But, honestly, this is just so much anti-working class snobbery: urbane mandarins masquerading as the underdogs.
Most Americans, like most Britons, live in the suburbs. Hate the suburbanites - hate the majority of the country.
You think that the suburbanites are living out a redundant fantasy? One could just as easily say that it is the urban centres that are cleaving to a 19C. model of social organistion.
You are surprised that suburbanites are ill at ease in the City. But how much more ill at ease are you in the suburbs?
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Ummm...what?
Listen, I believe that ideas should be grabbed by the collar and slammed against the wall to test their resiliency.
So let's rock.
The implied message of your post, as I read it, is that urban concentrations are an old answer to the question of how to organize a built environment. Not just a 20th century answer mind you but a 19th century one.
Damn. Cold words for the great old ladies of the world.
Now check this out...
I live in the big town and work in the burbs. This means I spend about 70 percent of my time in the latter. I'm accustomed to the sub and ex-urbs and feel no strong emotions pro or con so I won't be railing against the old themes of soul-less-ness or MacHouses or any of the rest of it.
However, let's compare and contrast a simple task -
Let's say I'm home, in town, and I have a hankering for some of that gold standard broccoli and chicken the Chinese restaurant nearby does so very well. I pick up the phone, wait a sensible 10 minutes and walk a block or so. Done and done.
But in the burbs - as they're laid out in America; can't speak for the UK - I have to hop in the machine and jet to an equivalent eatery. I'd like to walk but that's not such a good idea since the traffic flows are extraordinarily unfriendly to pedestrians and the restaurant isn't really within reasonable walking distance anyway.
Ah yes, time for a review:
Mr. D. wants some pickup food.
To get it in the city he walks. Cost in fuel and nerves? Zero
To get it in the burbs he has to walk to the parking lot, press the little button on the keyless entry device, fire up the machine, navigate the parking lot, enter the flow of traffic, swerve to avoid hitting the old lady who signaled left but turned right, pull over for the passing ambulance, carefully slide through the entrance to the shopping mall, find a parking space, jauntily exit the vehicle, wave the keyless entry device to lock the machine, walk into the restaurant, pick up and pay for the food, hop back in the machine and reverse the order of travel.
Now James, if I'm reading you correctly, you see the sprawling burbs as an advance over the creaky antiquities of the city, a tommorowland where dreams come true.
And I might agree, if I were to re-define my notion of progress to accommodate the replacement - out of necessity - of the simple act of walking with travel in a two ton machine that costs me a mint.
...
There's a joke one of my Star Trek loving friends tells that seems directly on-target here. During an episode of the program, a character pushes a button to get some socks out of a sleek cabinet. My friend laughingly points out that obviously, to the mind of someone on the show's writing staff, the idea of simply opening a cabinet by hand was too un-24th century like. So, he or she wrote that the character pushed a button to get socks. "Now" my friend says, "opening a goddamn drawer is one of those acts that will be the same for however long we're human.
If you're pushing buttons to get socks you haven't advanced, you've regressed with the help of some fancy machine footwork."
And so it is with replacing more and more traditionally human powered activities with the car - an inevitable outcome of the sprawl you celebrate as the very essence of modernity.
.d.