For example, here’s a postcard depicting Kansas City in the early 1900s. Caption: “Having a great time here in KC with all the multi-modality and pedestrian chaos. The shopping and the mass transit are awesome. Wish you were here!” At the time, the city had a population of 163,572. For context, that’s much smaller than the modern auto-oriented suburb of Gilbert, Arizona, population 208,453.

While Gilbert has a couple of blocks of a Main Street, Kansas City had a typical Main Street worthy of a city, with buildings home to offices, shops, hotels, civic gathering places, and all the needs of a community. These old postcards are replete with lessons of how we can make our communities stronger by taking notes from our authentic roots.

One piece at a time

At this point, you might be thinking that there are plenty of postcard-worthy places where you live. Maybe there’s a new master-planned community just off the interstate, or a corporate-sponsored plaza in front of an apartment complex or a sports stadium. That’s all fine and good today, but I question how long their postcard-worthiness will last. As longtime Strong Towns readers know, places that are built all at once to a finished state might be appealing initially, but they epitomize a pattern of development that only declines in value steadily over time. Our modern financial systems, tax, and zoning codes incentivize developers to transform whole swaths of land for a single use instead of focusing on the details of one building at a time. This results in increasingly fragile communities full of buildings that fail to inspire pride or awe.

In comparison to the community taking big risks on mega-developments, the traditional development pattern allowed for many small bets and incremental improvements, and these additions were often celebrated on postcards. A postcard building was usually not the original building to exist on its site, but rather an iteration taken from that time period. Some represent significant investments that demonstrate the community’s wealth and values.

Architecture

The buildings on postcards also remind us of the way that the modern architecture profession has shaped the way we build our communities. In my work, I’ve observed that many people claim to value good architecture, but for some reason don’t clamor for it. This might be due to the disproportionate influence that “starchitects” like Rem Koolhaas or Hertzog & de Meuron wield over the profession. I’m happy that firms like theirs exist, and I find their work sublime, but they are incentivized to produce work that shines in magazines and portfolios instead of on the streetscape at the human scale.

While these cities are lucky enough to be graced by such expressionist buildings, most new buildings are placeless, lifeless boxes that degrade the streetscape instead of adding to the community feel—certainly not anything to celebrate on a postcard. Even worse, backlash to change often leads communities to trap our cities in amber and designate aesthetically pleasing places as unchangeable historic preservation areas while pushing our incremental growth to the periphery of town.