They Have Ugly Plans for Your City

The history of the city is fundamentally the history of civilization. The earliest cities were centers of religious life, fortifications against outside threats, and commercial hubs where the first complex markets developed. They were where human beings learned to live together at scale.

When civilizations begin to decay, the cities are usually the first place you notice it. As I discussed in my video this past Friday, America’s greatest cities are now trapped in a familiar cycle: business is driven out, disorder goes unchecked, and political dysfunction becomes the norm.

I blame the central planners.

They convince themselves they can spend your money better than you, but when the top taxpayers vote with their feet, the planners’ opinions don’t end up mattering. Even the world’s greatest social engineer can’t spend your money better than you if you’ve moved it all to Florida.

Of course, when the resulting urban blight sets in, the planners will point the finger at those new Florida residents or some other perceived class enemy. The crises of homelessness, drug addiction, and crime that predictably follow will be left to fester while mayors and city councils double down on disastrous policies.

When Los Angeles burned last year, the city and state’s response wasn’t to reflect on what went wrong and fix those vulnerabilities going forward. It was to vaguely blame climate change (translation: the big bad oil tycoons) and to reimagine “L.A. 2.0.”

What does that even mean? Who knows. If you listen to L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, it seems like their imagination has been limited at best.

But one thing’s for sure. There will be more plans. Central plans.

These plans are introduced under innocuous-sounding names. Two terms that are especially popular with progressive urban planners are walkability and 15-minute cities. The idea is that, if you just design the urban environment carefully enough, with everything residents need within a short walk, you can engineer your way to a thriving community. It’s a little unclear why that magically solves deeply rooted social problems, but you can at least imagine the appeal of convenience and, ideally, a close-knit community.

However, this exact experiment has been run before, and not in some one-off utopian commune. The Soviet Union built entire cities around exactly this model, with massive identical apartment blocks arranged in hyper-planned “micro-districts.”

We call it urban planning, and they called it scientific socialism. The result, then as now, was engineered sameness. In other words, ugliness. That’s wasn’t a bug in the system, but a core feature of communist ideology.

The Enemies of Beauty

Recent guest of the show Xi Van Fleet, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, shared several childhood memories that put the literal ugliness of communism in stark terms.

Temples she visited as a young child were destroyed and converted into parks. These represented an ancient, complex culture, but anything from the before-times was as a threat to the communist regime and therefore had to go.

She highlighted how the violent land-reform campaigns following the Chinese Civil War didn’t just wipe out land owners as an economic class. They also destroyed human capital at a massive scale, eliminating precisely the most educated people who otherwise would have preserved and transmitted Chinese culture.

In her words, “Destroying culture, destroying civilization, is in the DNA of Marxism.”

By framing society as opposing classes at war with one another, Marxism brands any trait of the “bourgeoisie” as itself evil. Leveling all differences is the goal, so anything that sets someone apart, especially in a positive sense, must be a trait of the bourgeoisie.

“I grew up in an environment totally devoid of beauty,” Xi told me. Beauty was the enemy, and in its place, coarseness was celebrated as a mark of proletarian virtue.

She recounted seeing a teacher at her school surrounded and mercilessly spat on by a mob of children for the offense of putting too much effort into her appearance. Personal grooming was bourgeois. It marked you as the enemy. The gray uniform everyone wore was not a practical measure, but an ideological statement.

But here is where the Marxist binary breaks down. Beauty doesn’t really have an equal and opposite. Ugliness isn’t the “anti-beauty.” Just as evil is the absence of good, ugliness is the absence of beauty. The Marxists tried to replace one aesthetic with its righteous opposite, but in reality, all they accomplished was destruction, replacing beauty with nothingness.

In 1978, China began to open up. Xi was in college studying English and was allowed to watch Western films for the first time. When she saw beautiful women on screen, something clicked.

From her earliest memory, she’d been taught that everyone should look the same. No one should stand out. If you wear makeup, you’ll be beaten by the Red Guard. And yet even with that upbringing, her fundamental humanity recognized beauty when she saw it. After a lifetime in gray uniforms, she realized everything she’d been told about the West was a lie.

If her story doesn’t disprove the notion that everything is a social construct, I don’t know what does. No wonder they had to violently suppress beauty. Even the first hint unraveled the brainwashing.

More Planning, More Problems

The gray uniform, the Soviet micro-district, the 15-minute city. All of it stems from the same root assumption: that the collective, administered by experts, can design a better society than free people building it themselves. Some find it appealing on paper, but as Xi’s experience demonstrates, it’s a lot uglier in person.

Were the effects of land reform in China so different from what’s going on today in American cities? They may be orders of magnitude apart in moral severity, but the general trajectories are disturbingly similar. You eliminate all the people who know what they’re doing, either through violence or bad policy, and descend into a civilizational spiral.

That spiral looks different at the street level than it does in the history books. If we want to avoid the trap that destroyed Chinese civilization, we must reject even the relatively small doses of central planning we’re tempted with in our cities.

As David Rand wrote here last week, utopian engineering is no match for the “layered, unpredictable, gloriously unplanned” neighborhoods of the past that grew free from heavy-handed zoning restrictions.

A healthy civilization emerges from distributed individual action. It’s built and maintained by people with skin in the game, who live in the places they’re shaping and bear the consequences of their decisions.

The individual can create a thing of beauty for himself and his immediate surroundings, but rarely succeeds at civilizational scale. Central planning is the enemy of beauty.