melt hits it. I madly miss living in downtown Philly, but one of the reasons I left was to avoid continuing to pay $1,000/month for education for my son.
That said, I now live in an inner-ring suburb (I send my kid to a public school that rocks but! it's a magnet program, so it's an experiment by a lackluster inner city school district in trying to improve the quality of public education). We call it village living: I'm five blocks from a commercial area that was an old Main Street (zero lot lines) that grew up around a set of canal locks 80 years ago.
As to crime: a few months ago my potted tree was stolen off my front porch; several neighbors have had their cars smash-and-grabbed, and break ins during the middle of the day are not totally uncommon (a recent rash of them was just ended when the perpetrators were caught in the act). The crime is less, and tends to be more property-related than personal, but it's still there. Crime is everywhere - I wouldn't be surprised if someone is driving under the influence down my street right now - in Philly they'd be walking.
Also, the day my son goes to college is the day I move into a high rise condo - I'll take the perception of crime over the truly endless yard work any day!
I managed to live through the LA riots in '92. I have lived in Houston, San Diego and Chciago. All in all an urban dweller for about 10 years.
I like my 1/2 acre suburban lot where we can grow veggies and fruit trees, build tree houses and compost most lot of our organic waste. We can use clothes lines, collect rain water and get a good work out shoveling the driveway.
our office, by choice, is 5 min (by car) to the office and I come home for lunch on most days. This summer we had a felxible work schedule and I spent a lot of time w/ our children.
The office is in a small town off of the rail line to a major metro center and has many good resteraunts and places to shop.
95 percent of the kids in our local schools go to college. I know all of my neighbors and we had a large end of summer block party where the crock pots were lined 5 deep.
We have a great, well used library, good park district, awsome forest preserve complete w/ swimming hole, fishing and paddle boats. best of all is that I don't lock my doors.
My taxes are high but I have elbow room and love it.
my point is sustainability starts (and ends) with the individual. we can all do our part in our own way. if you want to live in the city and make other trade offs for sustainability so be it. But please don't social engineer my life based on your beleifs.
"my point is sustainability starts (and ends) with the individual. we can all do our part in our own way. "
F.B.I. (Faux Bonne Idee)
It's impossible for starters. I mean, there's a lot a single person can do. But when it comes down to it, most modern people are dependent on an industrial supply line.
Do you have access to materials to make some of the most basic components to living?
Are you near a salt marsh in which you can harvest plants rich in fibrous material to make rope? Do you grown your own sisal, manilla, jute, coir, hemp or cotton? Do you know how to make rope?
Do you make your own chlorine in a diaphragm cell electrolysis reactor in your garage to sanitize your own drinking water and to make your own plaster?
Is your house conveniently located in a pocket of unstable space-time that allows your property to conveniently be in all USDA grow zones and in both hemispheres?
Do you grow two tons of chrysanthemum flowers and tobacco in your back yard to make a years worth of pyrethrins to keep your garden and your house pest-free?
Do you conveniently live next to a large old growth forest in which you harvest tons of wood pulp and then use approximately 1,000,000 gallons of water to make a years worth of paper? Do you do this with the 30 some odd sheep you keep on your property to make all the felt necessary to precipitate the lingin fibers into paper sheets?
Do you also have a green house in which you keep thousands of silk worms to make all the silk necessary for filtration and other applications?
Do you use the left over products from your paper making process to power an industrial blast furnace to make the glass bottles you'll be canning your fruits and veggies in? To make the fibers necessary for insulation and air filtration? To make your own dishes?
Do you have a deep mine to mine near chemical grade silica, soda and sand to make your glass with?
Or do you make your own soda by heating coal to 5500C in a near vacuum?
Do you also distill your own polyol from your onsite oil well... you know to make your own plastics through advanced polymerization techniques? Do you distill your own ethylene from millions of tons of fruits too or do you chemically make that from your natural gas well? Do you also make your own high speed motors to spin nylon fibers from your distilled polyol?
Hmm, I would like to subscribe to your letter about suburban sustainability. I find it fascinating that you've figured out a way to synthesize glycerol in your home without violating your HOA agreement.
i'm not sure how much other cities are like ours but, since our single school system serves the entire metro area, the schools are as equivalent as they can make them. via a school assignment plan, there is an attempt at cultural and socio-economic diversity (always contentious, recently challenged in the supreme court). all in all i don't know that anyone could say there is an appreciable difference in city and suburban schools as categories, though there are very distinct differences between individual schools.
one of the best elementary schools in the system - our home school and the one we hope will actually be our daughter's assignment - is a historic neighborhood school in an urban neighborhood. the highest performing middle school in the system is suburban. the highest performing high school in the system is back in an urban neighborhood.
we, like lb, have a magnet system as well, so kids can move around according to their abilities and predilections.
so why would this be an argument for louisville's increasing sprawl? we may be an exception with regard to the school quality concern, but still have the same suburban extension problem, quickly wiping out the agricultural landscape surrounding the city.
the ky bluegrass as a cultural landscape was on the world monument fund's watch list in 2006 because, as both a landscape and a way of life, it's endangered by the creeping cancer of house farms.
have you guys seen these places? i can't figure out how any argument for any quality of life can be attributed to them: strings of vinyl boxes with huge garage fronts in treeless yards. it's least common denominator living, by almost any standard i can imagine.
Wow, this is just plain offensive, "i live in minneapolis and the life here is much better than the outburbs of msp; dim and scary people of limited intelligence...."
After more thoroughly reading all the posts I think there is plenty of plain old fashioned bias mixed with straight up ignorance concerning both suburban living and urban living. Personally I don't care why someone lives where they live. It's their decision and one I'm guessing they put a lot of thought into. Who cares if that's based on what you believe are misconceptions or if their chosen neighborhood isn't what you consider an acceptable "community." But to question one's intelligence just comes across as elitism. I'm not an urban planner, but that kind of rhetoric would never sell an architectural design.
Still, I contend that most jobs are in the suburbs, and thus where most people live. Take a drive around the perimeter highway of any major metro and I'm sure you'll see commerical office after commercial office the whole way around. For example, I really like the uptown area of Dallas, but if I had a good job up in Plano why the heck would I commute that far when there is plenty of housing right in Plano? The whole trifecta argument of getting away from the city "crime, schools and taxes" all goes out the door when there is no job in the city to bring people there in the first place. You want to revitalize urban centers...bring the jobs back, plain and simple.
I have seen the 1,000 home subdivisions in the west Chicago suburbs and really do not like them. I have also seen 400 home subdivisions, designed with a sense of place that takes account of the natural topography. They provided a number of 2.5" caliper trees and mandated, low-e glass, r-40 insulation, and anti-monotomy standards.
This subdivision is now 12 years old and has its own feeling of identity and community.
Their is choice. In the back of "Edge Cities" they derived a formula on how much one would pay for quality of life.
People choose to live in little pink houses for many reasons. I choose not to live in the city, I choose not to live in an exurb, I choose not to live in a 1000 home subdivision.
These are my choices. I would fight to keep the right to choose.
The suburbs exist bc there is still demand for them.
The suburbs dont care what a bunch of urban minded architects might think.
Lotta ppl like being able to drive to work easily, school districts, cheaper housing, having a backyard, etc. And theyve been around for so long ppl have expectations to get these sort of things. The school district issue is a huge one though.
aqua, i am glad you're offended, now, if you can spare a moment and climb down off your high horse. perhaps you live in the outburbs of MSP or you know of someone, in either case i really don't care. i have been in those places, the burbs - MN, NJ, UT, TX, PA, NC, IN, NE, most of my life and you know what; they are narrow minded people, narrow as narrow eyebrows can get.
michelle bachman, queen of the crazy outburbs, is indicative of their deficient mental acuity.
SW/LB - Cincy and Columbus also have great magnet/alternative programs. I am actually the product of them. Unfortunately there aren't many of them and the demand to get in them is VERY high (we're talking parents literally camping out for days to get a good queue position), but it is helping. These programs have been expanding in recent years, so I think a lot more people are wanting to stay within the city limits to take advantage of them. I think though, until the overall school systems get better, a good portion of young families will flock to the 'burbs with good educational resources.
lol, beta. mind you the story goes that in suburbs folk tend to live with like-minded people of similar social standing. what were you doing with all those silly people? and not just once, but sequentially? ;-)
orochi, sustainability does not require self-sufficiency.
that whole school thing is interesting. hadn't thought about it but is true. i was thinking of heading back to canada to take teaching position earlier this year and took tour of city to see if i could find place i would be comfortable living. downtown looked great for me, but decided pretty quickly that i would live in suburb closer to university and with better school and more green space. i was hoping to find similar amenities downtown but couldn't. i did find an old suburb though and would have moved there if i had taken the job.
same goes for when i lived in london. i love the city centre but without much higher salary there was no way in hell i would raise my children there.
steven those are great pics and looks fantastic neighbourhood.
they are narrow minded people, narrow as narrow eyebrows can get
Do you have any examples of narrow mindedness outside of a member of congress or what political party someone might endorse?
I have friends that live in perimeter suburbs/exurbs as well many friends that live right in the city. It has never ever crossed my mind in the slightest to think of friends in the exurbs as narrow minded. Nor do I think the same of friends living in the city.
As I've said, most people I know live where they do based on where they work...not their politics or intelligence. The only exception to that I can think of is those that live close to family.
I'm sorry that you didn't like your suburban neighbors. I've lived both in the city and in the suburbs with about a 50/50 mix over a lifetime. My experience has always been that my neighbors have been very nice people regardless of where I lived. This goes across regions like the mountain west, deep south and upper midwest...all good people regardless where they lived.
tuna - the magnets are the exception, but the point of that earlier post was that the non-magnet regular schools are the same whether you're urban or suburban as they're all the same school system and are funded and populated in the same way across the district.
and, yeah, beta, that kind of blanket statement is hard to support. the contemporary suburb is just as diverse politically, racially, and culturally as anywhere else.
for me it's less a cultural argument as it is one of resources, including land quality, road construction, utility extensions, water quality, etc. those americans upset about where tax dollars go probably should be most upset at how much of our taxes are required to subsidize the car-driving way-of-life except that so many of them have a vested interest in maintaining those subsidies.
Jump, I know sustainability does not require self-sufficiency.
However, many of the examples people use as examples of sustainability are self-sufficiency. However, the typical household usage of many things pales in comparison to industrial processes.
A majority of my undergrad coursework was industrial centered-- meaning I've done a majority of my work in urban planning and industry. I've yet to find an actual job doing urban planning for industrial properties... this would be my absolute favvvvveee.
Industry, however, given the right benefits and tools... is probably friendlier to "high-density" development than residential properties. And by rearranging industrial centers to be more efficient would do a whole hell of a lot more than personal and or residential sustainability ever would.
I also have had to try to learn the basics of every god-damned industrial process out there... and as frightening as it all is, it is amazing to realize how many applications go into the most benign things.
"... upset at how much of our taxes are required to subsidize the car-driving way-of-life except that so many of them have a vested interest in maintaining those subsidies."
This is pretty much it to me, as for the argument.
It sounds a little conspiracy theory-ish but how many businesses would go out of business if suburbanism simply stopped growing or reversed?
There would be some immediate obvious business changes. But I think one might see an overall drop in major purchases-- lawn mowers &lawn equipment in general, refrigerators, washers & dryers, cars (obviously), home improvement supplies, kitchen appliances, fixtures and so on. There would be a minor backlash into other parts of the supply chain as well because urban areas require longer lease and life periods.
Gasp... we'd have to start using ingenuity in the marketplace again.
Bite your tongue that we should all stop purchasing major purchases and retrench to the urban core...
it would price all the poor architects out of the market and there would be less work for all. no money for fancy materials and everyone would just maintain their buildings. the only thing left would be government work.
I believe that PRIVATE architecture is predicated on a growth model.
PUBLIC architecture is tied to endless cash register that is the government and subject to the aristocracy of pull.
I'm not saying we should stop but I am saying that if you move into a ihgh-rise condo... you aren't going to be shopping at Sears anymore, you're not going to be bringing home a hundred pounds of groceries and you have the option of easier access to cleaning services and machines that can do a better and or quicker job than is what available at home.
I believe that PRIVATE architecture is predicated on a growth model.
PUBLIC architecture is tied to endless cash register that is the government and subject to the aristocracy of pull.
peeps are we sooo young as to forget the PRIMARY reason there are suburbs? WHITE FLIGHT
we've already agreed that suburbs are wasted investments. we have a near collapse of the world economy centered on and around housing developments in the suburbs. we have utilities taxed to the hilt to deal with the ever growing geographical shift away from existing utilities and the failure of those to pay their fair share. all existing urban infrastructure seems to be in a state of disrepair, because of this shift to new - and not necessarily better - "communities."
and yeah, i have friends and family that live in the burbs, and while i would agree that blanket statements are far from reality; i have shifted away from those that have become more conservative and less tolerant of the shift in america...
i think there is a certain era and set of circumstances, beta, that grew suburbs based on white flight.
BUT before that there were the garden cities, the attempts to flee the heat and dirt of the early industrial city. in the south in the u.s. this often took the form of camp towns - exurban settlements that the wealthy (or not) set up to serve as a sort of natural a/c - they'd escape the city for a summer weekend, for an evening, for a week...
there was also the plantation model or (in europe) the chateau model - the idea among the poor dirt farmers that their wealthier counterparts were able to set up their country houses and live large - like jefferson did - and it was something to which they aspired. this was the american dream then and, in some contorted way, it still is. except for the land and views and quality construction part.
the turn of the 20c saw the growth of the streetcar suburbs, the beginning of the trend we're in now - and still not much about race. it was a product of a growing middle class that dreamed if a detached house and plot of land, and it was accessible by transit.
so far, so good. so now you're getting into a period where white flight can be said to be partly a cause, but you also have to credit cars, of course, and 'modern' ideas of function and clarity that gave us single-use zoning and overly-conservative and systematized traffic engineering, in which consideration of quality of life gave way to quantitative assessments of right answers.
all overly simplified, i'll admit. just indications that the current patterns are not the necessarily or natural extensions of this early suburban model but, to me, some sort of metastatic mutation.
and still not PRIMARILY caused by white flight and more of a complicated history of ideas and inclinations.
i will say that while white flight obviously implies a racial component, i would also tend to believe a large part of the trend was also contingent on influx of immigrants into america; italian, greek, german, polish, irish, jewish, asian, etc...
your talking about the creators of southpark right vado?
i understand beta. you got stuck living in a subset for years and years and somehow got idea it was representative. pity.
myself i didn't really live in suburbs. well that is not true i grew up as poah white trash in first ring suburb. crime was part of life. it looked nice, a new urbanist dream, but was kind of a small bit of hell in reality. porches just meant you had to watch out for people hiding in the shadows. but i don't think that has anything to do with the typology, just poverty. and luckily we got to move away before anyone did jail time. sometimes it is hard to separate personal experience from the big picture, but it is worth trying, just to see where it will lead.
white flight is the fox news picture of suburbia. it sounds plausible, but is hardly the real deal, just as steven nicely describes.
not sure suburbs are wasted investment. sub-prime loans and derivatives were probably a mistake, but that is not really connected to reality is it?
But jump, it is very true that the dynamic of US cities - mainly poor people left in the cities, richer people moving to suburbs - is a reversal of the European (and other places in the world) situation - poor (or poorer) people in the suburbs (usually cheap and grim) surrounding the cities with the richer urban sophisticates living within the city core. This is not true across the board (there are exceptions in both cases) but generally holds.
The dismissing of Jane Jacobs a no longer relevant is ill-considered. She was responding to the particular development of tower-in-empty-space and the clear-cut method of urban renewal as the cure for all urban ills. She pointed out that the city’s density was actually one of its strengths, and the dynamic she described is anything but old hat. I can walk in countless neighborhoods in Philly where the row-house streets that once held corner stores and bars and barber shops now hold bodegas and Korean grocery stores, and beauty parlors, but the dynamic and life of those neighborhoods – the interconnections – work in basically the same way they did when Jacobs looked at them. This commingling of activities and uses was exactly what suburban zoning codes – based on the complete separation of functions – pretty much destroyed. Granted, her analysis is certainly not applicable to all problems/challenges faced by cities, but many of her points still stand.
Another thing I notice in these “suburb” threads is that even some architects have to denigrate the city in order to defend the suburbs. This is silly for many reasons, including:
1. Suburbs can only be understood in the context of the cities they surround.
2. Suburbs are not cities.
Bringing up the crime issue in particular is a non-starter. Cities have larger and tighter concentrations of people, so certainly crime will always be higher. My fellow suburbunites (I live in a first-ring train suburb around Philly) will often express such fear of city crime as we ride around in a car, but…
lifetime odds of dying in a:
Motor Vehicle Accident: 1 in 84
Firearm Assault: 1 in 314
Pedestrian Accident: 1 in 626
Crime does become a huge problem when it reaches a tipping point where many of the dynamics described by Jacobs are stopped from happening because of fear (and there are quite a few neighborhoods in Philadelphia that fit that description).
As far as reading up on “where we learned to live that way” you could do worse than starting with Lewis Mumford’s The City in History. He looks at the development of the village as the precursor to the city, but then makes the distinction that when cities developed…
...the archaic village culture yielded to urban ‘civilization,’ that peculiar combination of creativity and control, of expression and repression, of tension and release, whose outward manifestation has been the historic city. From its origin onward, indeed, the city may be described as a structure specially equipped to store and transmit the goods of civilization, sufficiently condensed to afford the maximum amount of facilities in a minimum space, but also capable of structural enlargement to enable it to find a place for the changing needs and the more complex forms of a growing society and its cumulative social heritage.
And in contrast to the suburb or village, the city:
...brought into exististance realities that might have remained latent for an indefinite time in more soberly governed small communities, pitched to lower expectations and unwilling to make exertions that transcended both their workaday habits and their mundane hopes.
Cities aren’t just bigger than suburbs or villages, they dream bigger too.
Now, Mumford berated Jacob’s book, mainly because he maintained that her observations of “sidewalk life” would not work when a city reached a very large population, that such cities could no longer regulate themselves and quality of life would suffer. He thus advocated Garden Cites, where the dynamic of cities could be built on a manageable scale - but garden cities were to be more like village units as opposed to the disconnected, car dependant areas that are most suburbs now. I also think that Mumford didn’t account for the fact that even a very large city is made up of smaller units (neighborhoods, boroughs, arrondissements, etc) that maintain the proper scale for the dynamic that Jacobs described to still work.
emilio i was questioning white flight, not the distribution of poverty from center to urban fringe in usa.
jacobs is a great read, really a brilliant writer but what she wrote of was a tiny slice of the city and needs to be taken that way. that was her choice. she didn't like suburbia and took herself out of the debate about what the city was, even then, focusing instead on what she wanted it to be.
that is fine, and her arguments carry some well-earned weight, but only if you define cities in a very narrow way. great for polemics but not exactly useful way to resolve how to make future cities work better than what we have today.
I do think suburbs are the city. whether we like it or not they are a large part of most cities on many levels. that is not a good thing or a bad thing per se. how we react to the way things are is going to be important from now on though...
mumford is also good but he was, like jacobs, very much against suburbia. both were elitists, which is a horrible word to bandy around lately, but in this case is very fitting. mumford wrote quite openly against the fact that all these middle-class people were wrecking HIS countryside, which he thought should be the province of the wealthy, while the lower classes would live in new towns designed to HIS liking, not their own.
He wrote..."Whilst the suburb served only a favored minority it neither spoiled the country-side nor threatened the city. But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement, it tends to destroy the value of both environments without producing anything but a dreary subsitute...". which is to say suburbia is cool if you are a kennedy but not if you are born into the wrong sort of family.
anyway, the garden city is quite alright but for whatever reason has just not worked out over the last 100 years, and we are stuck with an entirely different situation to deal with. it is easy to say that the people who made levittown and its modern equivalent also give people no choice, but to be fair the garden city has had more than a hundred years to be accepted, in many forms (most recently as new urbanism), and somehow just isn't gaining traction as major game-changer.
While I don't like it, I do believe that means we need to rethink what is being talked about and why. As a goal garden city sounds great, but if no one wants it we either have to make laws that enforce it or start from reality instead of an unachievable ideal. The former seems unlikely to me, so I am left with the latter.
That does not mean I am against the city center, suburbia, Jane Jacobs or the Garden City theory. I am to the contrary for them all. But I am not exclusive. Which is where things seem to get fish-eyed with this sort of work.
Well, elitist or not, when someone writes something that makes sense, then it makes sense, and a lot of what both Mumford and Jacobs wrote still makes sense.
I just don't agree with your interpretation of Jacobs: she was not insisting on what she wanted the city to be; rather, she looked closely at how it in fact worked and showed that the widespread demolition to build towers was not actually helping cities but killing them (will withold comment on her "hating" the suburbs). The neighborhoods that she (and Herbert Gans in The Urban Villagers) looked at were not elitist by any means, but her observations have been interpreted in elitist ways by the New Urbanists, in that those developments are mostly not inclusive places.
And so Mumford wanted to the countryside not to be wrecked...is that such a bad thing? A lot of people would rather that the countryside not be wrecked, or at least be built upon in a more thoughtful way: that does not necessarily make them elitists. Yes, the text you quoted is upturned nose stuff, but many people have written of the drearyness and isolation of suburbia (Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Air Conditioned Nightmare, countless movies and TV shows) and it's just easy to dismiss all that as mere elitism. Maybe they are just pointing out what suburbs lack. If you read Mumford's section on suburbia, some of it is quaint and dated, but he does point out the one flaw of American suburbia: it's only possible through the motor vehicle (in a country that could care less about a real public transportation network), and it gives an inordinate amount of land to it (land that was mostly countryside). What I laugh at more is his paranoia about "megalopolis" (huge cities). As far as the Garden City, I only mentioned it because it was his favored alternative to the feared megalopolis, not necessarily as a workable solution now.
To say that suburbia is the city or is not the city is quibbling about semantics: however, the city came first, the suburb being expansions around it. My point about the suburbs not being the city was not one of legal boundaries: rather, that the suburbs, considered (by some) in isolation (we don't need the city any more, etc.) is that they are of a different scale than the city, and can never hold the complex interplay of activities and potentialities that make up a city, and can never really replace the city.
And I agree with you that white flight is just part of the story of the suburbs in the US (although it IS part of it, and my own childhood experience is directly involved in such a flight to a suburb to get away from "bad elements" in the city).
"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.[/q]
In the book Watchmen, the American Dream is referenced to when the Comedian and Nite Owl are clearing the streets of protesters against the Cold War. After the chaos and an argument with the Comedian, a somewhat depressed Nite Owl asks, "But this country's disintegrating. What happened to America? What happened to the American dream?" The Comedian, standing among the ruins of the riots while brandishing his shotgun, says, "It came true. You're looking at it."
ok, jump, I've left the old fogies (Jacobs & Mumford) behind and decided to get a little more up to date info.
I read through some of the William Bogart book which you mentioned above and now understand what you're getting at: he proposes the suburbs in unity with the city to form what he calls a "complex web of relationships", and a new model for the metropolitan area (and, funnily enough, he gives Jacobs credit for seeing this early on: "Even by 1960, observers such as Jane Jacobs and Jean Gottman had discerned a new structure for metropolitan areas, although popular interpreters of their work have neglected this insight. This new structure was called the polycentric city..." I guess she didn't hate the suburbs that much.)
I do agree in the main with Bogart's analysis of how metropolitan areas now function, although I have to say that the reality is sometimes quite different. In my area, for instance, the counties around the city often treat Philadelphia like it's a leper colony, except for maybe the city center and the sport stadiums. While this complex web does exist and works every day, it has not really gelled politically.
And then, by coincidence, last evening public TV showed a documentary on Portland, Oregon, the whole controversy over the "urban growth boundary", showing both the positive and negative results of that law, and the fights over measures to change it. The fight basically lays out between the ability of a large city to plan and control its growth and individual property rights.
What the film showed in abundance was property owners outside the UGB (many of them farmers) insisting that they be allowed to develop their land as they saw fit, as they claim is their right. After measure 37 passed and overturned the UGB, there was a mad rush to develop parcels, but not, of course, in any planned or sensible method, in a collaborative way, rather in the usual scattershot speculative method that is the norm. The voters then toned down the meas. 37 revolution with a meas. 49 revision, which allows some limited development outside the UGB.
I recognize that there are problems inherent on either side of that line (a literal line, in this case), and that Portland is a particular case, but I also sense that maybe the future of the suburbs (and the fate of the remaining open space around cities) lies in resolving this "let's plan vs. don't tread on me" dilemma.
good catch of my shameless hyperbole too. i think it is fair however in light of the way jacobs wrote. which was very well, but not honestly. She was a great observer of the problems but gave us an idealised vision of the city that was always suspect. i should admit to loving most of her books (and as you point out she was very cool for having embraced complexity theory well ahead of the curve), but also love dejan sudjic's critique of "the death and life" in his book The One Hundred Mile City.
After visiting the area she used to live in he notes the scene is no longer idyllic. There is a great rambling description of the street but the funny bit comes when he points out that it is currently an interestingly grungy place, where sidewalk strollers are treated to "...fat, unshaven old men [who] leaf through rack upon rack of magazines depicting fellatio from every angle....It is hardly the eden that Jacobs suggested. But Hudson street was clearly never the soft focus idyll that Jacobs portrayed. The city is a tougher, darker reality than she ever allowed.
Jacobs is a self-proclaimed enemy of suburbia, but the image of the big city advanced in The Death And Life Of Great American Cities is as sentimental as the corny vision of utopia cherished by the boy scout garden city types she scorns."
He then goes on to point out that the real enemy, the thing that brought quirky decay to Jacobs' Hudson street in recent times was not Le Corbusier and modern planning, but the invention of the shipping container (which led inexorably to the end of the local economy).
Which is actually the real point. While Jacobs and Mumford worried about the evil desires of the uneducated masses, a completely unrelated development was leading to an end they could not predict.
They were fighting the wrong fight altogether (much as we are now).
I like Bogart mostly for his attempt to find methods to deal with reality, for just this reason. Also because he accepts that cities are not static and that what works today probably won't work tomorrow - which to me means that ideological based design is probably a great way to win battles while losing wars.
For some reason these suburb threads are endlessly fascinating to me, and always bring out good comments. And - at the risk of turning this into a two-way conversation - yours, jump, are always some of the most interesting and well informed. I just did a search on those threads and have copied some of your reading lists, and will follow up with some reading of my own. In your comments, you’ve usually downplayed the “walkable city” model as overrated (as have I to some degree), but what does interest me is the question of density and the proportion of built to open space in different countries.
The US has, even now, an abundance of unbuilt space (although the East coast less so), so the urge to plan its use carefully is never seen as an important need. Portland is almost an anomaly in that sense, one of the few cities which has seriously considered it. England and Italy, to name two other countries, have kept much of their beautiful countryside because people accept (in most cases) living in smaller homes/apartments and in compact towns and villages - and I would guess with very tight controls on development. But they have to do it that way because there just isn't that much land available.
I like that kind of living, since it’s what I grew up with, but now live in a larger house in a first ring suburb. I could choose to move back into the compact city, but I would still not be able to do away with my car if I wanted to see my large extended family and get to some of the larger malls for shopping. The ideal would be a place where I could walk to most things (ideally even my job), with all the people in my family and even friends living close by….gee, I’ve just described an Italian hill town, or an English village. But even that’s not right, because my relatives in Italy live in a group of towns near each other, served by infrequent buses, so they still depend on their cars if they want to keep in touch. So yes, the walkable model only takes you so far. And, as you pointed out in another thread, the central hub model of transportation available in most cities is outdated as well.
In Philadelphia, the areas that have “sidewalk life” are some of the most popular places (Old City, South Street, Rittenhouse Square, Manayunk), with people from the suburbs mixing with the city residents, and I know for a fact that part of the reason for the buzz is the density of activity and walkability. Of course, a negative result of that street life is that real estate and rent prices have escalated to the point that only upper income people can live in those areas (and that is also happening in much of Portland as well).
On the other hand, some of the other old neighborhoods now have a rougher edge: there are people on the sidewalks and the stores are hopping by day, but if you go there at night, the blank metal shutters are down and they are mostly dead zones, and the fear is palpable. The reasons for the decline are sundry, as you pointed out, (the economy, crime, bad schools, etc.) and getting into them would make this post even longer than it is.
Unfortunately for the citizens of Philly, unless the state house gets its act together soon and passes a budget, the city faces significant public service shutdown, making life in those neighborhoods even grimmer (political division, distrust, and non-cooperation are wrecking quality of life throughout this country, not just here).
feel same way about suburban threads emilio. they are usually interesting.
i actually love walkable city concepts. where i live is pretty much what jacobs describes in her area of ny, but japanese, so cleaner and safer and with more mixing of social classes...but that is different topic.
what i wonder about is whether walkability should be the goal, or sustainability. ditto re density. i am pretty sure there are at least a dozen really good ways to make high and low density work on case to case basis, and equally as many examples where either one would be complete disaster.
if the goal is sustainability then i think we should be thinking much less along ideological lines. ie, (as i have said before) there is the very real possibility that the issue related to cars all stem from an energy problem and not a planning problem. in that light i can't help but believe suburbs might be just fine with only a little modification, and the same for traditional centers. instead the media, planner, politicians tend to begin with the answer in their/our heads (walkability, density, etc) and then look for the problem that fits. somehow i doubt anyone can make a real useful future from that...the goal is all backwards...
I completely agree with the ideological lines, and that immediatialy jumping to "town centers" as the answer to everything is not a real solution. But I don't totally follow your take on the car: isn't it both an energy and a planning problem? If an area requires close to 100% of its residents to be in a car to do almost anything, whereas another area requires maybe 30 or 40 percent of the people to travel by car at any one time, with an option to walk or take transit some of the other times, than aren't those, by definition, two radiacally different places to live? I understand about a case by case consideration, but isn't the car and its required infrastructure really always the gorilla in the room in any case you might look at, the thing that has to be considered carefully or it tends to takes over everything? I'd be curious to hear what these small modifications would be to change such a car-centric culture and the way most new areas are "developed"...i.e.: put in the houses first, put in all the other stuff needed by the new residents spread over the landscape, connect them all with new roads, or enlarge existing roads, and provide a butt load of parking lots.
"somehow i doubt anyone can make a real useful future from that...the goal is all backwards..."
This begs the question of whether or not personal transportation (at least in the form of an automobile) is a step forwards. While the automobile is a marvel of modernity, one should question whether or not if moving forward means letting go.
While I'm a staunch urbanist of all sorts, I do not necessarily want to take people's cars away-- especially to those who can afford them. But there's a lot of people in the United States, who own cars, that technically should not. We have people often choosing between car payments and other more sound personal investments (medical, housing, resolving debt, education).
I know that one of the ideas behind cars in the American mindset is mobility. But with the explosion of cars, the historical idea behind "mobility" has died. The expansion of privately-owned lands means that most people are no longer allowed to move freely. If property in the 1770s was owned like it was today and to the expanse that it is today, most of the First Continental Congress would have been jailed or shot for trespassing.
We also have to look at it this way, there is only one legal way to walk from Miami to New York City-- along US 1. There presently is no legal way to walk from Jacksonville to Los Angeles.
There are only 7 cities within the United States considered walkable enough to travel to by means of train or airplane without the use of a car.
To ride by train from Jacksonville, Atlanta or Houston to Santa Fe (one of the original train capitals in the world), it is a journey that is roughly 27 days long and nearly 11,000 miles. This is because there is no east-to-west train across the southern United States. This might have been fixed very recently... however, one of the most important routes of movement in the country is no longer accessible.
This is what I think it ultimately comes down to in terms of development and planning and what can be viewed in different mindset. That would be Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
"Traditional" suburbanism utilizes technology to circumvent the bottom layers of "need" within a typical development model. I would probably determine these two bottom layers to be "tradition" and "history." Tradition being the long-term development of the economy and overall secular choices of a society in what it deems important. History being the combination of movement and investment in a given area.
This is why previously I professed looking towards literature to find examples of "preference" and "functionalism" in determining who, what, where, when and why. The academic pursuit of Urban Studies often does this but not nearly as in depth from a planning point of view.
One example-- and one of the most popular nursery rhymes in the English language-- would be "Rub-a-dub-dub." The reason-- the depiction of the "butcher, baker and candlestick maker." All three of which are professions closely tied to urban environments, all three of which are nostalgic professions and all three of which that no longer functionally exist today. Instead, today, that rhyme would probably be along the lines of "Trader Joe's, Panera and Yankee Candle." Doesn't rhyme very well either.
And that's my point... most suburbs are not built on a foundation. They're held up on artificial piers and are rigid, inflexible and unadaptive. They require a constant flow of money and resources to sustain the technology that sustains them. They're grossly unattractive to generational change and choices in the economy. They import "soft goods" like information, usually from large external organizations, because there isn't usually enough present to sustain a local economy and their interactions within the context of a local environment is shallow and profit driven.
Without going back and presumably putting these foundations back into physical environments, we run the risk of collapse. It's unlikely there will ever be a instant doomsday scenario; however, it is more than likely we will be facing a creeping doomsday scenario when scarcity forces a dramatic change. Urbanized areas are reversible, suburbs are not.
my own view of cars is a little bit gray still, but i cannot help but wonder, if cars were all benign environmentally (a real possibility if recent events are any indication) then would it mean the problems are solved and we need to look for another object to skewer with scorn? congestion would still be problem, but then the planning problem will maybe not be to get rid of cars but to reduce their necessity. which is according to stats not so hard at all (most traffic is between suburban communities lately and not long journeys into city etc)
the real point though is not that we should be looking a priori[i] to get rid of cars or dismantling suburbia but instead might better spend our time focusing on sustainability. with that in mind the possible futures are infinite. and the role of innovation and intelligence is also wide open.
instead we tend to begin with the idea that cars are bad and suburbia is bad, without really looking at reality to see which parts of these things are objectionable.
with cars, the main problem is the pollution. if that is solved then cars are fine...no?
with suburbia, what is the problem? with cities in general, what is the problem? i am highly suspicious of the idea that we can or should make sweeping changes based on declarative sentences. no offense intended orochi but the idea that [i]"most suburbs are not built on a foundation." is i think demonstrably incorrect and more wishful thinking than anything. To be honest the rest of the paragraph which follows could be said of any city, center or suburb. cities (including suburbia or not) are not natural. they never have been. on that count cities will always fall down. now that i think of it, it is that very artificiality that spawned suburbia isn't it?
but again none of this is really here nor there. i am convinced we have something better in the pipeline, something that is just about the city and that doesn't take sides, which is going to change how we look at and live in the biggest and best creations of humanity....and it is going to come from somewhere the planners did not plan for...
agreed, you won't get rid of cars, but reducing their necessity should surely be a goal (not just because of pollution but also the room they take up): but that, and also the sustainability and innovation you mention, will not really happen unless the present scattershot methods of developing land and antiquated zoning laws that govern the developing are not modified to the degree that they no longer result in exclusively car-centric places to live. so no, not dismantling, but definitely some changes are long due.
curious as to what you think that something in the pipeline is....
"To be honest the rest of the paragraph which follows could be said of any city, center or suburb. cities (including suburbia or not) are not natural. they never have been."
Woah, woah, woah... bringing "natural" into this is a very slippery slope.
To me, the definition of urban is "a large population fitted into a limited space--other words, a high density proportional to total population-- with its inhabitants sharing basic services, structures and so forth."
There are many species that have utilize an "urban" arrangement of shared space with limited territorial concerns-- ants, termites, bats, dolphins, chimpanzees, baboons, other great apes, weaver birds, most parrots, flat lizards, bees, wasps, hornets, prairie dogs, mole rats, pistol shrimp, coral and so on.
With termites, wasps, hornets, weaver birds, prairie dogs and mole rats even build these "artificial" high-density colonies.
Part of the fallacy of defining "natural" for humans is the lack of history between 50,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE. We have a spread of pottery that dates back 30,000 BCE in Czech Republic-- coincidentally, the pottery is found in what is the second largest city (Brno) in Czech Republic. While Brno dates back to the 5th century, the discovery of a long line of pottery hints that this area has particular qualities that make it desirable to settlement, now and 30,000 BCE.
While a hunter-gather mentality is what most humans like to think of themselves, I am willing to wager that this was only a small blip in human history.
While the Great Rift is the home to most modern apes (humans included), recent evidence points that we did not come from the Great Rift. Actually, the newer evidence puts us in a very peculiar spot that makes some sense.
That spot is the Namib Desert on the border of Namibia and Angola. If we are in fact desert apes and not lake apes, this presents a challenging view of humanity. Hunter-gatherer societies could not exist in the Namib Desert. However, this hypothesis makes sense because the Namib Desert has had the same climate for over two million years-- a place where humans could have survived the Riss and Wurm ice ages. These ice ages would have reduced the overall rainfall in the Great Rift Valley and would have significantly increased the salinity of the lakes in the Rift Valley (no potable water except for pockets.)
But back to the Namib Desert and hunter-gatherers... the typical ideal of hunting in the Namib Desert would be nearly impossible. Without shelter, most humans would die within hours in the Namib Desert. The rainfall in the Namib Desert is a luscious 0.4 inches (10 mm) a year. Humidity is almost non-existent. And most large herding animals that can tolerate heat tend to flock in the dunes during the day to avoid other predators. The lack of vegetation and winds make stalking problematic as well.
Luckily, and unlike the Rift Valley, the Namib Desert is full of clay, canyons and caves. The combination of geologic conditions in the Great Rift doesn't support a majority of these things.
So, what does this mean? It means that the sparseness of the Namib Desert meant there were only so many available shelters and sources of water. It means that any hunting or gathering period could have only lasted for a few hours in the early morning or evening. It also suggests that there might have been methods for harvesting water as the Namib desert does not have a cyclical rainfall schedule. And that the limited calorie supply in the desert means that any "work" done had to have a "benefit" in the end.
There would be no way to have small independent familial groups or territorial attitudes. Also, because of long gestation periods and the length of time it takes to ween offspring out of infancy, permanent settlement must have existed. Crossing the desert with infants would be too demanding on a lactating mother and a helpless child.
If we take a natural "point of view" with this, anthropology suggests we were probably huddling around in caves, primitive lean-tos or canyons around diminish puddles of water in rather dense populations. The limiting factor of the desert means there was more than likely less nomadic behaviors and rather migration between population centers. The other fact that the Namib desert can support the creation of pottery correlates heavily with the idea of long-term water shortage as unfired pottery can be made waterproof with some interesting ingredients.
Furthermore, since so few plants can fix nitrogen on their own... having large amounts of animals find and "release" chemicals necessary for the growth of plants would have made incidental agriculture possible-- i.e. crap, seeds and water are foundation of any desert oasis. This is also the case with many ecosystems that the nutrient flow is completely dependent on the movement of animals to facilitate arable soil.
This would definitely move humans closer towards eusociality than presociality-- meaning a complex caste of inter-related individuals performing complex specialized tasks with a focus on a selected breeding population... i.e, humans are more oriented with urbanity than hunter-gathering living. Humans are also very inclined to develop genetic disorders in populations with high levels of inbreeding-- so these early stable desert populations would have to have been dozens of individuals, a theory that also correlates with meerkats and baboons [whereby members of families are chased off to join other colonies once the colony hits its population limit].
So, what would you call 40-100 humans living in a tiny semi-permanent spatial arrangement with multiple individual "jobs" sharing allocated resources?
i am sorry orochi, i didn't really understand any of that. i was responding to your claim that suburbs were not natural and required money/energy/resources to be supported. which is true of any city, dense or otherwise.
i should clarify that i view suburbs as urban. there are many reasons for this, and i am not alone, but won't get into it. it isn't a fringe point of view however.
i don't know what the future holds emilio, but there are lots of things changing in the suburbs and in "cities" all over the world. I believe it is part of the urbanisation process that is going on still, but now in most instances in the so-called developed world it is a process of improving mature cities rather than just simple expansion. That such things are actually important is is my intuition. Whether it will be borne out after looking more closely is another question. But i am hopeful. If i am lucky i will get post-doc funding to examine more properly. Will have better point of view in 3 years maybe...
anyway, yes i agree cars are still a problem, but i still maintain that we are looking at things the wrong way. its like energy companies who make energy by burning coal not willing to consider the fact that they are ENERGY companies and not "coal burning" companies. We are all too often just too certain about what things are and what we need to do and refuse to condone alternatives.
Zoning is a huge problem in USA. i have no answers there. However, to be fair, my research here in japan examined the effect of open zoning on car use and other behaviour patterns and found that even when there was a walkable situation, with shops and clinics and trains within walking distance most residents chose to drive. They did so for cultural reasons (which is i think malleable luckily enough), but part of the problem was that the train line connected the suburb i was studying ONLY with the city centre, when more than 50% of residents commuted to other suburbs. Just like Peter Hall found in Oslo, and just as the government of The Netherlands found over the last decade, people do not do what planners, nor politicians, think they should. The existence of walkable communities does not mean people will walk. Nor does a train line ensure riders. This suggests to me that we are looking at the wrong problem....or at least reading it wrong...
Not sure if interested but you can read a short article explaining a very small part of what i found here in an article i wrote for town and country planning last month. it maybe explains part of why i feel the way i do.
Good article, jump. I actually didn't realize that Japan has "sprawl" to the extent you point out. The main difference seems to be Japan's more flexible zoning laws. In most of the US, the zones are usually exclusive of all other uses and the laws are inflexible and long entrenched, and I fear that the zoning boards in place are entirely convinced that this is the only way things can be done. I've dealt with some "bang my head against the wall" projects where even proposing to place the parking lot behind the building instead of in the front caused conniptions on the zoning board. One of the biggest problems, at least in Pennsylvania, is that zoning enforcement is not just regulated by the counties, but is further divided among thousands of small townships, most of which rarely talk to each other or make collective decisions that would benefit a whole region. So yes, I do agree with your conclusion that the problem is not suburbs per se, but the rules that regulate them and the inflexibility in enforcing those rules.
sprawl like you wouldn't believe in japan. planners here have less control than in the usa and for much the same reasons. local residents call the shots and the big planning rules are so full of loop-holes that regional planning just is not feasible. so development is all over the place usually horrible and leap-froggy like you wouldn't believe. at that level the idea of re-arranging suburbia make perfect sense. but when you look closer (few do) it turns out that suburbia in japan is pretty cool, fulfilling many of the desires of the compact city in an almost accidental way. which is to me interesting, anyway, as evidence for potential alternate futures that start in suburbs as well as in the traditional center.
america maybe could be the same if zoning was more open, though i think the value of land is too much tied to social status and exclusion to make it possible for real change anytime soon.
which brings us back to the question at the top of this thread.
i am unnacountably optimistic in spite of all this. could be because i am more an architect than a planner...
with everything we know.. how is it possible we are still building suburbs?
melt hits it. I madly miss living in downtown Philly, but one of the reasons I left was to avoid continuing to pay $1,000/month for education for my son.
That said, I now live in an inner-ring suburb (I send my kid to a public school that rocks but! it's a magnet program, so it's an experiment by a lackluster inner city school district in trying to improve the quality of public education). We call it village living: I'm five blocks from a commercial area that was an old Main Street (zero lot lines) that grew up around a set of canal locks 80 years ago.
As to crime: a few months ago my potted tree was stolen off my front porch; several neighbors have had their cars smash-and-grabbed, and break ins during the middle of the day are not totally uncommon (a recent rash of them was just ended when the perpetrators were caught in the act). The crime is less, and tends to be more property-related than personal, but it's still there. Crime is everywhere - I wouldn't be surprised if someone is driving under the influence down my street right now - in Philly they'd be walking.
Also, the day my son goes to college is the day I move into a high rise condo - I'll take the perception of crime over the truly endless yard work any day!
I don't know if i'd ever move back to the city.
I managed to live through the LA riots in '92. I have lived in Houston, San Diego and Chciago. All in all an urban dweller for about 10 years.
I like my 1/2 acre suburban lot where we can grow veggies and fruit trees, build tree houses and compost most lot of our organic waste. We can use clothes lines, collect rain water and get a good work out shoveling the driveway.
our office, by choice, is 5 min (by car) to the office and I come home for lunch on most days. This summer we had a felxible work schedule and I spent a lot of time w/ our children.
The office is in a small town off of the rail line to a major metro center and has many good resteraunts and places to shop.
95 percent of the kids in our local schools go to college. I know all of my neighbors and we had a large end of summer block party where the crock pots were lined 5 deep.
We have a great, well used library, good park district, awsome forest preserve complete w/ swimming hole, fishing and paddle boats. best of all is that I don't lock my doors.
My taxes are high but I have elbow room and love it.
my point is sustainability starts (and ends) with the individual. we can all do our part in our own way. if you want to live in the city and make other trade offs for sustainability so be it. But please don't social engineer my life based on your beleifs.
"my point is sustainability starts (and ends) with the individual. we can all do our part in our own way. "
F.B.I. (Faux Bonne Idee)
It's impossible for starters. I mean, there's a lot a single person can do. But when it comes down to it, most modern people are dependent on an industrial supply line.
Do you have access to materials to make some of the most basic components to living?
Are you near a salt marsh in which you can harvest plants rich in fibrous material to make rope? Do you grown your own sisal, manilla, jute, coir, hemp or cotton? Do you know how to make rope?
Do you make your own chlorine in a diaphragm cell electrolysis reactor in your garage to sanitize your own drinking water and to make your own plaster?
Is your house conveniently located in a pocket of unstable space-time that allows your property to conveniently be in all USDA grow zones and in both hemispheres?
Do you grow two tons of chrysanthemum flowers and tobacco in your back yard to make a years worth of pyrethrins to keep your garden and your house pest-free?
Do you conveniently live next to a large old growth forest in which you harvest tons of wood pulp and then use approximately 1,000,000 gallons of water to make a years worth of paper? Do you do this with the 30 some odd sheep you keep on your property to make all the felt necessary to precipitate the lingin fibers into paper sheets?
Do you also have a green house in which you keep thousands of silk worms to make all the silk necessary for filtration and other applications?
Do you use the left over products from your paper making process to power an industrial blast furnace to make the glass bottles you'll be canning your fruits and veggies in? To make the fibers necessary for insulation and air filtration? To make your own dishes?
Do you have a deep mine to mine near chemical grade silica, soda and sand to make your glass with?
Or do you make your own soda by heating coal to 5500C in a near vacuum?
Do you also distill your own polyol from your onsite oil well... you know to make your own plastics through advanced polymerization techniques? Do you distill your own ethylene from millions of tons of fruits too or do you chemically make that from your natural gas well? Do you also make your own high speed motors to spin nylon fibers from your distilled polyol?
Hmm, I would like to subscribe to your letter about suburban sustainability. I find it fascinating that you've figured out a way to synthesize glycerol in your home without violating your HOA agreement.
tuna -
i'm not sure how much other cities are like ours but, since our single school system serves the entire metro area, the schools are as equivalent as they can make them. via a school assignment plan, there is an attempt at cultural and socio-economic diversity (always contentious, recently challenged in the supreme court). all in all i don't know that anyone could say there is an appreciable difference in city and suburban schools as categories, though there are very distinct differences between individual schools.
one of the best elementary schools in the system - our home school and the one we hope will actually be our daughter's assignment - is a historic neighborhood school in an urban neighborhood. the highest performing middle school in the system is suburban. the highest performing high school in the system is back in an urban neighborhood.
we, like lb, have a magnet system as well, so kids can move around according to their abilities and predilections.
so why would this be an argument for louisville's increasing sprawl? we may be an exception with regard to the school quality concern, but still have the same suburban extension problem, quickly wiping out the agricultural landscape surrounding the city.
the ky bluegrass as a cultural landscape was on the world monument fund's watch list in 2006 because, as both a landscape and a way of life, it's endangered by the creeping cancer of house farms.
have you guys seen these places? i can't figure out how any argument for any quality of life can be attributed to them: strings of vinyl boxes with huge garage fronts in treeless yards. it's least common denominator living, by almost any standard i can imagine.
sorry, kind of a wandering screed. but, yep.
Wow, this is just plain offensive, "i live in minneapolis and the life here is much better than the outburbs of msp; dim and scary people of limited intelligence...."
After more thoroughly reading all the posts I think there is plenty of plain old fashioned bias mixed with straight up ignorance concerning both suburban living and urban living. Personally I don't care why someone lives where they live. It's their decision and one I'm guessing they put a lot of thought into. Who cares if that's based on what you believe are misconceptions or if their chosen neighborhood isn't what you consider an acceptable "community." But to question one's intelligence just comes across as elitism. I'm not an urban planner, but that kind of rhetoric would never sell an architectural design.
Still, I contend that most jobs are in the suburbs, and thus where most people live. Take a drive around the perimeter highway of any major metro and I'm sure you'll see commerical office after commercial office the whole way around. For example, I really like the uptown area of Dallas, but if I had a good job up in Plano why the heck would I commute that far when there is plenty of housing right in Plano? The whole trifecta argument of getting away from the city "crime, schools and taxes" all goes out the door when there is no job in the city to bring people there in the first place. You want to revitalize urban centers...bring the jobs back, plain and simple.
I have seen the 1,000 home subdivisions in the west Chicago suburbs and really do not like them. I have also seen 400 home subdivisions, designed with a sense of place that takes account of the natural topography. They provided a number of 2.5" caliper trees and mandated, low-e glass, r-40 insulation, and anti-monotomy standards.
This subdivision is now 12 years old and has its own feeling of identity and community.
Their is choice. In the back of "Edge Cities" they derived a formula on how much one would pay for quality of life.
People choose to live in little pink houses for many reasons. I choose not to live in the city, I choose not to live in an exurb, I choose not to live in a 1000 home subdivision.
These are my choices. I would fight to keep the right to choose.
The suburbs exist bc there is still demand for them.
The suburbs dont care what a bunch of urban minded architects might think.
Lotta ppl like being able to drive to work easily, school districts, cheaper housing, having a backyard, etc. And theyve been around for so long ppl have expectations to get these sort of things. The school district issue is a huge one though.
aqua, i am glad you're offended, now, if you can spare a moment and climb down off your high horse. perhaps you live in the outburbs of MSP or you know of someone, in either case i really don't care. i have been in those places, the burbs - MN, NJ, UT, TX, PA, NC, IN, NE, most of my life and you know what; they are narrow minded people, narrow as narrow eyebrows can get.
michelle bachman, queen of the crazy outburbs, is indicative of their deficient mental acuity.
SW/LB - Cincy and Columbus also have great magnet/alternative programs. I am actually the product of them. Unfortunately there aren't many of them and the demand to get in them is VERY high (we're talking parents literally camping out for days to get a good queue position), but it is helping. These programs have been expanding in recent years, so I think a lot more people are wanting to stay within the city limits to take advantage of them. I think though, until the overall school systems get better, a good portion of young families will flock to the 'burbs with good educational resources.
As edge cities continue to develop. here is what is in store for them.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/edgier.cities_pr.html
maybe the city is not so bad LOL
lol, beta. mind you the story goes that in suburbs folk tend to live with like-minded people of similar social standing. what were you doing with all those silly people? and not just once, but sequentially? ;-)
orochi, sustainability does not require self-sufficiency.
that whole school thing is interesting. hadn't thought about it but is true. i was thinking of heading back to canada to take teaching position earlier this year and took tour of city to see if i could find place i would be comfortable living. downtown looked great for me, but decided pretty quickly that i would live in suburb closer to university and with better school and more green space. i was hoping to find similar amenities downtown but couldn't. i did find an old suburb though and would have moved there if i had taken the job.
same goes for when i lived in london. i love the city centre but without much higher salary there was no way in hell i would raise my children there.
steven those are great pics and looks fantastic neighbourhood.
jump, most of my early life was spent as a military brat.
Do you have any examples of narrow mindedness outside of a member of congress or what political party someone might endorse?
I have friends that live in perimeter suburbs/exurbs as well many friends that live right in the city. It has never ever crossed my mind in the slightest to think of friends in the exurbs as narrow minded. Nor do I think the same of friends living in the city.
As I've said, most people I know live where they do based on where they work...not their politics or intelligence. The only exception to that I can think of is those that live close to family.
I'm sorry that you didn't like your suburban neighbors. I've lived both in the city and in the suburbs with about a 50/50 mix over a lifetime. My experience has always been that my neighbors have been very nice people regardless of where I lived. This goes across regions like the mountain west, deep south and upper midwest...all good people regardless where they lived.
tuna - the magnets are the exception, but the point of that earlier post was that the non-magnet regular schools are the same whether you're urban or suburban as they're all the same school system and are funded and populated in the same way across the district.
and, yeah, beta, that kind of blanket statement is hard to support. the contemporary suburb is just as diverse politically, racially, and culturally as anywhere else.
for me it's less a cultural argument as it is one of resources, including land quality, road construction, utility extensions, water quality, etc. those americans upset about where tax dollars go probably should be most upset at how much of our taxes are required to subsidize the car-driving way-of-life except that so many of them have a vested interest in maintaining those subsidies.
Jump, I know sustainability does not require self-sufficiency.
However, many of the examples people use as examples of sustainability are self-sufficiency. However, the typical household usage of many things pales in comparison to industrial processes.
A majority of my undergrad coursework was industrial centered-- meaning I've done a majority of my work in urban planning and industry. I've yet to find an actual job doing urban planning for industrial properties... this would be my absolute favvvvveee.
Industry, however, given the right benefits and tools... is probably friendlier to "high-density" development than residential properties. And by rearranging industrial centers to be more efficient would do a whole hell of a lot more than personal and or residential sustainability ever would.
I also have had to try to learn the basics of every god-damned industrial process out there... and as frightening as it all is, it is amazing to realize how many applications go into the most benign things.
"... upset at how much of our taxes are required to subsidize the car-driving way-of-life except that so many of them have a vested interest in maintaining those subsidies."
This is pretty much it to me, as for the argument.
It sounds a little conspiracy theory-ish but how many businesses would go out of business if suburbanism simply stopped growing or reversed?
There would be some immediate obvious business changes. But I think one might see an overall drop in major purchases-- lawn mowers &lawn equipment in general, refrigerators, washers & dryers, cars (obviously), home improvement supplies, kitchen appliances, fixtures and so on. There would be a minor backlash into other parts of the supply chain as well because urban areas require longer lease and life periods.
Gasp... we'd have to start using ingenuity in the marketplace again.
We should all live in barracks.
Really does simplify things.
Bite your tongue that we should all stop purchasing major purchases and retrench to the urban core...
it would price all the poor architects out of the market and there would be less work for all. no money for fancy materials and everyone would just maintain their buildings. the only thing left would be government work.
I believe that PRIVATE architecture is predicated on a growth model.
PUBLIC architecture is tied to endless cash register that is the government and subject to the aristocracy of pull.
I'm not saying we should stop but I am saying that if you move into a ihgh-rise condo... you aren't going to be shopping at Sears anymore, you're not going to be bringing home a hundred pounds of groceries and you have the option of easier access to cleaning services and machines that can do a better and or quicker job than is what available at home.
PUBLIC architecture is tied to endless cash register that is the government and subject to the aristocracy of pull.
huh? can you expand on that?
peeps are we sooo young as to forget the PRIMARY reason there are suburbs? WHITE FLIGHT
we've already agreed that suburbs are wasted investments. we have a near collapse of the world economy centered on and around housing developments in the suburbs. we have utilities taxed to the hilt to deal with the ever growing geographical shift away from existing utilities and the failure of those to pay their fair share. all existing urban infrastructure seems to be in a state of disrepair, because of this shift to new - and not necessarily better - "communities."
and yeah, i have friends and family that live in the burbs, and while i would agree that blanket statements are far from reality; i have shifted away from those that have become more conservative and less tolerant of the shift in america...
i think there is a certain era and set of circumstances, beta, that grew suburbs based on white flight.
BUT before that there were the garden cities, the attempts to flee the heat and dirt of the early industrial city. in the south in the u.s. this often took the form of camp towns - exurban settlements that the wealthy (or not) set up to serve as a sort of natural a/c - they'd escape the city for a summer weekend, for an evening, for a week...
there was also the plantation model or (in europe) the chateau model - the idea among the poor dirt farmers that their wealthier counterparts were able to set up their country houses and live large - like jefferson did - and it was something to which they aspired. this was the american dream then and, in some contorted way, it still is. except for the land and views and quality construction part.
the turn of the 20c saw the growth of the streetcar suburbs, the beginning of the trend we're in now - and still not much about race. it was a product of a growing middle class that dreamed if a detached house and plot of land, and it was accessible by transit.
so far, so good. so now you're getting into a period where white flight can be said to be partly a cause, but you also have to credit cars, of course, and 'modern' ideas of function and clarity that gave us single-use zoning and overly-conservative and systematized traffic engineering, in which consideration of quality of life gave way to quantitative assessments of right answers.
all overly simplified, i'll admit. just indications that the current patterns are not the necessarily or natural extensions of this early suburban model but, to me, some sort of metastatic mutation.
and still not PRIMARILY caused by white flight and more of a complicated history of ideas and inclinations.
The suburbs have given us our greatest artists.
i will say that while white flight obviously implies a racial component, i would also tend to believe a large part of the trend was also contingent on influx of immigrants into america; italian, greek, german, polish, irish, jewish, asian, etc...
your talking about the creators of southpark right vado?
i understand beta. you got stuck living in a subset for years and years and somehow got idea it was representative. pity.
myself i didn't really live in suburbs. well that is not true i grew up as poah white trash in first ring suburb. crime was part of life. it looked nice, a new urbanist dream, but was kind of a small bit of hell in reality. porches just meant you had to watch out for people hiding in the shadows. but i don't think that has anything to do with the typology, just poverty. and luckily we got to move away before anyone did jail time. sometimes it is hard to separate personal experience from the big picture, but it is worth trying, just to see where it will lead.
white flight is the fox news picture of suburbia. it sounds plausible, but is hardly the real deal, just as steven nicely describes.
not sure suburbs are wasted investment. sub-prime loans and derivatives were probably a mistake, but that is not really connected to reality is it?
LOL!
But jump, it is very true that the dynamic of US cities - mainly poor people left in the cities, richer people moving to suburbs - is a reversal of the European (and other places in the world) situation - poor (or poorer) people in the suburbs (usually cheap and grim) surrounding the cities with the richer urban sophisticates living within the city core. This is not true across the board (there are exceptions in both cases) but generally holds.
Some responses to other points made above:
The dismissing of Jane Jacobs a no longer relevant is ill-considered. She was responding to the particular development of tower-in-empty-space and the clear-cut method of urban renewal as the cure for all urban ills. She pointed out that the city’s density was actually one of its strengths, and the dynamic she described is anything but old hat. I can walk in countless neighborhoods in Philly where the row-house streets that once held corner stores and bars and barber shops now hold bodegas and Korean grocery stores, and beauty parlors, but the dynamic and life of those neighborhoods – the interconnections – work in basically the same way they did when Jacobs looked at them. This commingling of activities and uses was exactly what suburban zoning codes – based on the complete separation of functions – pretty much destroyed. Granted, her analysis is certainly not applicable to all problems/challenges faced by cities, but many of her points still stand.
Another thing I notice in these “suburb” threads is that even some architects have to denigrate the city in order to defend the suburbs. This is silly for many reasons, including:
1. Suburbs can only be understood in the context of the cities they surround.
2. Suburbs are not cities.
Bringing up the crime issue in particular is a non-starter. Cities have larger and tighter concentrations of people, so certainly crime will always be higher. My fellow suburbunites (I live in a first-ring train suburb around Philly) will often express such fear of city crime as we ride around in a car, but…
lifetime odds of dying in a:
Motor Vehicle Accident: 1 in 84
Firearm Assault: 1 in 314
Pedestrian Accident: 1 in 626
Crime does become a huge problem when it reaches a tipping point where many of the dynamics described by Jacobs are stopped from happening because of fear (and there are quite a few neighborhoods in Philadelphia that fit that description).
As far as reading up on “where we learned to live that way” you could do worse than starting with Lewis Mumford’s The City in History. He looks at the development of the village as the precursor to the city, but then makes the distinction that when cities developed…
...the archaic village culture yielded to urban ‘civilization,’ that peculiar combination of creativity and control, of expression and repression, of tension and release, whose outward manifestation has been the historic city. From its origin onward, indeed, the city may be described as a structure specially equipped to store and transmit the goods of civilization, sufficiently condensed to afford the maximum amount of facilities in a minimum space, but also capable of structural enlargement to enable it to find a place for the changing needs and the more complex forms of a growing society and its cumulative social heritage.
And in contrast to the suburb or village, the city:
...brought into exististance realities that might have remained latent for an indefinite time in more soberly governed small communities, pitched to lower expectations and unwilling to make exertions that transcended both their workaday habits and their mundane hopes.
Cities aren’t just bigger than suburbs or villages, they dream bigger too.
Now, Mumford berated Jacob’s book, mainly because he maintained that her observations of “sidewalk life” would not work when a city reached a very large population, that such cities could no longer regulate themselves and quality of life would suffer. He thus advocated Garden Cites, where the dynamic of cities could be built on a manageable scale - but garden cities were to be more like village units as opposed to the disconnected, car dependant areas that are most suburbs now. I also think that Mumford didn’t account for the fact that even a very large city is made up of smaller units (neighborhoods, boroughs, arrondissements, etc) that maintain the proper scale for the dynamic that Jacobs described to still work.
emilio i was questioning white flight, not the distribution of poverty from center to urban fringe in usa.
jacobs is a great read, really a brilliant writer but what she wrote of was a tiny slice of the city and needs to be taken that way. that was her choice. she didn't like suburbia and took herself out of the debate about what the city was, even then, focusing instead on what she wanted it to be.
that is fine, and her arguments carry some well-earned weight, but only if you define cities in a very narrow way. great for polemics but not exactly useful way to resolve how to make future cities work better than what we have today.
I do think suburbs are the city. whether we like it or not they are a large part of most cities on many levels. that is not a good thing or a bad thing per se. how we react to the way things are is going to be important from now on though...
mumford is also good but he was, like jacobs, very much against suburbia. both were elitists, which is a horrible word to bandy around lately, but in this case is very fitting. mumford wrote quite openly against the fact that all these middle-class people were wrecking HIS countryside, which he thought should be the province of the wealthy, while the lower classes would live in new towns designed to HIS liking, not their own.
He wrote..."Whilst the suburb served only a favored minority it neither spoiled the country-side nor threatened the city. But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement, it tends to destroy the value of both environments without producing anything but a dreary subsitute...". which is to say suburbia is cool if you are a kennedy but not if you are born into the wrong sort of family.
anyway, the garden city is quite alright but for whatever reason has just not worked out over the last 100 years, and we are stuck with an entirely different situation to deal with. it is easy to say that the people who made levittown and its modern equivalent also give people no choice, but to be fair the garden city has had more than a hundred years to be accepted, in many forms (most recently as new urbanism), and somehow just isn't gaining traction as major game-changer.
While I don't like it, I do believe that means we need to rethink what is being talked about and why. As a goal garden city sounds great, but if no one wants it we either have to make laws that enforce it or start from reality instead of an unachievable ideal. The former seems unlikely to me, so I am left with the latter.
That does not mean I am against the city center, suburbia, Jane Jacobs or the Garden City theory. I am to the contrary for them all. But I am not exclusive. Which is where things seem to get fish-eyed with this sort of work.
Well, elitist or not, when someone writes something that makes sense, then it makes sense, and a lot of what both Mumford and Jacobs wrote still makes sense.
I just don't agree with your interpretation of Jacobs: she was not insisting on what she wanted the city to be; rather, she looked closely at how it in fact worked and showed that the widespread demolition to build towers was not actually helping cities but killing them (will withold comment on her "hating" the suburbs). The neighborhoods that she (and Herbert Gans in The Urban Villagers) looked at were not elitist by any means, but her observations have been interpreted in elitist ways by the New Urbanists, in that those developments are mostly not inclusive places.
And so Mumford wanted to the countryside not to be wrecked...is that such a bad thing? A lot of people would rather that the countryside not be wrecked, or at least be built upon in a more thoughtful way: that does not necessarily make them elitists. Yes, the text you quoted is upturned nose stuff, but many people have written of the drearyness and isolation of suburbia (Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Air Conditioned Nightmare, countless movies and TV shows) and it's just easy to dismiss all that as mere elitism. Maybe they are just pointing out what suburbs lack. If you read Mumford's section on suburbia, some of it is quaint and dated, but he does point out the one flaw of American suburbia: it's only possible through the motor vehicle (in a country that could care less about a real public transportation network), and it gives an inordinate amount of land to it (land that was mostly countryside). What I laugh at more is his paranoia about "megalopolis" (huge cities). As far as the Garden City, I only mentioned it because it was his favored alternative to the feared megalopolis, not necessarily as a workable solution now.
To say that suburbia is the city or is not the city is quibbling about semantics: however, the city came first, the suburb being expansions around it. My point about the suburbs not being the city was not one of legal boundaries: rather, that the suburbs, considered (by some) in isolation (we don't need the city any more, etc.) is that they are of a different scale than the city, and can never hold the complex interplay of activities and potentialities that make up a city, and can never really replace the city.
And I agree with you that white flight is just part of the story of the suburbs in the US (although it IS part of it, and my own childhood experience is directly involved in such a flight to a suburb to get away from "bad elements" in the city).
"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.[/q]
In the book Watchmen, the American Dream is referenced to when the Comedian and Nite Owl are clearing the streets of protesters against the Cold War. After the chaos and an argument with the Comedian, a somewhat depressed Nite Owl asks, "But this country's disintegrating. What happened to America? What happened to the American dream?" The Comedian, standing among the ruins of the riots while brandishing his shotgun, says, "It came true. You're looking at it."
George Hanson
ok, jump, I've left the old fogies (Jacobs & Mumford) behind and decided to get a little more up to date info.
I read through some of the William Bogart book which you mentioned above and now understand what you're getting at: he proposes the suburbs in unity with the city to form what he calls a "complex web of relationships", and a new model for the metropolitan area (and, funnily enough, he gives Jacobs credit for seeing this early on: "Even by 1960, observers such as Jane Jacobs and Jean Gottman had discerned a new structure for metropolitan areas, although popular interpreters of their work have neglected this insight. This new structure was called the polycentric city..." I guess she didn't hate the suburbs that much.)
I do agree in the main with Bogart's analysis of how metropolitan areas now function, although I have to say that the reality is sometimes quite different. In my area, for instance, the counties around the city often treat Philadelphia like it's a leper colony, except for maybe the city center and the sport stadiums. While this complex web does exist and works every day, it has not really gelled politically.
And then, by coincidence, last evening public TV showed a documentary on Portland, Oregon, the whole controversy over the "urban growth boundary", showing both the positive and negative results of that law, and the fights over measures to change it. The fight basically lays out between the ability of a large city to plan and control its growth and individual property rights.
What the film showed in abundance was property owners outside the UGB (many of them farmers) insisting that they be allowed to develop their land as they saw fit, as they claim is their right. After measure 37 passed and overturned the UGB, there was a mad rush to develop parcels, but not, of course, in any planned or sensible method, in a collaborative way, rather in the usual scattershot speculative method that is the norm. The voters then toned down the meas. 37 revolution with a meas. 49 revision, which allows some limited development outside the UGB.
I recognize that there are problems inherent on either side of that line (a literal line, in this case), and that Portland is a particular case, but I also sense that maybe the future of the suburbs (and the fate of the remaining open space around cities) lies in resolving this "let's plan vs. don't tread on me" dilemma.
nice comments, emilio.
good catch of my shameless hyperbole too. i think it is fair however in light of the way jacobs wrote. which was very well, but not honestly. She was a great observer of the problems but gave us an idealised vision of the city that was always suspect. i should admit to loving most of her books (and as you point out she was very cool for having embraced complexity theory well ahead of the curve), but also love dejan sudjic's critique of "the death and life" in his book The One Hundred Mile City.
After visiting the area she used to live in he notes the scene is no longer idyllic. There is a great rambling description of the street but the funny bit comes when he points out that it is currently an interestingly grungy place, where sidewalk strollers are treated to "...fat, unshaven old men [who] leaf through rack upon rack of magazines depicting fellatio from every angle....It is hardly the eden that Jacobs suggested. But Hudson street was clearly never the soft focus idyll that Jacobs portrayed. The city is a tougher, darker reality than she ever allowed.
Jacobs is a self-proclaimed enemy of suburbia, but the image of the big city advanced in The Death And Life Of Great American Cities is as sentimental as the corny vision of utopia cherished by the boy scout garden city types she scorns."
He then goes on to point out that the real enemy, the thing that brought quirky decay to Jacobs' Hudson street in recent times was not Le Corbusier and modern planning, but the invention of the shipping container (which led inexorably to the end of the local economy).
Which is actually the real point. While Jacobs and Mumford worried about the evil desires of the uneducated masses, a completely unrelated development was leading to an end they could not predict.
They were fighting the wrong fight altogether (much as we are now).
I like Bogart mostly for his attempt to find methods to deal with reality, for just this reason. Also because he accepts that cities are not static and that what works today probably won't work tomorrow - which to me means that ideological based design is probably a great way to win battles while losing wars.
For some reason these suburb threads are endlessly fascinating to me, and always bring out good comments. And - at the risk of turning this into a two-way conversation - yours, jump, are always some of the most interesting and well informed. I just did a search on those threads and have copied some of your reading lists, and will follow up with some reading of my own. In your comments, you’ve usually downplayed the “walkable city” model as overrated (as have I to some degree), but what does interest me is the question of density and the proportion of built to open space in different countries.
The US has, even now, an abundance of unbuilt space (although the East coast less so), so the urge to plan its use carefully is never seen as an important need. Portland is almost an anomaly in that sense, one of the few cities which has seriously considered it. England and Italy, to name two other countries, have kept much of their beautiful countryside because people accept (in most cases) living in smaller homes/apartments and in compact towns and villages - and I would guess with very tight controls on development. But they have to do it that way because there just isn't that much land available.
I like that kind of living, since it’s what I grew up with, but now live in a larger house in a first ring suburb. I could choose to move back into the compact city, but I would still not be able to do away with my car if I wanted to see my large extended family and get to some of the larger malls for shopping. The ideal would be a place where I could walk to most things (ideally even my job), with all the people in my family and even friends living close by….gee, I’ve just described an Italian hill town, or an English village. But even that’s not right, because my relatives in Italy live in a group of towns near each other, served by infrequent buses, so they still depend on their cars if they want to keep in touch. So yes, the walkable model only takes you so far. And, as you pointed out in another thread, the central hub model of transportation available in most cities is outdated as well.
In Philadelphia, the areas that have “sidewalk life” are some of the most popular places (Old City, South Street, Rittenhouse Square, Manayunk), with people from the suburbs mixing with the city residents, and I know for a fact that part of the reason for the buzz is the density of activity and walkability. Of course, a negative result of that street life is that real estate and rent prices have escalated to the point that only upper income people can live in those areas (and that is also happening in much of Portland as well).
On the other hand, some of the other old neighborhoods now have a rougher edge: there are people on the sidewalks and the stores are hopping by day, but if you go there at night, the blank metal shutters are down and they are mostly dead zones, and the fear is palpable. The reasons for the decline are sundry, as you pointed out, (the economy, crime, bad schools, etc.) and getting into them would make this post even longer than it is.
Unfortunately for the citizens of Philly, unless the state house gets its act together soon and passes a budget, the city faces significant public service shutdown, making life in those neighborhoods even grimmer (political division, distrust, and non-cooperation are wrecking quality of life throughout this country, not just here).
with everything we know.. how is it possible we are still building buildings?
feel same way about suburban threads emilio. they are usually interesting.
i actually love walkable city concepts. where i live is pretty much what jacobs describes in her area of ny, but japanese, so cleaner and safer and with more mixing of social classes...but that is different topic.
what i wonder about is whether walkability should be the goal, or sustainability. ditto re density. i am pretty sure there are at least a dozen really good ways to make high and low density work on case to case basis, and equally as many examples where either one would be complete disaster.
if the goal is sustainability then i think we should be thinking much less along ideological lines. ie, (as i have said before) there is the very real possibility that the issue related to cars all stem from an energy problem and not a planning problem. in that light i can't help but believe suburbs might be just fine with only a little modification, and the same for traditional centers. instead the media, planner, politicians tend to begin with the answer in their/our heads (walkability, density, etc) and then look for the problem that fits. somehow i doubt anyone can make a real useful future from that...the goal is all backwards...
I completely agree with the ideological lines, and that immediatialy jumping to "town centers" as the answer to everything is not a real solution. But I don't totally follow your take on the car: isn't it both an energy and a planning problem? If an area requires close to 100% of its residents to be in a car to do almost anything, whereas another area requires maybe 30 or 40 percent of the people to travel by car at any one time, with an option to walk or take transit some of the other times, than aren't those, by definition, two radiacally different places to live? I understand about a case by case consideration, but isn't the car and its required infrastructure really always the gorilla in the room in any case you might look at, the thing that has to be considered carefully or it tends to takes over everything? I'd be curious to hear what these small modifications would be to change such a car-centric culture and the way most new areas are "developed"...i.e.: put in the houses first, put in all the other stuff needed by the new residents spread over the landscape, connect them all with new roads, or enlarge existing roads, and provide a butt load of parking lots.
"somehow i doubt anyone can make a real useful future from that...the goal is all backwards..."
This begs the question of whether or not personal transportation (at least in the form of an automobile) is a step forwards. While the automobile is a marvel of modernity, one should question whether or not if moving forward means letting go.
While I'm a staunch urbanist of all sorts, I do not necessarily want to take people's cars away-- especially to those who can afford them. But there's a lot of people in the United States, who own cars, that technically should not. We have people often choosing between car payments and other more sound personal investments (medical, housing, resolving debt, education).
I know that one of the ideas behind cars in the American mindset is mobility. But with the explosion of cars, the historical idea behind "mobility" has died. The expansion of privately-owned lands means that most people are no longer allowed to move freely. If property in the 1770s was owned like it was today and to the expanse that it is today, most of the First Continental Congress would have been jailed or shot for trespassing.
We also have to look at it this way, there is only one legal way to walk from Miami to New York City-- along US 1. There presently is no legal way to walk from Jacksonville to Los Angeles.
There are only 7 cities within the United States considered walkable enough to travel to by means of train or airplane without the use of a car.
To ride by train from Jacksonville, Atlanta or Houston to Santa Fe (one of the original train capitals in the world), it is a journey that is roughly 27 days long and nearly 11,000 miles. This is because there is no east-to-west train across the southern United States. This might have been fixed very recently... however, one of the most important routes of movement in the country is no longer accessible.
This is what I think it ultimately comes down to in terms of development and planning and what can be viewed in different mindset. That would be Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
"Traditional" suburbanism utilizes technology to circumvent the bottom layers of "need" within a typical development model. I would probably determine these two bottom layers to be "tradition" and "history." Tradition being the long-term development of the economy and overall secular choices of a society in what it deems important. History being the combination of movement and investment in a given area.
This is why previously I professed looking towards literature to find examples of "preference" and "functionalism" in determining who, what, where, when and why. The academic pursuit of Urban Studies often does this but not nearly as in depth from a planning point of view.
One example-- and one of the most popular nursery rhymes in the English language-- would be "Rub-a-dub-dub." The reason-- the depiction of the "butcher, baker and candlestick maker." All three of which are professions closely tied to urban environments, all three of which are nostalgic professions and all three of which that no longer functionally exist today. Instead, today, that rhyme would probably be along the lines of "Trader Joe's, Panera and Yankee Candle." Doesn't rhyme very well either.
And that's my point... most suburbs are not built on a foundation. They're held up on artificial piers and are rigid, inflexible and unadaptive. They require a constant flow of money and resources to sustain the technology that sustains them. They're grossly unattractive to generational change and choices in the economy. They import "soft goods" like information, usually from large external organizations, because there isn't usually enough present to sustain a local economy and their interactions within the context of a local environment is shallow and profit driven.
Without going back and presumably putting these foundations back into physical environments, we run the risk of collapse. It's unlikely there will ever be a instant doomsday scenario; however, it is more than likely we will be facing a creeping doomsday scenario when scarcity forces a dramatic change. Urbanized areas are reversible, suburbs are not.
interesting points emilio and orochi.
my own view of cars is a little bit gray still, but i cannot help but wonder, if cars were all benign environmentally (a real possibility if recent events are any indication) then would it mean the problems are solved and we need to look for another object to skewer with scorn? congestion would still be problem, but then the planning problem will maybe not be to get rid of cars but to reduce their necessity. which is according to stats not so hard at all (most traffic is between suburban communities lately and not long journeys into city etc)
the real point though is not that we should be looking a priori[i] to get rid of cars or dismantling suburbia but instead might better spend our time focusing on sustainability. with that in mind the possible futures are infinite. and the role of innovation and intelligence is also wide open.
instead we tend to begin with the idea that cars are bad and suburbia is bad, without really looking at reality to see which parts of these things are objectionable.
with cars, the main problem is the pollution. if that is solved then cars are fine...no?
with suburbia, what is the problem? with cities in general, what is the problem? i am highly suspicious of the idea that we can or should make sweeping changes based on declarative sentences. no offense intended orochi but the idea that [i]"most suburbs are not built on a foundation." is i think demonstrably incorrect and more wishful thinking than anything. To be honest the rest of the paragraph which follows could be said of any city, center or suburb. cities (including suburbia or not) are not natural. they never have been. on that count cities will always fall down. now that i think of it, it is that very artificiality that spawned suburbia isn't it?
but again none of this is really here nor there. i am convinced we have something better in the pipeline, something that is just about the city and that doesn't take sides, which is going to change how we look at and live in the biggest and best creations of humanity....and it is going to come from somewhere the planners did not plan for...
well...maybe
agreed, you won't get rid of cars, but reducing their necessity should surely be a goal (not just because of pollution but also the room they take up): but that, and also the sustainability and innovation you mention, will not really happen unless the present scattershot methods of developing land and antiquated zoning laws that govern the developing are not modified to the degree that they no longer result in exclusively car-centric places to live. so no, not dismantling, but definitely some changes are long due.
curious as to what you think that something in the pipeline is....
"To be honest the rest of the paragraph which follows could be said of any city, center or suburb. cities (including suburbia or not) are not natural. they never have been."
Woah, woah, woah... bringing "natural" into this is a very slippery slope.
To me, the definition of urban is "a large population fitted into a limited space--other words, a high density proportional to total population-- with its inhabitants sharing basic services, structures and so forth."
There are many species that have utilize an "urban" arrangement of shared space with limited territorial concerns-- ants, termites, bats, dolphins, chimpanzees, baboons, other great apes, weaver birds, most parrots, flat lizards, bees, wasps, hornets, prairie dogs, mole rats, pistol shrimp, coral and so on.
With termites, wasps, hornets, weaver birds, prairie dogs and mole rats even build these "artificial" high-density colonies.
Part of the fallacy of defining "natural" for humans is the lack of history between 50,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE. We have a spread of pottery that dates back 30,000 BCE in Czech Republic-- coincidentally, the pottery is found in what is the second largest city (Brno) in Czech Republic. While Brno dates back to the 5th century, the discovery of a long line of pottery hints that this area has particular qualities that make it desirable to settlement, now and 30,000 BCE.
While a hunter-gather mentality is what most humans like to think of themselves, I am willing to wager that this was only a small blip in human history.
While the Great Rift is the home to most modern apes (humans included), recent evidence points that we did not come from the Great Rift. Actually, the newer evidence puts us in a very peculiar spot that makes some sense.
That spot is the Namib Desert on the border of Namibia and Angola. If we are in fact desert apes and not lake apes, this presents a challenging view of humanity. Hunter-gatherer societies could not exist in the Namib Desert. However, this hypothesis makes sense because the Namib Desert has had the same climate for over two million years-- a place where humans could have survived the Riss and Wurm ice ages. These ice ages would have reduced the overall rainfall in the Great Rift Valley and would have significantly increased the salinity of the lakes in the Rift Valley (no potable water except for pockets.)
But back to the Namib Desert and hunter-gatherers... the typical ideal of hunting in the Namib Desert would be nearly impossible. Without shelter, most humans would die within hours in the Namib Desert. The rainfall in the Namib Desert is a luscious 0.4 inches (10 mm) a year. Humidity is almost non-existent. And most large herding animals that can tolerate heat tend to flock in the dunes during the day to avoid other predators. The lack of vegetation and winds make stalking problematic as well.
Luckily, and unlike the Rift Valley, the Namib Desert is full of clay, canyons and caves. The combination of geologic conditions in the Great Rift doesn't support a majority of these things.
So, what does this mean? It means that the sparseness of the Namib Desert meant there were only so many available shelters and sources of water. It means that any hunting or gathering period could have only lasted for a few hours in the early morning or evening. It also suggests that there might have been methods for harvesting water as the Namib desert does not have a cyclical rainfall schedule. And that the limited calorie supply in the desert means that any "work" done had to have a "benefit" in the end.
There would be no way to have small independent familial groups or territorial attitudes. Also, because of long gestation periods and the length of time it takes to ween offspring out of infancy, permanent settlement must have existed. Crossing the desert with infants would be too demanding on a lactating mother and a helpless child.
If we take a natural "point of view" with this, anthropology suggests we were probably huddling around in caves, primitive lean-tos or canyons around diminish puddles of water in rather dense populations. The limiting factor of the desert means there was more than likely less nomadic behaviors and rather migration between population centers. The other fact that the Namib desert can support the creation of pottery correlates heavily with the idea of long-term water shortage as unfired pottery can be made waterproof with some interesting ingredients.
Furthermore, since so few plants can fix nitrogen on their own... having large amounts of animals find and "release" chemicals necessary for the growth of plants would have made incidental agriculture possible-- i.e. crap, seeds and water are foundation of any desert oasis. This is also the case with many ecosystems that the nutrient flow is completely dependent on the movement of animals to facilitate arable soil.
This would definitely move humans closer towards eusociality than presociality-- meaning a complex caste of inter-related individuals performing complex specialized tasks with a focus on a selected breeding population... i.e, humans are more oriented with urbanity than hunter-gathering living. Humans are also very inclined to develop genetic disorders in populations with high levels of inbreeding-- so these early stable desert populations would have to have been dozens of individuals, a theory that also correlates with meerkats and baboons [whereby members of families are chased off to join other colonies once the colony hits its population limit].
So, what would you call 40-100 humans living in a tiny semi-permanent spatial arrangement with multiple individual "jobs" sharing allocated resources?
i am sorry orochi, i didn't really understand any of that. i was responding to your claim that suburbs were not natural and required money/energy/resources to be supported. which is true of any city, dense or otherwise.
i should clarify that i view suburbs as urban. there are many reasons for this, and i am not alone, but won't get into it. it isn't a fringe point of view however.
i don't know what the future holds emilio, but there are lots of things changing in the suburbs and in "cities" all over the world. I believe it is part of the urbanisation process that is going on still, but now in most instances in the so-called developed world it is a process of improving mature cities rather than just simple expansion. That such things are actually important is is my intuition. Whether it will be borne out after looking more closely is another question. But i am hopeful. If i am lucky i will get post-doc funding to examine more properly. Will have better point of view in 3 years maybe...
anyway, yes i agree cars are still a problem, but i still maintain that we are looking at things the wrong way. its like energy companies who make energy by burning coal not willing to consider the fact that they are ENERGY companies and not "coal burning" companies. We are all too often just too certain about what things are and what we need to do and refuse to condone alternatives.
Zoning is a huge problem in USA. i have no answers there. However, to be fair, my research here in japan examined the effect of open zoning on car use and other behaviour patterns and found that even when there was a walkable situation, with shops and clinics and trains within walking distance most residents chose to drive. They did so for cultural reasons (which is i think malleable luckily enough), but part of the problem was that the train line connected the suburb i was studying ONLY with the city centre, when more than 50% of residents commuted to other suburbs. Just like Peter Hall found in Oslo, and just as the government of The Netherlands found over the last decade, people do not do what planners, nor politicians, think they should. The existence of walkable communities does not mean people will walk. Nor does a train line ensure riders. This suggests to me that we are looking at the wrong problem....or at least reading it wrong...
Not sure if interested but you can read a short article explaining a very small part of what i found here in an article i wrote for town and country planning last month. it maybe explains part of why i feel the way i do.
Good article, jump. I actually didn't realize that Japan has "sprawl" to the extent you point out. The main difference seems to be Japan's more flexible zoning laws. In most of the US, the zones are usually exclusive of all other uses and the laws are inflexible and long entrenched, and I fear that the zoning boards in place are entirely convinced that this is the only way things can be done. I've dealt with some "bang my head against the wall" projects where even proposing to place the parking lot behind the building instead of in the front caused conniptions on the zoning board. One of the biggest problems, at least in Pennsylvania, is that zoning enforcement is not just regulated by the counties, but is further divided among thousands of small townships, most of which rarely talk to each other or make collective decisions that would benefit a whole region. So yes, I do agree with your conclusion that the problem is not suburbs per se, but the rules that regulate them and the inflexibility in enforcing those rules.
sprawl like you wouldn't believe in japan. planners here have less control than in the usa and for much the same reasons. local residents call the shots and the big planning rules are so full of loop-holes that regional planning just is not feasible. so development is all over the place usually horrible and leap-froggy like you wouldn't believe. at that level the idea of re-arranging suburbia make perfect sense. but when you look closer (few do) it turns out that suburbia in japan is pretty cool, fulfilling many of the desires of the compact city in an almost accidental way. which is to me interesting, anyway, as evidence for potential alternate futures that start in suburbs as well as in the traditional center.
america maybe could be the same if zoning was more open, though i think the value of land is too much tied to social status and exclusion to make it possible for real change anytime soon.
which brings us back to the question at the top of this thread.
i am unnacountably optimistic in spite of all this. could be because i am more an architect than a planner...
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