"The Difference Between the Traditional Old City and the New Theme Park"

"Moore's seeming prescience about the conditions we now call 'neoliberal' (POPS are quintessential neoliberal spaces) accrued from his astute observation of California in postwar transition. You might say that Moore, and his essays, are historical vessels so vigorous that an era seems to pour through them. The new freeways that sped his statewide journeys, the massive water infrastructure that fed his beloved public fountains, the public university campuses that he admired (and where he worked)—in retrospect these were high points of a receding vision of hyper-modernization and civil engineering spurred, especially from the New Deal on, by federal, state, and municipal munificence. The impact of such public investment, to draw on a key word in Moore's essay, was 'equalitarian.' But when he praised the Disney maintenance crews for working better than corresponding public services (those 'handsomely costumed young people' who 'sweep away the gum wrappers almost before they fall to the spotless pavement'), and when, in a later essay on electronics, he would claim that 'our new places … are given form with electronic, not visual glue,' Moore was delicately gauging the more general societal turn, from the 1960s to the '80s and up to today, towards privatization and away from large-scale planning, top-down technocratic expertise, and public policy advocacy."

Simon Sadler at Places introduces Charles Moore's "You Have to Pay for the Public Life" from 1965.