"What Was It Like Back Then?"

In my challenging, occasionally obfuscating course on the history and theory of planning, the professor recently asked for our thoughts on the role of nostalgia in design. Several people, mostly in the urban design program, raised their hands to dismiss it. Here are my notes: "Nostalgia suggests an uncritical look at the past, distorting its memory; focusing on the past, instead of innovating and looking toward the future. But what about the desire to re-live? A puritanism tied to modernism, rejecting romanticism."

What about that desire to re-live? Surely there doesn't have to be something inherently hokey about fondly remembering the past. Nostalgia is a sign that perhaps something, however hard it is to define, might have been better back then. Is there always another peak coming around the corner or should we strive to hold on to what we've got?

On a related note, Kairos Shen, Boston's chief planner, told me and my classmates during a tour of his office last week that "most of the buildings we're putting up now are designed to fail in 25 to 30 years." (Someone asked him about his thoughts on historical preservation and, in his circuitously insightful way of answering questions, he landed briefly on construction quality. Obviously, he prefers the older over the newer.) I cite it because: If things were right in the past, build on them for improvement; don't reinvent them. Nostalgia can be productive, no?

The post's title is a lyric I wrote for one of our songs. It's about my favorite highway, but also, I think, about going home. Then again, there are only 38 or so words in the song.