Re: The New, New City
"Of course we're played out in this country ? We're effete and incapable of potent action like the last emperor's China? ... let's hear a (dare i ask?) policy suggestion to take away from this so we can get out of this bureaucratized, demoralized, traumatized paralysis!
something besides bending the world to your will.
People are always giving me homework.
Whew, this assignment is a biggie. Worthy of a Barack Obama. This charge is to make a technical proposal to pre-emptively fix the United States? future history, right? ?particularly with regard to our drift toward decline.
I?m just an architect, not a presidential candidate, and I?ve only got an hour to think this one out before I have to get back to work, but here goes ?
We could start by electing Barack Obama. Then we could feed him a courage potion so he?d be willing to make proposals unpopular with some of the electorate. Here?s the list:
1. Pull all troops out of Iraq immediately.
2. Make friends with Russia by:
a. pulling our newly-installed ?defensive? missiles out of Poland and the Czech Republic;
b. arranging to buy gazillion barrels of Russian oil to replace the petroleum we?ll no longer get from Iraq (Putin and cronies will love this one. The price of top-rank London condos doubles.).
3. In return, the Russians promise to stop selling arms and nuclear aid to Iran, and ?
4. We, in turn cut off arms shipments to Saudi Arabia. We leave the royal family to the tender mercies of Osama bin Laden, who moves back by popular acclaim as spiritual leader to the newly-minted Islamic Republic of Saudi Arabia. He agrees to call off his boys if we pressure the Israelis to make peace with Palestine by letting them have their half of Jerusalem. The Israelis dismantle the fence around Gaza.
Meanwhile, on the home front, Barack moves fast to:
1. get some Americans into vehicles that don?t add CO2 to the atmosphere and?
2. get other Americans out of their cars entirely for their trips to work.
To accomplish the former, Barack unpopularly launches a program to build 100 nuclear powerplants in wilderness areas downwind from population centers. While these are designed and constructed, GM, Ford, Chrysler and all foreign carmakers queue up for licenses to build Ratan Tata?s car that runs on compressed air. America?s suburban houses and service stations are equipped with air compressors. You plug in your car and fill the tank with compressed air. Zero emissions at the tailpipe and zero emissions at the power plant.
To accomplish the latter, Obama overlays all existing zoning with a separate Federally-mandated category that basically allows genuinely urban, walkable development (buildings that touch, mixed use, no surface parking lots) to occur wherever there is zoning that is not agricultural or wilderness. This means you can build Beacon Hill anywhere you can build Waltham.
At first, this is deeply unpopular with residents of Lincoln, Weston and Sudbury, who fear inundation by knife-wielding crack dealers. Since it?s proposed in the first week of Obama?s term, he figures he can get some of this stuff built before he has to run for re-election. To expedite construction, the Feds mandate a drastically streamlined approval process. Obama appoints Leon Krier to the newly-created post of Secretary of Urban Development. When the folks in Lincoln discover how convenient and pleasant it has become to walk to the corner store, they mute their opposition.
The building code, presently at 1350 pages, is edited down to 80 pages of essentials, and every addition to it must be accompanied by a deletion of equal length.
Developers jump enthusiastically aboard, construction delays are a thing of the past, and land values become a smaller part of the cost of developing a dwelling unit.
Little inhabited town centers appear like raisins in the pound cake of Suburbia. Now the country?s humming with construction activity as suburbia gradually morphs into urban patterns. Planners start the process of connecting these centers via networks of light rail.
Agriculture revives and food prices go down; as Suburbia recedes, arable land makes a comeback, and farming pays better than selling out to developers. Television broadcasts the spectacle of a subdivision actually being bulldozed to create a farm.
Money is now being invested on a Chinese scale as the whole country pitches in at an accelerated rate to rebuild. New infrastructure springs up: high-speed train lines, long-needed ocean crossings made possible by advances in suspension bridge design and tunneling techniques.
Naturally, the government raises taxes ?especially at upper income levels?but folks mostly don?t mind because they can see where the money is going, and there?s a new-found camaraderie to the national spirit, a consensus, a feeling of solidarity and patriotism without jingoism. As a byproduct of the tax increase, the national debt is paid off from its present $700bil.
Rivalry with China is back-burnered by both nations, as a constant series of treaties strengthen trade ties, co-operation, shared technology and a feeling of mutual destiny.
The minimum wage is raised to a level where a full-time worker can keep a roof overhead, and the price of a Big Mac goes up by a quarter.
In Obama?s second term, the constitution is amended to allow up to four terms.
* * *
something besides bending the world to your will.
Plenty of other countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark and Italy have found ways to prosper without the need to "run the world" anymore.
Pass muster?
Sorry for yet another round of gut-wrenching pontification, a630, but after all you did ask for it?
Gotta go feed my family. I'll step aside and allow identification of all aspects of this plan that are impossible, and when finished you'll know exactly why there's no hope for the future.
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