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Corporate/ Personal Goal: EuroDesignVIP, LLC has adopted a mission that grew from a mutual love of great cities, livable towns, memorable environments, and the discovery of the elemental cues that are the basis for life in an urban context.  The root of Civilization. We are identifying appropriate locations here in the United States and in countries worldwide to plan/design/and construct Culture based towns and cities that will have a natural alliance with business and economic vitality.  The means are now available as never before in history to create living environments that are stimulating, healthful, economically viable, and race and income group neutral.  We invite investors who believe in this approach to contact us immediately; we invite potential citizens who wish to live better and smarter to contact us and reserve a house or business to live and work with less stress, more energy, and who believe human interaction and art, spirituality, intellectuality, health and well being as the cultural binding for a full and long life.

John Henry and Allan Banks discuss the New Cultural Urbanism on AskRealTalk TV network above.  Video presentation here.

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Our Vision of the Ideal Community is based on the high architectural/urban excellence of European/Eastern and Occidental towns and cities connected with the practical work ethic and modernity of contemporary society.  This vision of community hearkens back to the basics of intelligent design with functional amenities, and includes the arts and sciences as core elements.  We do not believe that Modernist Utopias have forwarded human civilization; their success has been only one of expedience.

Our Mission calls for a renewal of urban design and living concepts that awaken our sense of being.  (read our introductory statement here) The ideal town should be a catalyst for bringing together creative minds to live and work unencumbered.  Our goal is to design viable communities that are as self sustaining as possible based on the marriage of arts and commerce.

“An Honest to Goodness Town”

(lecture given by John Henry Architect to Making Cities Livable symposium,1996)

‘There once was a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer twilight…’  --Disney sales brochure

“If Celebration succeeds,…Disney will go into the business of building utopian towns across the country, Michael Eisner will become president and Mickey will effectively rule America.”  --Laurence E. Oberwager, Editor Custom Builder

“Utopias are all very well.  The mistake is to build them.”  --Hugh Aldersey-Williams

“In all of life, place matters.” – Charles Bray, Pres. Johnson Foundation

We are all here today because of our love for our fellow human being, our concern for environment, health, and welfare, and because we believe that the urban form should be preserved as the best model to enhance and maintain community and culture.  I have just discovered the IMCL – I am thrilled.  And I have read a portion of the previously published topics discussed in earlier conferences.  “I share your pain.”  I am anxious to make a real contribution to the effort necessary to alert and educate the public about the disastrous consequences of continued suburban sprawl and to offer sound models and methods to counter this potentially catastrophic situation.

 I speak to you today first as a citizen in the Greek sense, secondly as an architect, and thirdly as one concerned about planning issues, particularly in the formation of livable cities.  My method today is social criticism, the base problem in my mind.  I feel somewhat intimidated by the prospect of speaking on any subject concerning city making due to the fact that so much has been studied and written on this most basic human endeavor.  It is almost a show of arrogance in fact, but let me humbly share a sliver of information in the hope that my experience and observation will have some value to you all.

           The city is an inspirational, magical place.  It was for me.  I miss everything about living in the city of Izmir, on the Aegean coast of Turkey.  As one who has experienced the delight of living in several urban areas in my youth, in Athens Greece, Munich Germany, Izmir and Ankara Turkey, and having had the opportunity to visit a portion of the other great cities of Europe:  Paris, Beirut, Rome, Belgrade, Zagreb, Istanbul, and Amsterdam--- my experiences of this country’s urban areas over the last 25 years in contrast are quite marked.

While urban planners, architects, and social scientists banter urban manifestos, whether the building of utopias (read New Towns, the New Urbanism, Megacities, etc.) will succeed over seeking the amelioration of existing older cities, this country’s suburban wasteland continues to expand at a voracious pace.  I grew up in the city, and found it wonderful.  I did not know I was disadvantaged.  I find the early American colonial models the best, because obviously, they are based on European – Old World thinking.  So I am biased in this respect.  But I am caught up in the automobile life-style like everyone else.  It seems inescapable, there are simply not enough alternatives.  It is an angering and frustrating prospect.

 After several years observing the American landscape, mostly living and working in ‘the New South’, I was bothered about the state of architecture and cities.  I am concerned about the environmental sensory deprivation that too many of our suburbs and downtowns exhibit.  The in-between places are amorphous.  Benjamin Thompson has written that “…it is urgent to consider and evaluate environment as the central physical expression of social and human values: an expression that physically touches our psycho-physical well-being and thus concerns our whole social equilibrium.”  I am concerned about the social fragmentation of this society and the resultant colossal expenditures of the world’s energy and material resources garnered to support the infrastructure of this nation’s wasteful practice of dispersal of habitation and the consequent scattering of workplace and commercial/ institutional activity and support services.

Prosperity has bred excess.

 The trigger that brought me to reflect and write upon architectural issues and urban matters has been the recent build-out of Disney’s Celebration in Orlando, and the waning influence of architecture and art in general on a public which is completely content to ignore the built environment and relegate it simply as a series of containers to accommodate basic human functions.  It was really the latter point that first motivated me to think upon our environmental dilemma.  In this country we escape the city with a vengeance if we have to work in it -- every afternoon.  Why?  

The overwhelming majority of our population lives in the suburbs.  Is it over 80 to 90% now?  This is a result of perhaps an innocent and well-meaning movement begun after the second world war.  Two crucial events created a blueprint for the juggernaut.  The government subsidization of the single family home (FHA, VA loans), and the Federal Highway Act.  (In fact the intent of the Act was “to disperse our factories, our stores, our people; in short, to create a revolution in living habits”.  Why not force the government to take responsibility for this colossal error and reverse those living habits?)  Big business – the oil and automobile industry responded with glee.  Americans were living farther apart, commuting between work and home, and could travel a vast landscape—guzzling gas, and wearing out mechanicals to perpetuate what has been termed a collusion and monopoly between big business.  Our infatuation with the automobile, the seeking after the rural idyll, has fueled an almost irreversible miasma.  It is an awesome accomplishment.  Euphoria clouded the minds of all.  Why worry about future consequences of unbridled expansion and dispersion?  A housing boom made good business sense.  It revitalized the economy and created jobs.  A domino effect rumbled forward.

What has become painfully obvious during the past 20 years is that this country’s economic system is based firmly on a theory of increasing production (and maintenance) of suburban and strip commercial infrastructure in order to make up for a loss to competitive nations in the development of new industries, the production of raw materials (oil and steel primarily) and their transformation into medium to heavy machinery and consumer goods, and other products and services for internal and external trade. 

For over three decades the United States has been losing the global trade war in terms of hard goods and manufacturing.  The housing industry in this country, if stalled for more than a few months, tends to drive the economy into recession.  Roads, electrical service, plumbing and utilities for water, sewage and gas, all follow the cancer of suburban sprawl which leads the growth of the commercial strip.  It is a vicious circle that consumes all.  One fuels the other. 

There is a far reaching interconnected industry built around servicing the building of single family homes in the center of a piece of land, tied together subdivision style.  The concrete plants, the road-building conglomerates, the electrical and water utilities, the sewage treatment plants, the builders and subcontracting trades, the finance and real estate professionals, etc.  The environment has become a commodity.  “We have promoted a form of hypergrowth that consists of socially pathological tissue.”  (James Howard Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere, in Metropolis, 10/ 96)  The duplication and extension of the same appears to continue ad infinitum, until what ---land runs out?  Under what circumstances will the present juggernaut slow or reverse?  Only a severe and prolonged recession coupled with an energy crisis might sober our expansionist waste.

 I was informed a few months ago that only 1 in 10 American citizens owns a passport.  Due to the obvious expanse of space here and relatively few unique neighbor states (as compared to the rich juxtaposition evidenced in Europe and other countries where cultural differences are quite pronounced upon crossing borders), and coupled to a high-technology base from which culture is presumably adequately imported via electronic means, the typical American has been led to believe either out of ignorance (and arrogance) or through a self-perpetuated myth, that the suburban way of life is superior to the traditional urban form.

In fact, generations of Americans have never lived in a city.  We drive around our center cities, like one does in Houston for example – the CBD, while navigating from El Paso to Beaumont on I-10; one might have been adventurous by driving to a parking garage downtown and gotten on an aerial people mover, like the one in Tampa Florida connecting to a nearby entertainment/ shopping complex; or have been a daring tourist wishing to experience the hilly streets of downtown San Francisco – driving across the bridges and through a few center city streets on a weekend (after which driving out to Walnut Creek to a safe suburban motel and dinner), one might have even had to conduct business dealing with taxes or immigration for example, as I had to driving from Orlando to Miami one day.  (I fled downtown as soon as possible, but then decided to find the Art Deco district.  I got lost in some of the worst inner-city crime areas imaginable.)

There are obviously many CBD workers who commute daily to the metropolis.  But except for the occasional art festival or museum special, these same workers will rarely go back into the city with their families.  There really isn’t a good reason to do so for the majority of commuters who elect to live in the suburbs.  They have made a decision to live out and away from the city.  Their children will probably never live in the city, following example.  “It is not merely that hundreds of thousands have been moving to suburbia, here they are breeding a whole generation that will never have known the city at all.”  (William H. Whyte Jr., The Exploding Metropolis, 1958.)

Why should we re-populate the existing city infrastructure?  Who are the ‘we’?  Primarily the middle class.  In order for positive change and migration to occur, the functional advantages of the city must be shown to outweigh all of its disadvantages.  Only a relentless compelling propaganda campaign will be effective to motivate the suburban public back into urban areas:  Americans have been programmed, habitually trained, and media blitzed, to live the suburban way.  The suburb is our utopia.  The Big City has had these connotations: mean, congested, dirty, crime-ridden, drug-pushed, a daytime-only event, a finance and business center for the corporate elite and government workers, a few large hotels, the occasional museum, and city services – abandoned warehouses, etc.  It is concrete, it is hot.  It is for singles and transients, for the socially eccentric and errant.  The city is evil.  But most of our cities are concrete jungles of high-rises populated with modern-movement knock-off architecture.  There are a few gems, but the rest do not inspire, are not scaled for pedestrian use, etc.  The legacy of the Modern Movement are ugly cities, the newer ones built in the 40’s on, based on modern zoning and planning methods.  The perception of the city must change: people must be naturally drawn to the city, they must like the city.

The suburb is good.  There is grass and green, yards.  Children playing on wide lawns, safety in the streets.  Clean air, the affordable single-family residence.  Neighbors you would like to know, girl scouts knocking on your door.  A back yard.  Privacy.  Isolation: as much as you can possibly stand.  (There is actually an anonymity more obtainable in the city)  But there is noise there.  Loud neighbors, thin walls.  Cramped apartments.   Most Americans cannot imagine city life.  And besides, there are no malls there.  Clean, efficient shopping.  The drive-up-to-the-door type.  Air conditioned, with food courts.  A machine for shopping.  And they are new!  Perpetually new.  And safe.  (I would like to inject a thought here suggested by an associate Dirk Arace, who believes that the mall is America’s medieval town, ancient agora.  All the variety of products and foods, architectural interest, people watching and density, the spectacle, interesting textures, lighting, and level changes, the mazelike layout – isn’t it truly the American version of the European village?  No wonder our tourists gladly lose themselves while visiting those wonderful towns and bergs over there.)

The middle class is almost entirely suburban --with the rich who live in the suburbs and even farther out in the country.  In gated communities.  Walled off.  The poor are left in the city ghettos and desolated peripheries.  As they spread further out, they displace everyone who fears them.  Ethnicity is feared.  The crime that goes hand in hand with economic impoverishment is feared.  But there is a trickle down effect for all that are enterprising.  It is called voodoo suburb-inanity.  It works, but excruciatingly slow.

 But who can control the natural processes of growth and expansion, of desertion even, that becomes unavoidable as evident in so many of our urban areas -- the old ones.  Should not cities die a natural death?  It is argued that the old form of the city is not capable of supporting the society of the Information Age.  It is obsolete.  Can a complex modern society actually thrive in an urban model?  (Obviously, our larger metropolises are still viable – New York, Chicago, San Francisco.  But in these and many more, the decay of the inner cities has promulgated increased commuting,--from suburbia). 

What about this telecommuting?  In the last two years only 40% of American households owned personal computers.  Of those 40% that could be tele-communting, only about 10% do so. (Susan Sears, Telecommuting Advisory Council).  Doesn’t this imply that 96% of our population is still relying solely on the automobile?  Yes, the numbers of computer users will rise, slowly.  But what are the rest of us doing?  The managers, clericals, the mechanic, the supermarket worker, the city employee, the various professionals who must attend a central office daily?  We burn time, energy, and brain cells commuting between job and home.  “The idea that we can get our fellow citizens out of their cars and into mass transit is Pollyannish; it isn’t going to happen.” (Dick Bundy, FAIA).  And, you know, we live in a particular neighborhood or subdivision because we like it, not because we are closer to work necessarily.  Mobility defines our culture:  we uproot ourselves once, and we never feel allegiance to anything or anyone else again.  The farther we drive, the more prestigious becomes our lament, doesn’t it?  Ridiculous!  There are people commuting 1 to 2 hours each day one way via the automobile in the scattered and dispersed LAs, Houstons.  Land is cheaper and the air cleaner the farther out one goes.  [In Future Shock (1970) Alvin Toffler predicted that over a lifetime, the average American will have traveled 3 million miles or more, more than thirty times the total lifetime travel of his 1914 forbears].

 Unless we do turn into the creatures depicted in the 70’s hit song, “In the Year 2525” – no arms, no legs, no feelings, no love, no connections except through hardwiring, and can exist immobile, we must re-introduce or ‘re-invent’, the city.  Make it palatable, make it exciting, clean, wholesome if possible.  Maybe we should attempt one of Paolo Soleri’s visionary ultra high density schemes.  The other visionary work of Mr. Wright: Broadacres City has come to pass – and it is completely unacceptable.

 The way cities have grown from pre-industrial times back to ancient models is no mirror of the forces which now gird the modern age.  The reasons people come together have changed.  There are no apparent benefits of living in high densities.  When we necessarily zoned our homes away from smokestack industries, we have not been able to bring ourselves to settle again close to any industry.  Produce was once grown on the periphery of the city and brought in fresh daily.  No more.  Fresh dairy and meats were also available.  We were healthier then.  In ancient times people gathered in cities for defensive purposes, to be among their own ethnic groups, to exchange goods and services face to face and conduct market on the streets.  No more.  People gathered in enclaves to be with relatives, to exercise similar religious beliefs, to surround themselves with like professionals, tradesmen, merchants.  No more.  There were specific areas of the city you went to buy certain dry goods, others for produce and meat, others for fish.  Cobblers on one street, clothiers on another, some mixed.  No more.  People gathered in the town center, on the street and discussed the salient issues of the day: they argued, they laughed, they shouted, they plead, they communicated face to face.  They participated, and shared commonalties as a whole.  There was a strong physical/ spiritual involvement.

Some participated in democratic self-government.  If a tyrant was overbearing the people could assemble in the streets and voice their protests.  They could smell the odor and perfume on each other’s body, they could be drawn to the food stalls by the scent of spice and freshly cooked meats.  They could smell the horses, the leather, taste the water from fountains, shake the dust on their feet, sense the familiar cobbles on the street, pick up the sweet trace of blossoming fruit trees in season, observe the subtle aging of the plaster on the walls, the discoloration of the paint.  They could escape the heat of the sun under arcades and dash into a place of worship to pray or meditate in the middle of the work day.  In the later metropolis they searched for their mates on sidewalk cafes, introduced each other at the parks and in the museum.  Flirted at the opera.  No more.  Well, maybe a little of that still exists!

We have overnight delivery of mail, and for practically every conceivable consumer good.  Only to the food supermarkets must we go to once or twice a week.  Refrigeration keeps us from daily forays into the marketplace, and allows us to watch continuously all the TV soaps.  There is electronic banking, telephone and e-mail for instant communications, television, radio, audio-video for education and entertainment.  The Rome of ancient times didn’t have these.  Neither did the Golden Age of Greece.  The medieval European hamlet and town, or walled city certainly didn’t enjoy refrigeration, rail, or telegraph.  Neither did the Renaissance cities of Florence and Venice.  Carts yes, bicycles and motor scooters no.

We no longer depend upon the immediate physical built and natural environment to order our lives, to be in touch daily with the changing elements, with the pulse of the street.  The streets are no longer for people, they are for machines.  Nourishment and stimulation are secured via modern means of production and distribution, electronic dissemination.  We have lost touch with each other as human beings.  Community means nothing.  “We are the children, we are the people.”

 In America, we have exercised our option of shutting out the world.  We are geographically isolated, yes.  But we have isolated ourselves from each other.  We evade direct involvement in social responsibility.  We encase ourselves in steel as we move from our doorstep to our place of business and back, to the market, to worship, to athletic and entertainment events.  We no longer walk.  We have been getting dangerously overweight in fact.  Our push-button world is our utopia, isolating us physically from each other in every possible way.  Our wildest imaginations have become reality, save from populating the rest of the solar system.  To search for better in outer space seems anti-climatic.  We, like lemmings, are swiftly moving towards a doomsday scenario of diminishing resources, and social alienation.  Or is it really that bad?  Is this a conservative vs. Liberal issue?  As long as oil is produced in unlimited quantities we ought not to worry?

We obviously do not need the city form to successfully run a business or find a job, secure adequate housing and food.  So what are we missing?  Culture can be had without forming an aggregation of humanity crowded together in stifling proximity.  What really happens to culture, to society when it is dispersed?

 My central thesis is this:  Americans have evaded social conscience, it has been dulled and made ignorant on the vital matters of Community and City Building.  Americans have rejected community –implicitly – in their manifest escape to suburbia.  We do not want the city, we do not desire it.  We want the suburb.  Americans swear by the suburb, we anticipate living there happily ever after.  We have accepted it, it has been the norm for the majority, we cannot imagine any other lifestyle.  Fait accomplait.  We can telecommute to anywhere if we wish, not just downtown.  The future is cyberspace.  We are part of a New World Order but do not wish to ‘get involved’ anymore.  We can e-mail to China but do not want to do anything with our neighbor, our community.  The American utopia is already here: it is an economic ideal, not a humanitarian one, not based on morality or ethics, nor religion as the early 18^th and 19^th century models of this country.  And this utopia is reinforced by a trumped up fear of the city – a straw man supported by a vicious cycle of production-consumption.

What are we missing in the city?  In the face of these realities – making any real attempt to remedy the pandemic situation in even the smallest degree becomes a great risk for private development.  The government surely will not touch it unless the doomsayers present the case logically and forthright.  What happened to holistic thinking?  Ecology, etc. ?  Where are the hippies of the nineties?  We have institutionalized social welfare and evaded individual responsibility through the innocuous (but ultimately devastating and clever) ploy of the suburb.  It is escapism.  It is greedy and selfish.

 The New Urbanists, the Neo-Traditionalists in particular, wish to take us back to pre-industrial times.  There is great potential in this concept, but the hard-core traditionalists and lovers of classical architecture, appear to wish to get even with the modernists and their architecture, don’t they?  We simply can’t have any glass boxes, no? But as cosmetically interesting are the recent attempts at town building -- the ‘New Towns’, they do not address the full spectrum of our social dilemma: the particular problems of the aging, the discriminated, the sick, the young, the destitute, the lower economic classes, the poor.  The New Urbanism has few examples of fully integrated by age, ethnic group, and economic class -- cities, towns, communities.  I have not had the opportunity to experience first-hand the examples built outside of Florida in recent years.  I live in Orlando.

(see text concerning Celebration at this juncture as Part 3: Conclusion, this page)

           Most New Towns will typically therefore be exclusive enclaves for the middle to upper class.  They do not address the larger problem.  They gloss over the social imperative, they continue to waste precious resources.  They achieve no beneficial densities.  They are marginally incremental improvements on unmitigated sprawl.  They are pseudo-cities.

As Alex Marshall wrote for Metropolis recently:  “…these new subdivisions cannot cure the ills of sprawl.  They are sprawl…”  Richard Arkin, Kentlands’ chairman of the Citizens Assembly claims that the new town represents the “New Suburbanism’ rather than the New Urbanism.  “Truly promoting urbanism would require banning development on farmland, halting construction of highways and Interstates, and creating mass transit lines.”  (Marshall).  A radical notion.  The baby steps are not enough.  A dramatic change must be instituted as soon as possible.  The complacency, ignorance, and arrogance must cease.

Americans must set the example to once again return to the urban form.  Suburb building is like chain-smoking.  Americans will have to accept higher densities of housing in the near future.  Pollution from millions of automobiles can be reduced only through the use of mass transit.  Mass transit only works economically in routes where a large population is concentrated.  The dependency upon the automobile for every errand and trip must be reduced.  We must undergo automobile ‘de-tox’. 

The continual waste of energy and materials -- added pollution, waste of time, the resulting socio-psychopathological disorders, etc. in order to serve up the American Dream results in a global imbalance of resource use.  It is reprehensible, it is unethical, it is immoral.

Vincent Scully writes in The New Urbanism that since World War II the nation has destroyed more communities than it has built, calling it a kind of developmental holocaust.  The automobile has been the “agent of chaos, the breaker of the city.”  (Donald Canty, Builder 1/ 95)  The cost of suburban sprawl was estimated by the Urban Land Institute in recent years to range from 40 to 400 per cent more than compact development.  (Roberta Brandes Gratz,  The Living City).  Newsweek magazine reported in May of 1995 that the city of “Phoenix sprawls into the desert at the rate of an acre an hour.”  It is happening not only in Arizona.  Growth is rampant in Texas, in Florida.  This expansionary destruction of resources must stop.  Unfortunately, the unquestionable veracity of this model has been accepted as a world-wide ideal and has crept into other markets as well where land availability is at a premium to boot. 

How much longer are we willing to trade standard of living for quality of life? New real urban models must be introduced.  The people must be educated.  The professionals must lead.  We must inform, plead, and warn.  This warning should be a foreboding as strong as the Bible prophets who preached a certain doom unless the chosen changed their ways, repented. 

Who will be at the helm of this enterprise --the planning and building of new towns and cities?  In the foreseeable future government will not be.  In recent years large corporate conglomerates have been able to pool funds to build mega-communities.  These are large scale expanded PUDs.  They gobble up thousands of acres of land at once.  The planning consists merely of strings of varying qualities and densities of housing tied to a central boulevard.  Subdivision after subdivision on closed loops and separately identified marquees are connected into maze-like street geometries.  It is instant and megalomanic suburban sprawl.  If the number crunchers see an opportunity to introduce basic service retail and commercial structures supportable by the internal population, a ‘town center’ might be introduced.  Otherwise the picture is the same with corner 7-11s, strip malls, franchise eateries, branch banks, etc. on the periphery.  Somewhere in the middle is the elementary or middle school and perhaps a common green or park.  Golf course communities tend to have attractive landscaping, controlled signage, architectural review, a Club House, etc.  But the basic formula hasn’t changed.  The infrastructure and environmental waste continues.

What is ironic is that American business has been on a downsizing trend for several years.  The electronics industry has continued to miniaturize.  Automobile manufacturers in this country have conceded to build Euro-style compacts.  All have attempted to be more energy efficient.  When will we address the log in our eyes – the monstrous and unprecedented infrastructure waste?

 A note on the existing infrastructures:

How do we once again embrace the city form? Do we inject the lower economic class into middle-class suburbs?  Can we inject the middle class into the inner city among the urban poor?  Which can it be?  Will it work?  You can lead a horse to water for a sip maybe, but not to set up house.  How about the speed of urban husbandry?  Isn’t it too late in many cases?  And the government spigot has been turned off.  Few subsidies are available.  (If the FHA and VA subsidized over 14 million homes after World War II, why can’t the U.S. government provide funding for model energy efficient, resource conservative, ethnically and economically balanced communities, designed in high densities, pollution-free with mass transit connections?  How about some restructured form of the Urban Development Action Grant program instituted under President Carter’s administration in 1977 to form a public/ private enterprise alliance?)  We are in the laissez-faire mode.  We are simply not going to be able to motivate the middle class to repopulate the old city, the decaying metropolis – especially those areas which have no real environmental advantage, historical matrix, ease of accessibility, etc.  I believe our European counterparts will have this success because city life is a natural alternative, there is a psycho/ sociological basis.  And there is a ‘there’ on which to build.  Many American sites had no redeeming features to begin with, and the archaeology is ravaged in too many cases.  The stigma persists overall.

For Americans to form new communities in an urban setting will require a blockbuster event.  Like Celebration.  It requires a new mind-set, a new form, a new way.  Americans have always been future oriented.  The space age was to solve a host of social and resource issues.  Salvation has always been based on the premise of a new and better future, not one based on tradition.  We have a chance only by constructing new ones.  We have wonderful models, there has been excruciating research and discussion of past failures.  We have clearly written and illustrated guides (raise book).  We need to get the message out.

Rudyard Kipling noted in 1896 that the suburban lifestyle was “the curse of America – sheer, hopeless, well-ordered boredom; and that is going some day to be the curse of the world.” 

Let us not allow this scenario to proceed any further.

 But the underlying question is really: does this nation truly seek social solidarity?

In our New Town is “…the transformation of the physical environment…the outward sign of an inner transformation in the social structure.”?  (Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century)