Let’s Build Cities of Marble, Not Metal

I remember at 19 when I first went to Venice, I walked down the steps from the train station as I had in so many other cities on my three month train tour of Europe, but this time, the stone steps went down ... to water. It wasn't a joke and it wasn't a canal or two here or there. It was literally a city built with canals as roads.

And it gave me some hope for humanity. Because, having grown up in America, I had come to feel that we as humanity had no imagination. Of course, that's not entirely fair as we have been poor relatively-speaking throughout history. Food scarcity is still a problem and it's 2022. But even when we would have pockets of wealth, we rarely used it to do something interesting. We're not dreamers. We, humanity, are for the most part simply mouth-breathers.

Now that indictment is writ large. Our wealth has increased in the last century in so many ways but we're cheaper now than ever. The architecture of the last 100 years has been democratizing but also appalling. We've put more roofs over more people's heads but at terrible cost. We used take centuries to build cathedrals that would reach the sky and it would inspire us. It's impossible to walk into the Koln Cathedral and not swoon. We stopped doing that.

Innovation into making money has shot to the moon but innovation in how we live, the quality of experience for our 80 or 90 years of life on this dumb rock, has plummeted. And what does all that filthy lucre, that number in the bank account, mean in the end if not for that?