Semiquincentennial
Presenting Southern Urbanism's 5-Part series on American Land Use at 250
When I finished architecture school, I told everyone, myself included, that I’d start a magazine. I was fascinated by the thought pieces in the middle of the glossy pages with impossible buildings. It was the kind of writing that is at the same time ambiguous and on point, full of seemingly unrelated ideas, and then shows you, at the end, that all the pieces somehow connect to your life’s puzzle. The magazine never happen. Life did.
So when the invitation came to collaborate with Southern Urbanism and open the Semiquincentennial series, something clicked again. Two hundred and fifty years is more than a number. It is proof that an idea can give life, and that freedom, values, and culture keep finding new people to set free and new frontiers to conquer.
The idea did not begin in 1776, and it did not begin in English. The oldest continuously settled city in the United States is St. Augustine, founded in 1565 under the same Spanish town-planning laws that shaped Havana, Mexico City, and Lima. That tradition runs through New Orleans, names half the states out West, and still molds the urban fabric, for good or bad, from Los Angeles to “Nueva York”.
I come from one of those Spanish-founded cities myself. I mention it because the American story has always been written by people arriving into cities someone else had already started, understanding the values that built them, making them their own, preserving them with zeal, and passing the torch for future generations.
That is the premise of this series. We are, to a real degree, what our cities make us, and our cities are what successive waves of entrepreneurs, innovators, and creators have made of them. We find our history in them. We learn how good ideas, values and culture are indispensable to achieve greatness. We create, we worship, we argue, we discover. Agglomeration enables that. Cities enable that. The question we’re asking, as the Republic turns 250, is whether the Dream those cities were built to hold is still being written, or whether we’ve stopped adding lines.
Five essays take up that question from five different directions. Aaron Lubeck revisits Euclid v. Ambler, which turns 100 this year. His essay recasts it as one of several judicial missteps in the 20th century that constrained our freedom to build, severely impacting our quality of life. Eli Smith makes a similar case in a slightly different key, finding in the Federalist Papers a Republic deliberately built to tolerate conflict rather than engineer it away. Billy Cooney turns inward, tracing how imagination, the thing that founded the country, is the same faculty a planner uses and the one our profession has half-forgotten. Nick Larkins goes to the land itself, to the old quarrel between the city and the farm and the suburb that failed to reconcile them. I will close from the outside looking in, on what the Dream looks like to someone who arrived, took up the values, and started adding lines of his own.
What America has built in 250 years has no equal, and the entrepreneurs who built it, native-born and newcomers alike, did it with nerve, invention, and no small amount of chutzpah. This is our homage. It is made of words that tell stories of cities. How they were built, how they make us believe in the possibilities, how we make sense of them, how we build systems to make them more efficient, grander, and more human, and, in the most American of fashions, how we do it with infinite humor, and hope.
Jaime Izurieta is an Architect, designer, and urban development consultant, founder of Storefront Mastery. He is the author of Main Street Mavericks and The 10 No-BS Rules For Successful Storefront Design. He has founded a city, a museum, and an architectural practice, planted a few trees, rehabbed a 100-year old farmhouse, co-owned an independent bookseller, worked in the public and private sectors, and taught architectural design studios at university. Jaime writes on Substack at The Vertical Sidewalk.