Planners could develop more sophisticated zoning tools to foment commercial diversity and architectural variety: They might, for instance, require new stores with more than 50 feet of frontage to be spaced two or three blocks apart. That will happen only if neighbors demand it. The only people who can curb the blight of sameness are the ones who suffer the consequences.
The architect and provocateur Rem Koolhaas recently suggested, in a polemical exhibit called “Cronocaos,” that the world should routinely clear out the underbrush of obsolete junk architecture. Preservationism, he argued, is keeping cities sluggish and out of date. Koolhaas was once a connoisseur of New York’s contradictory quirks; these days, he has only to stroll up Broadway on the Upper West Side to observe the baleful outcome of the progressive erasure he advocates. Here, the preservationist impulse is needed not in order to cherish the past, but to safeguard the vibrant present.
