To the Editor:
I’ve been thinking about development for years and years and I’ve seen many loved places ruined along the way. This morning, I was looking at the planning documents for an “upgrade” to the great old town of Bernardsville, New Jersey.
I went to school in Peapack back in the 1970s, and drove through it every day — amazing countryside, driving over stone-cobbled bridges, through lush horse country and farms. I was lucky to have that experience.
I’ve been back since and have seen the Pfizer-ing of yet another town — one that the corporation also left — have seen how one development became two, three and then hundreds with induced growth. And yet, the town still retained a spirit of its old self.
But now, like so many other places, it is on the chopping block, with a rolled-out soulless vision of a kumbaya inclusivity that is nothing more than a developer’s sales brochure. We pretend it is about the “vision” but it’s really about the money. And developers are making a lot of money.
The rise of the MBA planner-developer class has created a national sickness. I don’t know what else I can call it.
It’s about ripping out the town-ness of a town, what actually defines it as a town and replaces it with Svengali creations that pretend to care about what they destroy. They show you endless renderings, oh, the absolute joy of the renderings, happy multicultural bots eating ice cream and drinking coffee with all of their neighbors in some dream rainwater garden.
We talk about not wanting “cookie cutter” towns but ignore the fact that we are creating a “cookie cutter” nation, devoid of any spirit. How did we become this numb? Towns should grow because they need to, not because a small group says they must.
As Jane Jacobs argued decades ago (to paraphrase the writer Katherine King), these grand planning schemes, built on theoretical frameworks, fail because planners do not understand that healthy towns are organic, spontaneous, messy, and result from long evolutionary processes.
Just as Urban Renewal failed in the 1960s, so will New Urbanism fall by the wayside… but not soon enough.
Robin Breeding
Old Lyme, CT