Things Fall Apart (Book Excerpt)

Every city has a shadow. It’s the things we don’t see, that we choose not
to see or teach ourselves not to see. What we don’t see still exists,
though. It works out of sight, behind our backs, and it’s all the more
powerful because it’s unobserved. We underestimate what we don’t
notice. We mount no defense against what we never see.

No matter where you live, I guarantee that something near you

unraveled while you slept last night. Things do that: they fall apart.
They do it constantly, without cease. Steel doesn’t get your permission
to rust. Wood doesn’t require legislation to rot. Last night, wherever
you are, pavement cracked a bit more. And another weed seed
germinated, someplace dark and out of sight.

That falling apart, whether you call it decay or entropy or disorder, is a

force with power, and it never stops. There’s even a thermodynamic
law about it. For a lot of us, the cities in which we live are great
examples of this, either as a whole or in part. Those parts may be
places we try not to go, but they exist all the same, even when they are
out of sight. If you’re someone who studies cities or governs them or
shapes them in any way, this unraveling is not something you talk
about much, or perhaps not something you want to look at. Cities are
supposed to grow. For a lot of us concerned with cities, our particular
take on them is predicated on growth, particularly continual building
and land development. It’s an article of faith that our city will continue
to build. To look at the opposing force, at decay and disorder, feels a lot
like failure. It feels like that fear that keeps you up at night.

In fact, a lot of our top fears fall into the category of “things falling
apart,” whether you worry about climate change or crime or whether
your car will get you home from work tonight. Things can come apart
in terms of how we get along with each other, how systems work, or
how structures endure.

Neglect is this falling apart that affects cities like yours and mine.
“Neglect” means that it’s something someone has looked away from.
Neglect is what happens behind your back. Neglect is also a verb, and
you can neglect something by ignoring it or not seeing its distress, but
also by not paying for what it needs. These are fundamental
statements, but you get the idea: neglect is all the ways, big and small,
that cities unravel. No matter what city you think of, neglect is shaping
it right now. Neglect is a constant, because there’s always something
we should be paying attention to but can’t afford. The bottom of
someone’s to-do list is tomorrow’s neglect. Neglect doesn’t need our
permission. It doesn’t need us to notice it to be at work. In fact, our
inattention can turbocharge neglect. It’s a shaping by unintentional
consequence. It’s powerful because we don’t pay attention to it. It
thrives on passivity and apathy.

If neglect shapes the environment of your city, it’s influencing you, too,
through that environment. You probably don’t notice how it affects
you, and once again, that makes neglect a little more powerful. That’s
sinister, and it should be, because neglect hurts us, and it hurts some of
us a lot more than others. Except when it doesn’t. Neglect, in some
ways, shapes urban environments in ways that benefit us.

Some of us, some of the time, are better off because of

neglect.

This is ambiguous, which is what makes it worth learning about. It’s

also worth learning about because it’s an unstoppable force that’s
shaping our cities, as you read this, in ways that affect our health, our
climate, and our opportunities in life. It’s working right now, outside
your window or behind your back. It’s just out of sight.

Never Enough Money

Our cities are falling apart. This isn’t news — pick several recent
headlines and connect the dots.[i] Our government is characterized by
dysfunction and inaction: gridlock, shutdowns, and most especially,
the inability to pass legislation that majorities of the country’s people
support. We’ve grown used to this, so we don’t think of it this way, but
that doesn’t make it less true. Dysfunction and inaction are the
essential characteristics of governance in this country, particularly at
the federal level, but not only there. Failing water mains and the
overburdened electrical grid are not partisan issues. We all use water
and electricity, and no one supports dirty water or power outages. Yet,
inaction persists. Dysfunction at its most basic and undeniable.
In too many cities, it’s been a long time now since there was enough to
go around. Enough money, enough labor, enough staffing, enough
political will, but really, it all comes down to enough money. Rust-Belt
decline and shrinking cities are often portrayed as a new or newly
urgent problem, but really, they aren’t. There’s nothing at all new
about this decline, or about the disinvestment in cities that has
accompanied it. In a strange twist, the lack of newness is exactly why it
matters — these are long-term trends and thus, their effects are much
bigger. Because they are long-term, they are more difficult to stop or to
reverse. It’s not a bad year or a bad decade or someone’s poor
governance during his term in office. It’s forty years, or more: 1950 is
usually cited as the peak year of urban population, or the year in which
the most people lived actually within the city itself, not its many
suburbs or in neighboring bedroom communities. And friends, 1950
was a long time ago, over sixty years at this writing. This atmosphere of
scarcity in our cities is not a blip, and the next election won’t change it.

So here’s a bit of logic. It’s pretty basic, but it escaped my notice for
many years, even as I learned about, shaped, and studied cities,
because it happens out of sight. That persistent atmosphere of scarcity,
the budget that’s never big enough, the coffers that are always
overdrawn? What that means is choices. Just as in your own home or
your own life, when there’s not enough money to go around, you
choose where to spend what you do have. In city governance there are
all kinds of possible shenanigans involving deficit spending and
various ways to rob Peter and pay Paul, but really, are those so
different from credit cards in our own homes? Not really.
When times are tight at home, you might opt to pay the electric bill and
avoid eating out, if you are able to cook at home and shop for groceries.
If you do this enough — say, if times are tight for sixty years — you will
always have the lights on and never eat out. The electric company wins
and the restaurant down the street loses. Although your intent was to
keep the lights on, you may find you weigh less and thus escape the
host of obesity-related diseases with which we are plagued because you
have eaten home cooking for sixty years instead of more caloric
restaurant food. You may also enjoy better health due to dodging the
related host of diet- and nutrition-related diseases with which we are
plagued, because, again, you’ve not eaten at a restaurant in sixty years,
so you likely consume less salt, for example. You’ve undoubtedly
become a great cook with all that practice. Your pots and pans have
gotten a lot of wear. You’ve been at home for sixty years of dinner-time
telemarketer calls. Your kitchen has needed to be cleaned frequently,
with all that use. You may be very tired of mac and cheese and
spaghetti. All of these are consequences of your choice repeated
consistently over decades to pay for electricity and not for eating out.
They are unintended, yet consequences all the same; some are positive
and some are negative. You could say that you’ve neglected to fund
eating out for sixty years, and thus caused all these consequences, good
and bad.

The Big Hypothesis

Couldn’t the same thing happen with city budgets and competing
priorities for municipal resources? If, for example, police protection
and trash collection always get funded — and they are important —
what doesn’t get funded to provide for them? What’s the dining out in
this comparison? And is it always the same priorities or tasks or
programs that don’t get funded? And what does that mean?

This book is about a question — a hypothesis — and what’s already

known about it, what new connections can be drawn between those
bits of existing knowledge, and what new insights can be produced
from examining all this material together.

This central hypothesis is this: all these bits and pieces are observed
effects and outcomes from a larger trend or dynamic: neglect. Decades
of scarcity have resulted in the same priorities going unfunded
repeatedly, and those unfunded priorities express themselves in the
physical environment of our cities, in consistent and predictable ways.
In short:

Neglect is a major yet unnoticed shaper of our cities.

An intriguing sub-hypothesis: Some impacts of this

neglect may be positive — we urban residents may
actually be better off in some ways because of the
environment created by neglect.