It’s called Public Administration. And it’s called urbanization and suburb development.
And what these concepts have done is change the way American’s live.
“The City in History” by Lewis Mumford, written in 1961, is a work that describes in wonderful literate detail, the development of our urban and suburban lifestyles.
It’s an old book but one of the best I’ve ever read to describe the development of the way we live today in America and in fact, around the world. I read it long ago when I was getting a Masters in Public Administration.
Essential to his discussion is the fact that urban and suburban planning by professionals is essential to life as we know it.
Sounds different from the myths of populism, right? We live with a mythological vision of American life that is still stuck in the 19th century. We continue to wish to find a place back on the farm in an agrarian setting where “rugged individualists” are the heroes. “The Waltons” always comes up as an example of this yearning for the "simple life".
Our movies, our television dramas, still resort to this convention; that we are happiest with the simple life, on a farm, independent of others with our faithful (God always is involved) family.
Problem is this bucolic vision was just that; a vision. Even in the frontier, we had to gather together into villages and towns for survival. The problems of septic cleanliness itself, required village and town development; treated water is the single biggest reason for live expectancy.
In short, you lived alone in the mythological single family farm, you usually died early and often. Being down river from a farm means drinking fouled water; and you die.
Only in banding together was there a chance to survive and a chance to have a decent life. Only in finding a way to keep from getting cholera could you survive in the 1800s.
And we have been doing that for hundreds of years.
The fact is in the United States urbanization is the norm. The vast majority of people live in urban settings with all the hierarchy and infrastructure that is necessary for a healthy lifestyle.
And that means, in sharp contrast to the myths of the rugged individualist, planning and government is a given. Government bureaucracy is necessary for life itself.
What we have today, with the phenomenon of the Tea Party, Trump, and modern conservatism is a mythological problem. A political movement, populist and often delusional, is trying to push us into a reality that is impossible to achieve. We cannot survive without the bureaucracy they hate so much!
It screams at us to be angry because our government doesn’t work to put us back in the ideal small, agrarian community, where men were men and women were (well slaves).
And there are guns (in the 1800s gun ownership was far below what it is today; ordinary people simply could not afford them) and there was the ideal of the rugged individual and true “freedom”.
And a gun culture in an urban setting results in a killing field, making areas of cities so dangerous that even the police won’t go into them; a nightmare.
Fact? Well, the fact is that the bucolic agrarian life never existed in the first place. The first thing the white Europeans did when they colonized the “New World” was build a fort; that’s right, a fort.
And the next thing they did is die in great numbers because the infrastructure they needed to live was back in England. Only the Indians, who rescued more than one colony, showed the colonists (who would soon became their killers), how to survive in the hostile New World.
And towns and villages is how they survived, where the WE not the ME was essential to survival. The towns and villages, soon to become cities, were the way the West was conquered, NOT the small farms.
Lewis Mumford and other writers of public administration teach professionals how to administer urban and suburban entities. There is a skill set that provides the government that allows business to prosper, children to grow, and public safety to exist. It is a skill set. You need experts to make it work!
Today with the renewal of populism in Trump and the right wing Tea Party types, we see a call to renounce professionals, experts it you will, as somehow part of an elite or establishment that represses freedom.
Fact is it is exactly the opposite. Freedom is NOT Free! It requires planning, safety and infrastructure that allows at the most base level, water that is safe to drink so we all don’t die of dysentery; public safety that fights fire and yes, stops the bad buys from stealing your house.
Trump constantly tries to persuade us to mis-trust experts.
It is no accident that he is a real estate developer.
Real estate developers have to deal with government regulations all the time. And often they do everything they can to cut corners to make more money. Trump is renowned for this. And sometimes buildings fall down and burn down because of code violations. And we as home buyers want and need legal protections when we buy a home.
So there is a tension between public administrators and developers like Trump. There is a tension between the pubic interest to have safe housing and charlatans who try to rip us off.
Urban planning and regulations are there are will stay there no matter how much we wish for a return to the “good old days”.
Trump’s populism is self serving, he is fooling a whole lot of people with a promised reality that is simply not possible. The elite is NOT the problem. Our idealism is the problem; it lives is an unreal place. We NEED experts to help us navigate an increasingly complex urban infrastructure.
“The City in History” is a great read. It proves again and again that we NEED professionals to build and maintain urban and suburban centers that are safe and healthy.
Without them, in Trump’s world, we will have chaos!
