Urban communities and virtue pt 2

This is the second in a series. You can read the first here and the next one will be here.

Last time I said the kind of argument that people like Raymond Hain make in favour of new urbanism is not businesslike but conceals a very businesslike purpose. What do I mean by that? Well, you can see it in the following paragraph [emphasis added]:

Given how we pursue and achieve happiness, and that our built environment can encourage or discourage the activities necessary for human happiness, we must promote building patterns that will help these various small-scale human communities to flourish and make virtuous action possible. But the architecture of community, the architecture that will best promote successful small human communities organized within one large civic community, is the architecture of new urbanism. Therefore, as Aquinas might have said, the natural law requires that we make mixed-use, walkable human settlements.

What you see here is the potentially heavy hand of political morality. Lurking behind all this is the very  businesslike project of controlling the way other people behave in a very deliberate and conscious way. And when we see that sort of project it becomes very important to ask who exactly this "we" is. By what authority and using what means will this be accomplished? And, quite frankly, words like "must" and "requires" scare me. It also bothers me when people talk about using the environment to "encourage and discourage" what we do and it is not at all comforting to be told that this is being done to promote "human happiness". The Russian and Chinese communist regimes killed more people than any other regimes in history in the name of promoting human happiness.

It is important to acknowledge that any community requires us to control what others can and cannot do. I like like laws that discourage specific things such as violent assault or drunk driving. But the moment controlling others gets linked to bigger projects to achieve vague ideals such as promoting happiness, I begin to get worried. Particularly as, you may have noticed, most people don't naturally choose to live in walkable communities. Most people prefer to live in suburbs. Model communities such as Celebration are model communities. They are artificial ideals that would require a lot of encouraging and discouraging to be made to work as real communities. If they would, in fact, work at all.

You might argue that suburbs also require all sorts of underpinning to exist. That is true but it is underpinning that already exists and people had choices. There were and are other kinds of communities ranging from inner-city neighbourhoods to small towns and most people chose and choose to live in suburbs. Those competing types of communities still exist and people can still choose or not choose them.

The new urbanist walkable community hasn't done so well in this competition. Governments could and perhaps should make efforts to support the creation of such communities but I still want it to be a choice. I want people to be able to make their own decisions about what is best for human happiness. When i read arguments lie those made by Raymond Hain I get a disturbing feeling about this.

Look at that paragraph above again. The language used gives me goosebumps and not in a good way. Our built environment is a large impersonal force. I'm not comfortable with people who want to use it to encourage and discourage. I get even less comfortable when they write sentences wherein the actual actor doing this manipulation disappears into passive voice. And I'm not comfortable when imperatives like "must" and "require" suddenly pop up. We must? Why exactly must we? And what purposes require that we do particular things? Right now it feels like I have a lot of choices and you're making me feel like you want to replace these choices with obligations and controls. And it makes me even more nervous when I hear someone talk about controlling other people's lives but when I wonder who it is that will be doing this controlling I see the pronoun "we" cropping up. I always know who "I" is; I'm not all certain who "we" are.