California and Chicago: Beauty and the Beast
Traffic is a drag in both places, but here you get this to look at
California is a fiction and a romance, indeed it takes its name from a novel of an exotic utopia, and since the earliest European encounter, it has been a place where dreams come real, from the dreams of missionaries and miners to the visions of moviemakers and microcomputer mavens that continue to radiate around the world.
Chicago is a fiction too, but it is less wish-fulfillment and more film noir, captured pretty persuasively in Call Northside 777 with the great Jimmy Stewart. Titans of industry fulfilled their dreams of filthy lucre there, as did the gangsters. Today it is an international destination as well known for art food and music as it once was for smokestacks and blind pigs, but it will never be confused with the sun-kissed valleys and tree-bedecked mountains of the Golden State. Continue Reading
A City Cannot Be A Work of Art
Hey it is the end of January 2012 and I have only been home for four days this year and tonight my new seminar class meets for the first time, under the title above. It is a deliberately provocative title, although perhaps not as provocative as its source, Jane Jacobs’ epochal “Death and Life of Great American Cities” which was written 51 years ago and remains the touchstone for everything written about cities since, including the various recent books I have included in the syllabus.
I think I will pepper this blog with pictures of actual cities, although like mirrors and magazines and popular television shows, the actual way things look has a lot less effect than too-perfect ideals. The history of city planning is the history of dreams with the “magic to stir men’s (sic) blood” as Daniel Burnham said in the really important part of his famous quote. Continue Reading