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worth repeating |
Kenneth T. Jackson, Barzun Professor of History and Social Sciences at Columbia University, delivered the Phinizy Lecture March 26. His subject was “The Road to Hell: Transportation, Sprawl and the Decline of America.” He chose the examples for his thesis from the history of Atlanta. Some excerpts: “Atlanta is still a small city, in terms of the city itself. It’s mostly suburban, more like Boston, San Francisco, St. Louis and Washington—little city, surrounded by big suburban area. Not so much like New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, San Diego or Houston, where the city is relatively much larger compared to the suburbs. Atlanta in some ways, the Atlanta region, is even more balkanized than the country that we live in. One of the most important things to understand about the United States is how decentralized we are. . . . We project this image of a colossal powerful government. But in fact we are very local. When you think of things like police, fire or schools, we are local. Athens has a school district. France has a school district. Japan has 64, but they’re all in the same group. Australia has six. . . . When you move from one town to another you have to immediately change all of your local services on which you depend, so when you move around the United States it carries with it a lot more weight than it does elsewhere in the world. . . . Land-use control is very different here. . . . Elsewhere in the world, they would say ‘You think just because you own the land and you have a good lawyer that somehow you are going to be able to change the appearance of the land forever?’ It’s a different attitude toward the land in most other cultures. We still cling to the belief that ‘it’s my land, if I want to put houses on it, a Wal-Mart, or whatever, I can do that.’ That debate, of course, is going on as we speak.” |
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| —Beth Roberts |
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