So there’s a conflict between rejecting modernism for its effects (and blaming a lot of them on it’s process) and wondering if a post-futurist process can undo generations of oil subsidies and The Great Streetcar Conspiracy, or if one can only fight fire with fire.

A post futurist response to modernism looks like Depave but until we institute a Universal Basic Income they’ll never get enough volunteers to depave any significant % of roadway. Fighting fire with fire is difficult because to do that you either have to be the Koch brothers or be willing to get arrested.

So the question remains, for those of us who want to modify the physical environment to rollback the worst excesses of modernism, can we really do it using the old (modernist) process or do we need design to come up with new ways of envisioning what we can consider success?

Given that nothing can really be rolled back, I think the answer tends towards design giving us new successes to shoot for. But even the greatest hopes from design are deeply local.

As I mentioned in the piece I was paraphrasing Jacobs. She, of course, wasn’t talking about blogs, but about the sidewalks of lively neighborhoods. Here’s the full quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.

In regards to Brutalism, I think the whole flaw comes in thinking that what’s most important about architecture (or any particular historical movement in it) is its style rather than the social relations it creates amongst its users. In many cases, Brutalist architects cared more about formal stylistic issues (such as honesty towards material like concrete) than about the lives their projects would create for the people who live and work in them. And the same goes, only more so, for what I’m calling Tumblr Modernism: people who fall in love with the style through pictures of the buildings rather than lives lived in and around them.

In many ways that’s a good summary of Thingpunk in general: obsessing about how digital technologies alter the style of our built environment rather than how they transform our social relations.

Admittedly, a lot of brutalist examples are pretty awful, but I think the blame is better directed to individual architects than the style itself.

Anyway, I’d love to know the source of the Jane Jacobs comment on blogs, I’ve never read anything that mentions her thoughts on that and I’d be really curious to know more 🙂