The US President talked about the “special relationship,” meaning that Britain’s role was to do as the White House ordered. However, to everyone’s surprise, the British Prime Minister told the American leader to stuff his special relationship, that Britain may be a small nation, but it’s a great one, and it demands equality in negotiations. The one-way transatlantic bullying has to stop.
The gathering of cynical pressmen leapt to their feet with a roar of approval. Audiences all across Britain did likewise, shouting their support. Billy Bob Thornton looked nonplussed, and Hugh Grant smiled the smile of a politician who knows he’s captured the mood of the nation. Brits are thoroughly fed up with giving America everything it demands and getting nothing in return.
Of course it was a movie, Love Actually to be precise. There’s been a strong political reaction among British audiences to this scene in what is otherwise an engaging romantic comedy. Hugh Grant spoke the words Britons yearn to hear from the lips of Tony Blair.
By contrast, when I watched the film in Charlotte, the SouthPark crowd fell silent at that scene, laughter stifled in mid-guffaw. Moments like this bring home to me that I live in a foreign country, a stranger in a strange land. But this town’s been my home for 13 years.
In my work, designing the future of Carolina communities, people often ask me why I care so much about Charlotte and its region. After all, I have no roots here. My home is 4,000 miles away in a green and pleasant land. I’d never heard of Charlotte until I read an advertisement for employment at UNC Charlotte in 1989. I vaguely thought it might be like Chapel Hill.
When I interviewed in the spring of 1990, the landscape was green, rolling and fresh, and after three years’ exile in the bleak, brown flatscape of Oklahoma, it looked like the Promised Land. I accepted the job on the spot, and have not attempted to move on.
Charlotte is a fascinating urban laboratory, illustrating America’s quintessential paradox of loving nature and distrusting urbanity while destroying nature to live in cities. The local landscape is a battleground for most things good and bad about environmental politics in this country. We’re doing many things right, reviving the center city, enhancing and densifying the inner suburbs, investing in transit and tackling affordable housing. But for every good move there is an opposing negative force: as SouthEnd grows into its new mixed-use, walkable future around transit, so the proposed new NorthPark Mall repeats all the suburban mistakes of the retail mess around Carolina Place and Hwy 51 in South Charlotte. Only bigger.
The new mall in northwest Charlotte at I-77 and Reames Road provides a microcosm of the American planning and development system that is constitutionally weighted for failure. I don’t mean that the mall will be a commercial flop. On the contrary, it will be hyped into a roaring market success for a few years. It will flaunt the latest urban fashions to lure us by our tens of thousands into its fantasyland of extravagant consumerism. We’ll shop till we drop and then drive back for more.
But it’s a planning failure before the first foundation is dug. It’s the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no amount of presumptuous rhetoric can disguise the fact. Because we are trained to believe individual property rights are more important than community values, developers can build almost wherever they want — whether or not it makes environmental or economic sense.
The mall is trumpeted as “unique,” but it’s just trendy packaging on a generic product. Politicians claim that they can “do it right this time,” starting with a fresh green slate. But it’s already too late; the die is cast and the landscape is history. Planners are left searching for fig leaves to cover their powerlessness to guide growth in sustainable patterns.
Millions of square feet of shopping and thousands of new houses located miles from any transit will transform the landscape, with all the air and water pollution this unconstrained development brings. Across the city boundary stands Huntersville, whose more advanced zoning strives to protect the heritage and natural environment that Charlotte is hellbent on destroying. But tragically, there’s no regional coordination, just the recipe for an environmental mess that’s “Pineville redux” dressed in flimsy false facades to disguise the banality of its architecture and planning.
Perhaps someone will make a movie where a small but defiant planner looks a crass developer in the eye and says, “No. Enough is enough!” The audience will stand in the aisles and cheer, but in the world outside the cinema, the developer, like Billy Bob Thornton, knows he’s got the power to get his way. Still, in spite of the odds, I’m taking my cues from Hugh Grant.
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2003.
