Moses and the romance of the modern
When old societies yearn to be young again
Over at Compact magazine, Ross Barkan has written an intriguing essay calling for a new approach to governing cities – or rather, an old approach whose time has come again. It resonates with the mood here in Britain and in other parts of Europe too. Progressives, Barkan argues, should take inspiration from a figure who is widely reviled today: the urban planner Robert Moses.
Beginning in the late 1920s, and continuing for the best part of 40 years, Moses transformed the state of New York. An extraordinarily capable administrator, Moses leveraged the funds made available by FDR’s New Deal to deliver a vast number of projects. These included highways, parkways, dams, bridges, tunnels, beaches, parks, pools, and public housing. He could be autocratic in his methods, megalomaniacal in his ambitions, and ruthless in his disregard for existing urban fabric. Later generations, inclined to regard cities as organic ensembles of communities and neighbourhoods, saw in him all that was wrong with top-down planning and unaccountable machine politics.
But according to Barkan, Moses represented an effective mode of progressive governance, which focused on “delivering durable public goods to ordinary people.” Whereas today’s progressives only create rules, those in the mid-twentieth century offered a positive agenda, based on “the expansion of infrastructure, industry and technology.” “The New Yorkers of the Robert Moses era believed in Big Government,” Barkan writes, “because Big Government got so much done, and they could see that in their daily lives.”
This re-evaluation of Moses speaks to a wider shift that is taking place in the English-speaking commentariat and policy elites. Barkan himself calls it the “abundance agenda.” Put simply, it consists of a renewed focus on the need to raise living standards, especially by expanding and renewing the basic things that underpin them: housing, energy and infrastructure. This discourse has become particularly pronounced in Britain, fed by a pervasive sense of dysfunction and decline. In September, three think-tankers published an influential pamphlet, Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated, aimed squarely at these problems. The same thinking lies behind the decision of Rachel Reeves, the UK Chancellor, to announce £100bn of capital investment in her budget this week, paid for with big tax increases and borrowing.
Yet there is a revealing ambiguity in Barkan’s essay. His argument is not primarily about policy, but politics. He frames his endorsement of Moses with a diagnosis of Democratic governors’ failure to inspire the public. They lack a “vision of civic improvement,” and have no leaders “remaking a state or major city in the image of a well-articulated ideology.” The goal of public works appears to be capturing people’s imagination as much as materially improving their lives.
This points to a theme I have explored at The Pathos of Things from the outset. Of all the ways that design can be said to be political, the most significant in modern history has been the ability of artefacts to communicate visions of the future, providing a source of collective meaning and direction. Design, in this guise, is inherently romantic. It is a kind of rhetoric, an object lesson in possibility. And Barkan is not the only author who has found this romance in the achievements of Robert Moses.
In his 1982 book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman situates Moses in a Modernist tradition that includes the writings of Goethe and Karl Marx, as well as the urban worlds of St Petersburg and Haussmann’s Paris. Growing up in the Bronx, Berman was surrounded by memorabilia from the 1939 World’s Fair, another of Moses’ projects, which had carried the slogan “Building the World of Tomorrow.” He portrays Moses as an almost mystical incarnation of the restless spirit of New York, both terrifying and inspiring. The great urbanist was consistently able to “pre-empt the vision of the modern,” so that opposing his plans was “to oppose history, progress, modernity itself.” Such is this power that Berman, in a move that threatens to break the credibility of his entire narrative, even manages to reconcile himself to the destruction of his own beloved neighbourhood by one of Moses’ expressways.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that visions of positive change are more important than the experience of it. The relationship between the two is complex, though there are clearly limits to how far experience can be shaped by rhetoric. The claims of Communist regimes that they were building a workers’ paradise could only defy reality for so long. Or to take a more current example, the British government’s promise to make the country a “green energy superpower” rings rather hollow when the policies in question have left us with some of the highest electricity prices in the world.
But rhetoric can also tell us something about the real conditions it is contending with. It is striking how readily the progressive visions we’ve been discussing make use of history, whether it be Barkan drawing on Moses, or Berman redeeming Moses by comparison with earlier Modernists, or, for that matter, the authors of the Foundations pamphlet invoking Britain’s historic achievements as an industrial nation. There is nothing suspect or hypocritical about this. But it surely has something to do with the fact that heroic projects of modernisation were simply easier when Western countries were at an earlier point in their development trajectory – when their populations were younger, when they had more space, when the easiest productivity gains were yet to be made, when citizens had fewer entitlements, and less power to resist changes they did not like.
In other words, in the “developed” world, the romance of development tries to persuade us that our societies are still young; and if it has imaginative power, it comes from our yearning, as societies, to be young again. Whether such rejuvenation is a real possibility remains to be seen.