dissimilar to the modest utopianism of Britain’s post-war town planners.

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Cumbernauld’s town centre was pioneering, but it was also a failure. There is no disgrace in that failure, however: the first generation of occupants, like my grandparents, found these homes a huge improvement on the Glasgow tenements they had grown up in; indeed, New Towns across the country were an improvement on conditions in the slums they were designed to replace. Instead of a single room, kitchen and shared toilet, families now had extra bedrooms, bathrooms and a living room. Later generations did not have this point of comparison, however, and lived in the town once it was already decaying.

The problem with preserving architectural experiments is that they are not like novels lacking the letter “e” or repurposed urinals that live unobtrusively on bookshelves and in museums; they are infrastructure, and it is very hard to persuade people that they should pass their lives in crumbling buildings that they hate because of the interesting ideas that inspired them.

It would be nice, of course, if you could take all those decaying brutalist buildings from around Britain and move them to an open-air park where architectural historians could admire these daring visions, while others could reflect on the dangers of falling for ideas that look good on paper. But that isn’t going to happen: some of these buildings will be preserved, but most of them are going to disappear, just as most of everything has disappeared.

The truth is, we often judge New Towns too harshly: it takes centuries for a city to become interesting, and even then, many old places are also quite boring and squalid. And as it turns out, many New Towns were simply a step in a broader evolutionary process. Just as Milton Keynes has realised its destiny as a sleeper town for middle class people priced out of London and Oxford, so Cumbernauld is discovering its destiny. It was never to be a self-contained social unit built around an eight-storey mixed use retail, office and residential complex — but rather a bedroom community on the edge of the larger metropolis of Glasgow.

This faceless collection of houses and shops and retail parks, without any particular centre or identity, will ultimately surrender to a vast urban sprawl: that’s progress. In time, other New Towns will see that this too is their best option; or, if they are not located close enough to a major city, continue to crumble, until one day they vanish and are forgotten forever.

The book’s full title – Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and How We Heal – speaks to its grand ambition. Sasse argues that the whirling cesspool of American politics need not be so ugly and futile, that we can recover our sense of decency and our national pride. It’s an appealing message, but only Sasse’s biggest fans will be satisfied by this book. Its diagnosis of our ills is superficial and one-sided; its proposed solutions are feeble. Were it a book from nearly anyone else, its lightness would be laughable.

But Sasse is not anyone else; he may seek to stand for President in 2020 and, now 46, will still be young enough to run four years later. Let’s wade into the book’s shallow pools, therefore, to see why he falls so short. We will also find nuggets of wisdom there that may, in time, grow into a mature understanding of America’s maladies and help him fulfill his substantial promise.

Further reading

What does America want?

By Henry Olsen

Them is really two books. The first of these (I’ll consider the second in my next article), addresses the purported decline in America’s sense of community, which Sasse blames for both a decline in life expectancy and individual happiness. He says this isolation, this loss of community, simply transfers our natural needs for meaning and belonging to a national, political stage, where we are easily manipulated by an unscrupulous but highly profitable ‘politainment’ industry.

Community is at the heart of Them. As Sasse tells it, America was once filled with towns like the one he grew up in, Fremont, Nebraska. Children grew up under the watchful eyes of a league of parents. The Friday night football games at the local high school were where “everyone showed up”, where “there were no rich and poor – there were only Fremont Tigers”. In these “tight-knit places so many of us had called home”, “the town was in it together”.

Today those places, according to Sasse, either don’t exist or are quickly fading away. Parents are not “keeping an eye out on the roving bands of kids, making sure they aren’t up to no good. No longer is the town packing the stands for the game.” The result is loneliness, and loneliness is tearing America apart.

People used to have one primary community for all of their lives. Sasse’s own family lived in Fremont for four generations; his maternal grandfather had carved the altarpiece that is still used by the local cemetery. These days, though, economic opportunity draws people into the vortex of the city and the suburb.

Further reading

America 2025: a nation violently divided

By Henry Olsen

Sasse cites a dizzying blizzard of social science to support his claims, along with references to the work of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam (men who also grew up in small, Midwestern towns and also noted a decline in community cohesiveness). He fails to note, though, that Putnam’s most important work dates from the 1990s, chronicling decline in the period Sasse (who graduated high school in 1990) recalled so fondly.

Ambitious people like Sasse, though, become nomads. Sasse paid taxes in a dozen states in the first decade of his marriage. The result of this rootlessness: no one knows each other and everyone retreats into their own, social media-fuelled echo chamber, replacing real attachments with virtual ones.

Sasse argues that the very survival of our republic and our happiness as individuals is at stake. With such a challenge, what could the remedy possibly be? Not what you’d think. Sasse is one politician who seems to genuinely hate politics. His opening chapter is entitled “More Politics Won’t Fix This”.

And so we come to his wholly unsatisfactory recommendation. He says challenges which are global in nature can only be addressed by tiny individual steps. The ones he proposes – limiting internet screen time; spending time in your community; making regular time to meet old friends – are not going to make Fremont great again.

Further reading

A culture war the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee

By Henry Olsen

They might, at a push, reinvigorate community on the margins, but they’d take an awful lot longer to change mass behaviour. It’s like Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War saying that slavery is an evil that is ripping America apart, and then saying that rather than ban slavery in the territories it’s important to follow St Paul and be nicer to the slaves. As they say in the South, that dog don’t hunt.

Sasse’s diagnosis is also seriously flawed. Even if we accept his glowing description of 1980s Fremont, the fact is that most Americans stopped living in these places decades ago. The explosive growth of the automobile dependent suburb, subsidised by the federal government through its housing and transportation policies, meant that by 1970, 70% of America’s population lived in a metropolitan area. By 1990, the year Sasse graduated from high school, that share had risen to 77%. In short, Fremont’s Dodge County, which remains a non-metro area, has long been a throwback to America’s distant past.

Life in a metropolitan area is defined by the separation of work, life, and play. You work in one place, drive or take public transit to another to shop, go to yet another place to worship, and none of these places needs be within a mile of your home. You share these different experiences with different people in each place, and these people also share their lives with different people in each place. You may not know any of your neighbours, but that does not mean you do not know plenty of people or that you do not form friendships that matter with them. It’s just that the human interactions you do have are by choice rather than by accident and are unbounded by geography.

Further reading

The ugly truth behind Amazon's beauty contest

By Ian Birrell

A serious attempt to return to the geographically-bounded communities that Sasse remembers would mean tackling this separation head on, forcibly rebundling them – a gargantuan undertaking, and one unlikely to succeed. Maybe America could do something like Britain does: create mandatory green space between discrete towns, to nudge people into identifying with a small area and thus subtly encouraging the informal interactions upon which genuine community depends. Doing this now, however, would leave America’s vast suburbs largely in place, committing tens of millions of people to the allegedly inferior life there.

American politicians who propose limiting the growth of cities are almost always found on the Left – and are criticised by those on the Right for sacrificing consumer preference and cheaper housing on the altar of social planning. If the community deficit is as serious as Sasse proposes, perhaps it’s a sacrifice worth paying. But given Sasse cannot bring himself to consider limiting of the size of cities, perhaps this isn’t quite the problem he makes it out to be.

That’s because his real aim is not in recreating community; he aims to heal America’s political divide. Sasse implicitly acknowledges that in his youth Americans did not hate each other because of politics. Yet most Americans did not live in tight-knit communities during this time. Something else must have happened to bring about the intense vitriol and anger that makes Sasse and millions like him despair.

Further reading

And finally: the good news from flyover county

By Peter Franklin

We can begin to see what that might be by looking at what’s missing from Sasse’s own description of Fremont. Fremont High and its Friday night games looms large in his retelling, the place where “everyone” went. But it turns out Fremont High was not the only high school in town. Archbishop Bergan served many of the town’s Catholics and fielded their own sports teams. Indeed, despite their tiny size their basketball team won the Nebraska state championship during Sasse’s freshman year, something that a self-described “gym rat” who spent “enough hours there that it came to feel like an extension” of his home was surely aware of. Everyone, it turns out, does not mean everyone.

People like Sasse who extol tight-knit communities almost always miss those on the margins who don’t quite fit in. Possibly because these people generally avoid outing themselves. They’ll show up at mandatory events like pep rallies and cheer the obligatory cheers, and then go back to their quiet closeted lives where they can carve out a space of dignity far from the maddening crowd.

If they are lucky, like the kids at Archbishop Bergan, they can carve out their own space to establish their own community. If they are not, like countless outsiders, punks, theatre kids, and anyone else who has ever found themselves on the margins of high school, they cling to the shadows and ensure they remain unseen.

Further reading

Trumpism: America's new religion

By Peter Franklin

America was once a nation of communities dominated by people of faith like Sasse. Coincidentally, Sasse’s life spans the period when this group passed from a majority to a distinct minority. This, not the supposed decline in community, might have something to do with the change in the tone of American politics since Sasse’s youth.

There’s an old medieval German expression that’s relevant here: “Stadtluft macht frei” – city air makes one free. Under German feudal law, a serf who could escape to a city and remain there undetected for a year and a day was freed of his obligations and became a freeman. Cities and their modern suburban equivalents have always been havens for those who don’t care to fit into tight communities, for the people who want to be free.

Visit Americas cities and suburbs and you will find all those people who want to be free from old-time community – career women, ethnic minorities, non-Christians of all stripes, LGBT people. Analyse America’s political divide and you will find the cities and suburbs on one side and the rural and small towns on the other.

Further reading

How long can Trump hang on to the evangelicals?

By Francis Fitzgerald

Scratch the surface of any angry debate, such as the one surrounding Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and you will find partisans on both sides of this divide, each convinced that the other means to force them into the shadows.

This divide between those who reject traditional American community and those who revere it is at the heart of the bitterness that typifies today’s politics. Sasse, as we will see in the second part of this review, is not wholly unaware of this. Feckless paeans to a fading communitarian past will not heal our divide, but in parts Sasse is on to something which, properly developed, might.