The Order of Nature IV

Early in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs makes the point that the book is the result of her personal experience and observation, rather than sociological studies, planning theory or the lessons of architecture school.

Like Phil Bess, I think right and wrong are in nature, and human nature, not just our minds and books. Both of us also agree on the importance of tradition for the present and the future.

Where we tend to part company is on the relative emphasis we each place on the role of the past in the present, and even on the nature of our dicussion. Phil likes "phenomenology," I like "experience." Phil likes Thomism . . . I like experience . . . and believe in the "self-evident" truths.

I'll write about this after the last part of Phil's essay. Part IV is here.

The Transect and Natural Law

I turn now to the subject of the Urban Transect and its relationship to the natural law. The Congress for New Urbanism has undertaken the revival and creation of traditional towns and neighborhoods in a physical context of sprawl and the legal and cultural context that promotes it. One of the intellectual tools increasingly employed by New Urbanists is called the Transect, an idea presented by New Urbanists not only as an intellectual construct but as a discovery and articulation of a general principle of both land use and historic human settlement.

A common New Urbanist diagram of the Transect depicts six distinct Transect Zones (T-1 through T-6). Zones T-1 and T-2 refer to Rural Transect zones in the most general way, insofar as they relate to the development of human habitat. The Urban Transect, strictly speaking, is described by zones T-3 through T-6; and together with the Rural Transect zones constitute the Transect proper. The Transect seeks and purports to describe some general conditions of good human settlements, and can itself be used as the basis for locally particular zoning codes.²¹

Andres Duany has referred to the Transect as a “natural law,” adopting a dictionary definition of natural law as “a principle derived from the observation of nature by right reason and thus ethically binding in human society” [emphasis added]; and in a footnote likens natural law to Thomas Jefferson’s references in the Declaration of Independence to “self-evident truths.”²² But although I intend to argue shortly for a relationship between a certain understanding of the Transect and the natural law, Duany’s dictionary formulation of natural law seems to me almost but not quite right; and would have been better formulated had it said instead that a natural law is “a principle derived from the observation of nature and recognized by right reason to be ethically binding for individuals and human society.” The big problem with the dictionary formulation employed by Duany is the word “thus,” which blithely purports to leap the huge chasm that in the modern world divides what we believe to be our extensive knowledge of what is from what we believe to be our excessively modest knowledge of what ought to be. But how we get from the “is” to the “ought” depends entirely upon our understanding of human nature: and specifically upon whether or not human beings even have a nature, and if there is a telos or end or good toward which all human beings are oriented.²³

Duany’s reference to Jefferson is particularly illuminating. The Declaration of Independence refers at the outset to the separate and equal political station of a people “to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them;” and continues with the assertion that all men are created equal and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But here we must note two things in particular. The first is that although Jefferson is enumerating a list of inalienable human rights, he is careful to anchor them in an account of our divinely created status. In other words, the revolutionary implications of the idea of “inalienable [read “natural”] rights” follow from a traditional (if not here extensively articulated) understanding of natural law. However, it is quite clear that the rights Jefferson enumerates are not (even if true) “self-evident.” If they were, why would it be necessary to enumerate them?²⁴ The second thing to note is the distressing turn in modern culture subsequent to Jefferson where we increasingly are confronted with assertions of “natural rights” independent of their grounding in natural law — an idea of rights once aptly referred to by British Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (himself no fan of natural law) as “nonsense on stilts.”

But let me return to an argument for the Urban Transect both consistent with much of the behavior of New Urbanists and that also acknowledges two contentions prominent in the Charter for the New Urbanism itself: first, that conventional post-war sprawl development is unjust; and second that conventional post-war sprawl is culturally and environmentally unsustainable. Taking these factors into account, I would propose the following definition of the Urban Transect:

The Urban Transect refers to that range of human habitats conducive to human flourishing within which human settlements are part of a sustainable (albeit not necessarily locally bio-diverse) eco-system. These habitats, diagrammatically depicted as Transect-zones (“T-zones”), range from less dense human settlements to more dense human settlements; but each urban T-zone denotes a walkable and mixed-use human environment wherein within each urban zone many if not most of the necessities and activities of daily life are within a five-to-ten-minute walk for persons of all ages and economic classes.

This definition of the Urban Transect clearly owes much to the larger discussion of the Transect that has been occurring among New Urbanists for several years now. Nevertheless, while I acknowledge my debt to that discussion, the definition of and claims for the Urban Transect that I am here putting forth may or may not find wider support among New Urbanists, in part because I am trying to make more precise what some New Urbanists perhaps prefer to leave ambiguous.²⁵ But while there are surely occasions when prudential judgment warrants ambiguity rather than precision, this seems to me not to be one of them, inasmuch as current New Urbanist ambiguity about the nature of our own claims on behalf of traditional urbanism and the Transect to me seem more to reflect potentially damaging intellectual incoherence than justifiable strategy.

The first thing to note about my definition of the Transect therefore is its generality. The New Urbanist Transect diagrams I have shown above and on page 1 are inevitably culturally specific in their imagery; but the idea of the Transect is general and could be represented in a variety of cultural modes. Indeed, in this understanding, specific places in the world — each presumably reflecting a locally specific climate, within a locally specific culture and economy — relate to the Transect in a way exactly analogous to the relationship of culturally specific positive laws to the natural law.

The second thing to note is that my definition of the Transect is normative: it is intentionally defined not only to include good forms of human settlement but also to exclude bad forms of human settlement.²⁶ Although my normative definition of the Transect acknowledges and leaves room for a wide variety of human settlements — from the single family house of the T-3 zone to the Parisian apartment of the T-6 zone — it nevertheless does not include every form of human settlement. It makes distinctions; it is not the night in which all cats are black. A normative definition of the Transect proposes that we really can distinguish between good and bad human settlements with respect to human flourishing and environmental sustainability. It suggests for example that large parts of 18^th century Manchester, England really were bad human settlements, for both human beings and local eco-systems. It suggests, to take another example, that large parts of contemporary Mexico City really are bad forms of human settlement that need to be reclaimed and ought not to be emulated.

And then there is the question of conventional post-WWII sprawl development. Here are some of the problems commonly associated with sprawl, problems that are either direct consequences or unintended byproducts of sprawl’s formal patterns of development:

• sprawl makes it impossible for people of different generations and different incomes to live in proximity to one another, and to work, shop, play, learn and worship in the same neighborhood

• sprawl effectively de-mobilizes and disenfranchises those without cars and those unable to drive, notably children (whose parents must become chauffeurs) and the elderly

• sprawl injures the common good by concentrating both wealth and poverty; by separating people by income, age, and race; and by failing to provide a genuinely public realm shared by all:

• because sprawl separates housing settlements by class, it promotes extreme inequality of educational opportunity;

• sprawl hastens the loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the settlements it creates are not worth the tradeoff;

• sprawl, by its automobile-dependent lifestyle, contributes to unprecedented rates of obesity;

• sprawl is ugly, and produces nothing in the public realm worthy of aesthetic contemplation;

• although suburbia has become a cultural ideal, it is a contradictory ideal because sprawl consumes the landscape that is the very substance of its promise; and finally

• because sprawl cannot deliver on its promise of convenience, mobility, natural beauty, individual freedom and well-being for all, its self-contradictory dynamic is culturally problematic and undermines the common good. This is evidenced in part by the observation that often the persons most recently arrived at the fringes of suburbia are also the persons most vociferously opposed to its continuing extension (the political phenomenon that has come to be known as NIMBYism—“Not In My Back Yard”).

The conclusions I draw are that because the formal patterns of sprawl encourage unjust and environmentally unsustainable human settlements, therefore 1) sprawl development should not be emulated and perpetuated; and 2) sprawl development should not be regarded as part of the Transect.

Now, part of my claim that the New Urbanist argument on behalf of traditional urbanism is implicitly a natural law argument is simply the nature of the arguments that New Urbanists ourselves already make on behalf of urbanism: viz, that we appear to be arguing that traditional urbanism is an objective good not simply by virtue of its aesthetics nor simply by virtue of its utility, but by virtue of its promotion of both the good of individuals and the common good as implied in the Charter. But as I have heretofore alluded, this argument meets resistance among some New Urbanists, the nature of which I will describe shortly. Here however I refer to comments by professional theologian and student of New Urbanism Randall Smith of the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Professor Smith writes:

[I]t is sometimes hard to see what the [New Urbanist] problem [with natural law] is. [Perhaps] the problem lies merely with the term "natural law." Perhaps the term should be jettisoned…. [T]he question is: Do New Urbanists think that the kinds of traditional urban neighborhoods they build are actually better in terms of human flourishing than…those built in suburban sprawl zones? Or do New Urbanists favor traditional urban [neighborhoods]… because:

a) traditional neighborhoods are more quaint (i.e, it's a purely aesthetic difference);
b) traditional neighborhoods are more profitable (i.e., on purely capitalistic grounds: the return on investment is better -- at least in the long run); or
c) traditional neighborhoods are “just what New Urbanists do" (i.e., our approach to urban design is merely one sort among many, and we’re marketing ours).

If [New Urbanists] reject rationales a, b, and c as inadequate, and rather believe…that New Urbanism is actually more in keeping with human health and human flourishing -- then they should simply say so... (If they don't recognize that as "natural law"…so be it.) …. [T]he reason I can't understand the problem is that, in everything I read about New Urbanism, all New Urbanists seem pretty certain and convinced that their view of urban design is better and more conducive to human flourishing than sprawl. To me, this appears to be an unquestioned premise of the movement. All [the natural law theorist is] doing is coming along and pointing that out to them, and then giving [their] view a name. Are they troubled by the name or by the fact that they already all hold that view?²⁷

So what exactly are the objections I’ve encountered from New Urbanists to my contention that New Urbanists both do and should argue for our objectives from natural law assumptions? Essentially, there are four:

1) that natural law arguments are “conservative” arguments (and therefore shouldn’t be associated with the Congress for New Urbanism);

2) that natural law arguments are used by those who oppose homosexual marriage and abortion-on-demand (and therefore shouldn’t be associated with the Congress for New Urbanism);

3) that natural law arguments presume that human beings have a “nature” (and therefore shouldn’t be associated with the Congress for New Urbanism); and

4) that natural law arguments imply the existence of God (and therefore shouldn’t be associated with the Congress for New Urbanism).

My reply to these objections must be brief:

To the first objection I would say that although many if not most persons who hold the Aristotelian-Thomist view of natural law are indeed cultural conservatives, this does not necessarily make them political conservatives. To cite but two counter-examples: Libertarians appear to have little use either for the positive estimation within the natural law tradition of the legitimate authority of government, or for the natural law notion that the common good is something more than the sum of individual desires. And Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is an explicit appeal to an eternal if not natural law understanding of justice. But more importantly with respect to this particular New Urbanist objection (and setting aside the interesting if unspoken assumption that political liberals have a monopoly on correct thinking about the relationship of good urbanism to the common good), it is the natural law insistence upon objective standards of justice that offers the only non-theistic intellectual justification for protecting the weaker members of society from the stronger members of society, a concern I have always understood to be a moral cornerstone of the liberal social agenda.

To the second objection I would say first that the Congress for New Urbanism has no need to take any position at all on the issues of homosexual marriage and abortion-on-demand. That said, the more important point is that just because there is disagreement about the implications of the natural law when applied to one issue or set of issues does not mean that there cannot be consensus about the implications of the natural law for another issue or set of issues. Considering the fact that most of the arguments (good or bad) one hears in favor of homosexual marriage are also themselves implicitly natural law arguments (good or bad) from justice, the fact that there are natural law arguments against homosexual marriage clearly does not constitute a persuasive argument that therefore there is no such thing as the natural law.²⁸

The third objection — that natural law theory presumes human beings have a nature — is a much more serious and substantive complaint, because the history of much of the modern era is premised upon the idea that there is no such thing as human nature, and that human beings are both self-made and infinitely malleable. The unfortunate 20^th century consequences of that belief for both global politics and the human habitat seem to me plainly evident; and I infer not only from these negative witnesses but also from the positive witnesses of both natural law theory and New Urbanist theory and practice that human beings do indeed have a nature — the existence of which does not in the least exclude the influence and significance of history and culture. If the view of human nature implied in the Charter for the New Urbanism is perhaps less well articulated than it is in natural law theory, rectifying that is both an immediate and long term objective of this essay.

Finally, the fourth objection, which in fact is related to the third — that natural law theory implies the existence of God. I agree that it does: if there is a law there is a law-giver; though the natural law in and of itself gives us a much more generic view of God than that provided by biblical revelation, for example. I hasten to add the obvious: that there should be “no religious test” either for membership in the CNU or for advocating that building in accordance with the Urban Transect is something that human beings ought to do.²⁹ But on this larger objection — that we must not and can not embrace a natural law argument for traditional urbanism because such an argument implies the existence of God — here my differences with my objectors run deep; and it is a dilemma, because I picture them in my mind’s eye, and I have fond regards for them all. Some deny God because they must; to them, God is literally incredible. Others deny God because they appear very much to love being in denial. Still others deny God because they have been wounded, and remain unable to separate thinking about God from some unhappy childhood or adult experiences associated with religion — a circumstance that especially commands the sympathy and patience of religious believers. Nevertheless, the denial of God is a dilemma deeply embedded in the cultural dilemmas of modernity; and can be described as something like this: If human beings have no nature, then we have no natural telos or purpose. And what this has meant in the modern world, where the belief that human beings have no nature is widespread, is that rather than the purpose of an individual life being to discover one’s unique vocation — literally, one’s calling from God; i.e., that work which an individual needs to do both for his or her own gladness and for the world’s — rather than discovering one’s own vocation (which in the modern view is an illusion) one instead makes an artifact of one’s life. One is forced to become an artist because one has no un-chosen obligations. Likewise, the implication of there being no natural law (and eo ipso, no God) is precisely that there are no un-chosen obligations; and therefore that everything — genocide, murder, chattel slavery, cloning, totalitarian politics, abortion-on-demand, sprawl — is in principle permitted, if only as an aesthetic and experiential “choice.”³⁰ In such a cultural context, is it a surprise that therapeutic individualism and artistic self-expression — those preconditions of suburbia, those banes of good traditional urbanism, those foundational assumptions of first-year architecture students (and many of their teachers) — are normative?

Many of the leading architectural figures of the Congress for New Urbanism have worked incredibly hard to overcome the dogmatic modernist architectural and urbanist ideologies they learned in school. But although New Urbanists have begun to wean ourselves away from the ideology of modernist urbanism and to relearn the art of traditional urban design, to the extent that we still recoil from the notion of obligation &mdash even as we evangelize others on behalf of the goodness of traditional urbanism — we have still not weaned ourselves from the individualist and emotivist sensibilities of the modern world. There remains, I fear, a modernist anthropology very near the heart of the CNU that I suspect is in fact incompatible with traditional urban culture and our own professed urban and cultural objectives; and the danger of this, as always, is that an incorrect understanding of human nature has detrimental consequences for the making of our cities. If we mis-understand what cities are for, we will surely make them badly.

The merit of the natural law intellectual tradition is that it allows New Urbanists to argue in good faith for why traditional urbanism is a genuine human good and why suburbia is objectively problematic. By attending to the complex inter-relationship between biology, culture, and human agency (i.e., will) with respect to individual and collective human behavior, and without denying either our social or biological natures, the natural law intellectual tradition draws us away from modernist temptations to social and/or biological determinism by its dogged insistence that character is the key to civilization, not only in terms of social justice and human happiness but also in terms of artistic production and aesthetics. It reminds us that it is a false objective to seek for what T.S. Eliot called “social arrangements so perfect that they will make us good.” And it allows us as architects and urban designers to steer ourselves away from sterile notions of the zeitgeist and personal “authenticity” in favor of the fecund language of craftsmanship and of moral and intellectual and artistic excellence.

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23. The famous modern difficulty of deriving evaluative judgments from descriptive accounts — that is, to describe something that is as something that is good or is bad — only exists because modernity denies that human beings have a nature. In cultures and/or sub-cultures where there is greater consensus about the purpose of being a human being, there is no more trouble commonly recognizing from empirical observation a “good” human being than sports fans have recognizing that Derek Jeter is a “good” baseball player, or that Tiger Woods is a “good” golfer.

24. The same line of reasoning incidentally applies also to the moral authority of the Urban Transect: it may be true, but is clearly not “self-evident.”

25. The positing here of a normative definition of the Transect in the interest of greater precision is only the most important of several thoughts about the Transect that are perhaps not shared by other New Urbanists. But if this first point seems to me fundamental, the ones that follow may be more like issues about which intelligent people of good will simply disagree. For example: I concur that Transect zones can be regarded as “locally calibrated,” — meaning that what is T-3 (“Sub-Urban”) or T-6 (“Urban Core”) in Italy or Indonesia may not be T-3 or T-6 in the United States. Nevertheless, I think that with regard to absolute density T-zones should be regarded as similar; and also that it is not necessarily the case that every human settlement must have every (or even most) of the urban T-zones within its borders. (The whole point of a T-zone is precisely that it is mixed-use and walkable, and hence potentially capable of standing on its own.) Or to take a second example: Should the Urban Transect diagram include Districts (which are defined as large parcels of land devoted to a single-use)? In my opinion---the diagram on the preceding page notwithstanding — it should not; not because Districts are not to be permitted or because Districts don’t occur or because Districts are not needed, but simply because Districts are exceptional whereas the Urban Transect diagram is typical and normative. Or, to take a third example (with respect to what appears to be the unfortunate temptation of some New Urbanists to view the Transect as the comprehensive organizing principle of all of life) are some rural-to-urban “transects” — e.g., transects of shoes, of hats, of building styles — better understood as embodiments of custom and tradition (i.e., as cultural) rather than as natural? That is: more analogous to positive law than natural law? In my opinion — considering, for example, that there may be Transect zones in which the human occupants don’t even have shoes or hats — absolutely...

26. I realize it is possible to define the Urban Transect descriptively rather than normatively, as a gradation of every conceivable human habitat; but since those of us who are New Urbanists are obviously evangelists on behalf of a normative idea of urbanism, if we don’t use the Transect as an intellectual tool to help us define and promote normative urbanism, then we are going to have to find some other intellectual tool to describe and articulate our normative agenda. I would argue therefore that my proposal here to define the Transect as normative commends itself not least because a normative understanding of the Transect is so eminently practical.

27. Personal correspondence, 9/1/03.

28. I reiterate that the CNU has no need to take a corporate stance on the issues of homosexual marriage and abortion. Nevertheless, the dismissal by some New Urbanists of natural law theory otherwise supremely supportive of New Urbanist objectives on the grounds that forceful intellectual opposition to abortion-on-demand is indeed founded upon natural law arguments is yet another example of how the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and its aftermath continue to corrupt American political and cultural life generally, and contemporary political liberalism in particular.

29. In contending here that building in accordance with the Urban Transect is properly understood as a moral imperative, it is no part of my contention that individual urbanites are necessarily “more moral” than persons who live in sprawl suburbs. It is my contention that acquiring the virtues necessary to living a good life does require communities of propinquity, which are both more numerous and more accessible in traditional urban environments than in sprawl environments. It is therefore by these criteria that efforts to build more of the former and fewer of the latter, as cultural and institutional conditions permit, should be regarded as morally obligatory to all persons possessing right (practical) reason.

30. I’m not suggesting that those who deny the existence of natural law necessarily favor all of these activities; only that to the extent that such persons regard any of them as intrinsically (as opposed to merely situationally) wrong, they are thereby implicitly affirming the existence of the natural law. Nor is it germane for the non-believers in natural law to point out that some believers in natural law have at times supported some of these activities; because the obvious inference of this criticism is that the believers, by engaging in such practices, have themselves behaved immorally, i.e., in violation of the natural law.