Authenticity

I am walking around the old square in Denton, Texas with its lovely old courthouse and pleasant brick buildings. Towns like this have started coming back – I don’t mean the twee little stores that used to attempt to repopulate these places, but more or less real businesses. Still heavy on the real-estate lawyer type offices, and the restaurants and cafes still tend towards pretense. But there are people actually here that are not weekend antiquers.

Part of the charm of the ‘old world’ is authenticity. There is so little left in the US. There is some – but it is lost in a sea of neon plastic signs, and most crucially, landscapes that one cannot walk in. Having to drive everywhere destroys any intimacy and attachment you can really feel to a place.

That is where Europe automatically wins. It is not so much a matter of space as of time. Things that were built before the twin diseases of the automobile and high modernism are desirable. Places built on the inhuman scales that high modernism preached and cars enabled are not.

I love the human scaled stuff in theUS. It is just hard to find. Pleasing places are now like little islands in America – you have to drive through endless inhuman wastelands to get from one human-scaled little corner to another.

The United States once had immense human capital – some of the most creative, kindest people on earth, truly building a ‘city on the hill’.

These people and attitudes still exist.

But they survive on borrowed time. Smolder on human capital built up over centuries. I fear we are burning it up without replenishing it, and this is partly because the very physical possibility of real community has been precluded by the way we build our cities and towns.