Last week, I wrote about the fact that progressives desperately need to come up with a twenty-first-century American Dream–and the fact that twenty-first-century America can almost be defined as the kind of place where you can’t come up with a new, believable American Dream. A problem.
Enter David Roberts and Tom Philpott, who have been writing a series of articles in Grist about the direction (those spatial metaphors really are hard to avoid!) that progressive movements need to take, under the banner/slogan “Great Places.” Roberts’s series of five articles on the idea of great places is here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Philpott’s meditations on where food fits into the picture are here: 1, 2. Essentially, Roberts’s argument is that progressives should be concentrating on transforming (primarily) cities into fun, exciting, joyous places to live and work. Urban areas should become more palpably collaborative places where creative and skilled individuals come together to produce great things that they could not produce apart; they should use the power of density to make modern life sustainable; and they should be centers of wondrous design to delight the minds and bodies of their inhabitants. Philpott chimes in by talking first about the horrors of the modern industrial food complex and then about the potential for regional and local food producers to use the power of place to rejuvenate and transform our foodsheds.
I think some variation on this theme is arguably The Answer to the problem I discussed last week. First, I’ll explain why the great places idea, once tweaked, is potentially revolutionary. Then, I’ll explain why it needs some tweaking to get us where we want to go.
So, to begin with, a brief return to the well of post-structuralism, which in many ways embraces a politics of plurality. If it is impossible to envision or believe in a single Promised Land for The American People–if it is impossible even to believe in a single, unified American people in the face of the nation’s palpable fragmentation and polarization–it is quite easy and even necessary to see multiple, more modest promised lands proliferating the spaces we already inhabit. Improving your home community, town, or city is a manageable, concrete goal that is obviously in your interests and (hopefully) within your ability to imagine. But it is also a goal that, sooner or later, requires action on a scale beyond the local–possibly far beyond the local if it incorporates renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and other such ambitious endeavors. It is, in short, a way literally to situate political practice. More on that in a moment.
The other immediate advantage of the Great Places idea is that it can address and eventually ameliorate our social fragmentation without engaging in the fool’s errand of confronting it head-on by attempting to impose a common American identity on the most diverse population on the planet. When a bunch of people in disparate regions work simultaneously to create and improve an equally disparate bunch of great places, certain common values underpinning their success will likely emerge. (I don’t want to gloss over the difficulty of this step; competing interests and bitter fights between equally well meaning antagonists will be unavoidable along the way, and those fights will obscure or destroy some opportunities to find and embrace common values. However, I believe that some genuine broadly shared values will emerge, and such values are sorely needed right now.)
Our society is becoming increasingly defined by its conflicts–even more so now than in the past. It is too fragmented to sustain a common dream, so starting from the dream is almost putting the cart before the horse. But where a forced and ill-fitting global metanarrative of unity will not serve us, myriad local actions may. Community organizers, activists, and civic leaders working throughout the country to better their own local spheres may ultimately find enough common cause to build meaningful coalitions.
The old mantra “Think Globally, Act Locally” meant in part “think about the global context and consequences of your actions and, having done so, take local action accordingly.” As the world system has become larger and more complex, thinking globally has become alternately impossible (the system is too complicated to be thought) and enervating (to the extent that it can be thought, global context dwarfs local action until it seems without sufficient power to be of consequence). A progressive politics rooted in great places could rejuvenate this mantra, replacing it with something like “Act Locally to Think Globally.” By which I mean that the very process of acting locally with purpose and self-awareness can become synonymous with thinking globally, if, in the process of creating a great place, we take seriously the relationship of that place to the other places around it–its region; its nation; its local, national, and international resources; its sources of food, water, energy, labor, and capital.
Progressives cannot build great places by plundering resources from others. Instead, they must negotiate and compete with their neighbors in good faith. To do so, activists in each locale must develop a deep understanding of the particular needs of that locale and the best ways to meet those needs without trampling those of others. Los Angeles needs water, but it can’t simply usurp a greater share of the Colorado River. Working-class people living in the city’s food deserts need access to cheap, fresh food–but not at the expense of the living standards and dignity of the agricultural laborers throughout California who produce it. So, making Los Angeles a better place requires its denizens to deal justly with their neighbors in very concrete ways. Through such practical, sustained, and serious engagement with the specificities of place, we can gain a far greater understanding of our homes. We may thus find ourselves mapping our global reality through action in a way that we never could through thought alone.
Roberts’s emphasis on delight as a characteristic of great places is also crucial. Pleasure is a primary driving force in many walks of life, and it can be a driving force behind political practice as well. A great place is also a great space. Great spaces are palpably joyous to occupy. They may be open and tranquil or frenetic and exciting, but in any case, when you enter one, you smile. You are enveloped. You fit. The pleasure of being in welcoming or exciting spaces is a powerful impetus to defend those spaces, and the promise of delight is a powerful motivator to construct new ones.
The vast majority of homebuyers list livability and walkability as high priorities in choosing new homes. There are not currently enough livable and walkable neighborhoods to satisfy this demand. Not by a long shot. Creating more would significantly increase the happiness of a great many people, who in turn would more readily embrace the political and community values that made success possible.
Where Roberts goes wrong, though, is his privileging of urban space. This is a frankly mercenary choice, as he makes clear in his first article. Locations with higher population densities vote Democratic and locations with lower population densities vote Republican, with striking consistency across all fifty states. Thus, Roberts believes, cities can provide the basis for an identity politics to drive progressive victories. Perhaps, he even seems to suggest, if we can lure more people into cities, the increasing urbanization of the nation will lead to its increasing liberalization. In addition, he believes that density is so important to solving the environmental problems we face that encouraging anyone to live in rural or even suburban areas is counterproductive.
Philpott’s focus on food and foodsheds provides a necessary corrective to Roberts in this regard. Even if it were theoretically true from a narrow political perspective that progressives could succeed by abandoning rural America and sparking a new wave of urbanization, that perspective would soon be brought up short by a simple fact: We gotta eat. And we want to eat real food. The kind produced on farms and pastures, not in factories or feedlots. The kind produced with fewer efficiencies of scale, requiring more labor by more farmers. If the real food movement is to succeed on a scale large enough to provide healthy, responsibly raised food to a significant percentage of Americans, rural places have to be just as great as urban places. People need to be motivated to live where they can grow real food. And, again, progressives in cities cannot benefit from the labor of farmers at the expense of those farmers’ quality of life.
Plus, it is not in fact true that progressives can succeed by moving as many people as possible into cities and screwing everyone else. Not while the U.S. Senate exists. And not while we care about social and economic justice, which is in as short supply in rural communities as in inner cities. It’s also terribly short-sighted and strategically daft to put forward any definition of “Great Places” that does not encompass state and national parks. If we want to argue broadly that government can help us make places great, there is almost nowhere where that’s more palpably true (and no spaces that are already more beloved) than those parks.
With that caveat, though, Roberts is clearly onto something huge. The immediate questions to ask in response are clear: Do you live in a great place? If so, how can your community make it better or protect it from harm? If not, how can you make it great? Answer those questions in detail, and we’re on our way to building the progressive agenda for the twenty-first century.
