Three Cheers for Big Buildings

When I first drove into Philly on my recent research trip, I saw a welcome sight--a skyscraper going up. Substantially taller than the previous highest building in Philadelphia, the Comcast Center is a testament of the continued vitality of the city. There was also a lot of construction going on around the Jefferson Medical School. If life is building up and tearing down, there was a lot of life in Center City Philadelphia.

A lot of my friends on the left have an almost instinctive aversion to new construction. Here I part ways with them. One of the impressive things about the early work of Karl Marx is his emphasis on the creativity of human nature in his concept of "species-being." For Marx, the big contribution of capitalism was the liberation of human creativity from the straight-jacket of tradition and primitive technology. Capitalism showed what social labor could accomplish even though the wage-labor relationship itself also served to limit human productivity. From Marx's point of view, communism would lead to the full expression of human nature and would be even more active, more productive, and more creative than capitalism.

Many of my friends have a preservationist mentality of protecting the natural and traditional worlds from the restless activity of the present. But there's almost a hostility to human nature in the efforts to keep big construction projects out and preserving buildings that no longer meet anybody's needs. It's almost a Platonic preference for contemplation over the "dirty" irregularity of congemporary life.

This kind of contemplative attitude is just as conservative now as it was when Plato wrote The Republic.

And just as wrong.

Of course, "conservation" is a fundamental dimension of any rational approach to public policy. But profligacy and wastefulness are just as fundamental to human activity and public policy also has to allow for the full range of building up, tearing down, and squandering resources as well as conserving them. That's the only way to maintain the vitality of our cities, towns, and rural areas.

So, three cheers for the Comcast Center.

I hope they start a bigger building soon.