Sunday, June 21, 2009

Development Components vs.Democratic Qualities

In The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell Berry gets real about coercion of assimilating family farms into an industrial agribusiness market. He also addresses how the fiction of development models assign a regimented division of activities to peoples lives under the guise of liberty. His realism applies to Metro Planning's new beatific vision of an urbanized Bells Bend with the May Town Center development:
It is clear, at least, that official policies ... have come to be routinely justified in this country on grounds that they will uphold freedom, dignity, and equality of opportunity .... But these assurances are always incidental, outside the boundary of whatever allegedly benign (and profitable) innovation is at hand. People are not going to be free or dignified or even well fed just because some specialist says that they will be .... People will be allowed to be free to do certain things in certain places prescribed by other people. They will be free to work in the places set aside for work, free to play or relax in places set aside for recreation, free to live (whatever that may mean) in places set aside for living.

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