That was crushed in favor of "development" and financial motives that supported the generation of wealth rather than the quality of life for a community. Before the oil boom and exploitation of coal to feed the furnaces of the burgeoning industrial age, there was sustainable living. So ponder this... most of human existence has been under a low energy (water wheels and oxen pulled plow) regime and today's overconsumption with all of its complexity is really a very small blip in time. We are headed back there.
An idea known as Broadacre City was one of many such ideas espoused by victorians albeit ahead of its time.
Although Frank Lloyd Wright tried to claim ownership of such planning, a contemporary by the name of Wijdeveld was probably a bigger contributor to the inspiration.
The historical record is often inaccurate, edited or just plain falsified to support some new agenda. That is nothing new, so be wary when you read about "history" - it's best taken with a dose of many alternate views of the event as are most things in life (be very wary of those who don't seek out "the other point of view" - sadly, they can be manipulated so easily and make the best useful idiots). The idea of sustainable living has been promoted so many times in our past, with all of its quality of life attributes. The "rub" is that it doesn't naturally have a mechanism for exploitation of anything unless you contrive a currency for exchange of "things". Hence no way for the person(s) with the cash or intimidation to force an acquisition of power on the rest of the community without that concept. Think of where we could be right now if these evolutionary ideas had been supported by governance and not bull dozed into oblivion to always chase a buck and create a fiefdom. We are all guilty of chasing a better value for something. Cheap energy naturally became the easy button and it was sure to be exploited in numerous ways. Enjoying personal wealth creation by manipulating the currency of trade and not really doing anything else is another blip in history that will die a hard death. Think for a moment - did American Indians have a banking class? Ancient cultures traded in real value not with fiat markers that can be manipulated with a mouse click or an author less "algorithm". Their system of exchange was primitive but robust unlike the leaky and corrupt systems we have managed to employ today. Sorry Bretton Woods thinking and infinite growth models were flawed from the start, and time will bring us back around. Painfully.
In the short FLW book cited below, and to put it in prospective; FLW's Broadacre City, represented the view of a man born in the pre-federal reserve late 1800's when there actually was a tendril to reality in the gold standard. A person who had no idea cheap oil and energy were to enable cities to grow into unsustainable monstrosities, pollution to spiral, wars to be funded out of thin air and fought with abundant resources and all the other unintended consequences that would shape our modern lives - but alas are unsustainable. A person from this era had one foot clearly planted in a time where sustainable living was the only option. FLW sees the growth of modernism and the concrete jungle as an assault on intellectual honesty. The dependency on machines, and the generation of wealth based upon plunder of the land was simply unsustainable and therefore obviously obscene to FLW. So put on your turn of the last century contextual thinking cap and enjoy the read below! I think this short video is oddly prescient.
Here is a fun read on the "City".
Nothing new under the sun and much to be learned from the sensibilities of the pre or early industrial age thinkers as pertaining to the evolution of the community etal. As this early observation made before peak oil points out... Large cities are not sustainable. Maintaining millions of miles of roads, building energy sucking data centers, inefficient use of resources like the current battery mania and mixing millions of tons of concrete to keep on building stuff is not sustainable either. Retraction and eventual collapse and reconstruction of a new low density energy world will take decades to unfold - but it will unfold. All of the propaganda, digital magic and financialization ain't gonna stop this train. Wooo wooooooo.
Also appropriate but allegorical... you can figure it out.
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