| Replaced_Texan |
08-22-2019 05:31 PM |
Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
(Post 524566)
Houston is stupid big, and poorly signed. As a city it is like LA- not really one.
|
Eons ago, Houston made the decision to incorporate the crap out of the outlying areas, so it's not a collection of small cities or towns but under a single municipality. The suburbs, early on, got absorbed into the tax base. Places like the Woodlands, Sugar Land, and Katy are anomalies rather than the norm.
About 18 months ago, some east coast writers tried and failed to describe LA in the New York Times. There was much derision and scorn, but my favorite response article in the LA Times was a missive on Houston, because we are similar.
Quote:
If I had to put my finger on what unites Houston and Los Angeles, it is a certain elusiveness as urban object. Both cities are opaque and hard to read. What is Houston? Where does it begin and end? Does it have a center? Does it need one? It’s tough to say, even when you’re there — even when you’re looking directly at it.
The same has been said of Los Angeles since its earliest days. Something Carey McWilliams noted about L.A. in 1946 — that it is a place fundamentally ad hoc in spirit, “a gigantic improvisation” — is perhaps even more true of Houston. Before you can pin either city down, you notice that it’s wriggled out of your grasp.
People who are accustomed to making quick sense of the world, to ordering it into neat and sharply defined categories, tend to be flummoxed by both places. And reporters at the New York Times are certainly used to making quick sense of the world. If there’s one reason the paper keeps getting Los Angeles so spectacularly wrong, I think that’s it. Smart, accomplished people don’t like being made to feel out of their depth. Los Angeles makes out-of-town reporters feel out of their depth from their first day here.
Their reaction to that feeling, paradoxically enough, is very often to attempt to write that feeling away — to conquer that sense of dislocation by producing a story that sets out to explain Los Angeles in its entirety. Because it’s a challenge, maybe, or because they simply can’t be convinced, despite all the evidence right in front of them, that Los Angeles, as cities go, is an especially tough nut to crack.
***
That tendency — to attempt the moon shot, the overarching analysis, too soon — is equal parts hubris and panic. It usually goes about as well as it went this time around for Arango, not incidentally a brand-new arrival in the New York Times bureau here, and Nagourney.
Among the most dedicated scholars of Houston’s urban form in recent years has been Lars Lerup, former dean of the Rice University School of Architecture. In his new book of essays, “The Continuous City,” he argues that the first step in understanding Houston and cities like it is to begin with a certain humility about the nature and scale of the task.
This kind of city has grown so large — in economic and environmental as well as physical reach — that it begins to stretch beyond our field of vision. The best way to grasp it, according to Lerup, is to understand that it is not Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco or Chicago — to recognize it instead as “a vast field with no distinct borders.”
“The old city was a discrete object sitting on a Tuscan hill surrounded by a collectively constructed wall; the new city is everywhere,” he writes. “Only when we accept that we can only attain a partial understanding can work begin.”
Lerup stresses that huge, spread-out cities like Houston — which he also calls “distributed cities,” places where “the spiky downtown is just a blip in the flatness” — have long been tough to read, in part because they are “always in the throes of change.” But the relationship between urbanization and climate change has added a new layer of complexity, because big metro regions and their pollution are exacerbating the ecological crisis. The city now “owns everything” and must answer for everything, “even the raging hurricane bearing down on its coast.” The vast city has grown vaster still.
|
|
