Barack Obama has promised an office of urban policy, but what will it look like? Dana explains:
There is a certain vogue gathering around urban issues. No -- not inner city poverty, crime, or joblessness -- but, rather, those issues that might broadly be described as ones of "human geography." Where do people live, where do they work, and how should they travel between the two? How can resources, ranging from good schools to public transit to clean air, be more fairly allocated within regions?
Such questions have long been the provenance of a small group of left planning theorists such as James Howard Kunstler and Jane Jacobs. Their calls for denser, urban development were motivated as much by aesthetic concerns as by economic and environmental ones. And while it's certainly true that strip malls and parking lots are eyesores, and that old buildings are often prettier than new ones, critics weren't totally off the mark when they accused these thinkers of snobbishness; of a certain lack of compassion for the typical postwar middle class family, lured by cheap real estate and good schools into a vastly expanding suburbia.
--The Editors
