I know this is coming a little late, but if Cultural Capitol ever gets more than fifteen readers, they should be aware of this article in the New York Times a few weeks ago. The question is how to create urban density that is aesthetically pleasing. Winy Maas’s answer is shown in the picture above.

Maas’s self-described obsession is “density”: “the idea of using urban space intensely to create a sustainable future.”

The Times article should be read next to this article in the Atlantic by Hanna Rosin, in which Rosin describes the perceived failure of Section 8 and Title VI housing initiatives that knocked down many of the inner-city tower housing projects of the 60s and sent the former residents to live in suburbs of cities like Memphis (featured in the article). In Rosin’s view, the poor who were concentrated in the housing projects did not find themselves lifted out of poverty when placed in middle-class neighborhoods; rather, middle-class neighborhoods found that crime spiked. Rosin’s conclusion is that the poor brought their crime with them, and that they lost their sense of community. She quotes Ed Goetz, a housing expert at the University of Minnesota, who says, “For all its faults, there was a tight network that existed [in the projects]. So what I’m trying to figure out is: Was this a bad theory of poverty? We were intending to help people climb out of poverty, but that hasn’t happened at all. Have we underestimated the role of support networks and overestimated the role of place?”

That community is more important than geography appears to be the conclusion that Rosin comes to by the end of her essay, but she gives evidence that points in a different direction. She says that “demonizing the high-rises has blinded some city officials to what was good and necessary about the projects, and what they ultimately have to find a way to replace: the sense of belonging, the informal economy, the easy access to social services.” What made the high-rises better than the suburbs for the poor was clearly their geographical proximity to services, that and the density fostered community.

Perhaps we can read this through WOW ideology. The idea was that concentrating poor people in ghettos merely concentrated poverty. Projects like the one pictured above (on Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn) were a giant rug under which the poor were swept. At the end of the WOW era policy makers decided the way to bring down rampant crime in the cities was to move poor people to where wealth seemed to be: the ‘burbs. Obviously the ‘burbs had better schools, more lawn space, and you had to have a car to get around — an obvious sign of wealth.

Whether the irony was intentional or not is anybody’s guess. I suppose they had forgotten that the projects were built to segregate African-Americans, Latinos and Asians in the cities while the Whites flew in their cars to the ‘burbs. When seen through the WOW lens, however, it is clear that lawmakers tried to make up for their earlier failed policy of segregation by trying forced integration in the ‘burbs. Was this just bad timing? Now that the white children of the ‘burbs were moving back to the cities the poor were forced to evacuate their houses and take a federally funded housing voucher to an alien environment bringing with them the social problems of the ghetto, but with grassy space between the sites of crime.

What does this have to do with Winy Maas you ask? Density creates community, I answer. I propose the counter-intuitive notion that rural life is as dense as urban life, but on a different scale. In the city the conceptual unit of space is the street. In the country it’s the house (oikos in Greek, which is where we get the term “economy”). Both of them are dense living situations where many people with different objectives must coexist. Everyone in a house is the same! you say, and cultural differences on the street lead to friction and perhaps violence. If we peer into the mists of history even a couple of hundred years, however, we can see the house is the home of manufacture, and that its residents do not necessarily belong to the same family, religious group, or ethnicity. Cities are industrial centers of economic activity, just as the farmhouse in the agricultural age was the center of economic activity.

With the growth of the suburbs and the decline of manufacturing in the US it has become commonplace to talk about “post-industrial” society. But why is that necessarily post-urban? The density of the street brings down crime, especially if it is close to good, middle-class jobs. Suburbs, being neither city nor country, have no density, and consequently isolate people from community, allow for anonymity, and promote crime. The difference between the suburb and the city in the minds of suburban residents is aesthetic. It’s an ideal, that as Maas shows, can be implemented in the city. You don’t have to build giant, ugly brick towers to get density. What’s more, as this article by Amy Hoak at Marketwatch.com illustrates, density itself can be an aesthetic.

Even better, it’s an aesthetic that, like the rus and the urbs, makes economic sense. As Hoak says “the Center for Neighborhood Technology recently released research that showed people who live near transit, jobs, schools and retail spend up to $2,100 less a year on gasoline than those who live in outer-ring suburbs, where more driving is required.”